Text Searching Beyond the Text: a Case Study

This paper represents an ideal supplement to my papers about my metrical analysis system, with the double intent of illustrating further methodological aspects with a concrete scenario, and present a system to show how architectural and modeling choices can make it usable even outside its original purposes. The paper illustrates the peculiar requirements and data modeling of a modern, lightweight and highly integrable philological text search engine, based on concordances and text structures. In the metrical analysis scenario, where it represents one of the possible presentation methods for a much higher and complex data set, its usage provides a concrete case of integration of textual and metatextual data, merged from a number of different sources, either inside and outside the input documents and the boundaries of the software system itself, including third-parties functionalities like POS tagging and lemmatization from popular natural language processing libraries.