An Analytical Onomasticon to the Metamorphoses of Ovid

The Analytical Onomasticon is a reference work to persons and places in the Metamorphoses of Ovid. It is intended to assist the study of a poem that has remained curiously intractable to the literary critical quest for its coherence. The problem has not been a want of schemes, but rather too many, or at least more than can be accounted for by any one reckoning. As Brooks Otis pointed out years ago, Ovid sports with the idea of continuity: at the same time, and often with the same device, both supporting and undermining it. The Onomasticon assumes no particular theory of how the poem is constructed, nor that it has a single construction. Yet it is based on the idea that Ovid's is a serious play, not meant to scatter our attention but to redirect it. This book is intended to assist that redirection by supplying several different means for commanding the most extensive and significant body of textual evidence for the interrelation of persons, hence the interconnection of stories: the words and phrases that refer to and so name them. The Onomasticon is not limited to the quest for continuity in change, but its explicit aim is to further understanding of the poem as a coherent or, more accurately, cohesible work of literature.

1. Prototype (as of 10/02)
1. Introduction [X]
2. Indexes (with concordance to the Latin text & a narrative index]
   1. Persons [X]
   2. Nominals [X]
   3. Attributes [X]
   4. Verbs [X]
2. Personification model (as of 7/03)
1. W. McCarty, "Depth, markup and modelling", Text Technology 12.1 and CH Working Papers A.25 (2003) [X]
2. Prototype model (downloads)
   1. Spreadsheet front-end (MS Excel) [X]
   2. Relational database (MS Access) [X]