ABSTRACT
uBIQUity is a semantic research tool designed to investigate the sacred texts of Christianity and Islam across diverse historical and cultural contexts. Its title incorporates the “BI” of the Bible(s) and the “QU” of the Qur’an. By combining traditional philological methods with state-of-the-art computational approaches, uBIQUity enables the identification of both literal and non-literal biblical references in Greek and Latin Christian exegetical works composed from the Patristic era to the Late Byzantine period. It also supports the detection of Qur’anic quotations and, more broadly, the identification of intertextual relationships among the Qur’an, the collections of the Sayings of the Prophet (aḥādīth), and Qur’anic commentaries (tafāsīr). In doing so, uBIQUity illuminates the internal dynamics and reciprocal interactions that shape these distinct yet interconnected textual traditions. By integrating curated textual datasets with flexible semantic retrieval, uBIQUity supports the study of intertextuality without imposing rigid categories such as “quotation”, “allusion”, or “echo”. Whether employed consciously or unconsciously, the intertextual references embedded in ancient and medieval commentaries function as (in)visible “places of memory,” rendering the sacred texts effectively “ubiquitous”.
RESULTS AND TOOLS
The project has developed a bidirectional semantic search engine capable of navigating between sacred texts and their commentaries. uBIQUity operates on two major corpora: Greek and Latin Christian commentaries from the Patristic period to the Late Byzantine era, and Qur’anic commentaries (tafāsīr) together with ḥadīth collections, spanning from the origins of Islam to the fifteenth century. Biblical and patristic texts are encoded according to established scholarly standards (TEI, OSIS, TEI-EpiDoc) and semantically enriched with metadata to enable filtering by author, period, region, biblical book, commentary, and textual tradition. The Arabic corpus—built from OpenITI—is normalised to allow the Qurʾān, tafāsīr, sīrah, and multiple ḥadīth collections to be explored within a unified and coherent dataset.From a technological perspective, the uBIQUity platform supports the study of intertextuality by capturing a wide spectrum of textual similarities, ranging from near-verbatim quotations to thematic or structural affinities. Users can select among different comparison criteria (exact matches, lemmatised forms, roots, synonyms, or AI-based “structures”), annotate results, and visualise data through parallel views, variant graphs, close and distant reading modes. In this sense, uBIQUity does not impose a predefined taxonomy of intertextual categories (e.g. quotation, allusion, echo). Instead, it operates as a retrieval-based framework: given a source passage, the system returns candidate correspondences ranked by relevance. The output is therefore binary at the retrieval level (retrieved vs. not retrieved), while similarity is expressed through a continuous relevance score (e.g., cosine similarity or BM25 ranking). This design intentionally avoids rigid categorical classifications and supports expert-driven interpretative evaluation. To enhance the automatic retrieval of intertextual connections, the methodology integrates classical token-based and language-aware techniques with state-of-the-art vector-semantic embedding models. Semantic search is further complemented by a node-based workspace in which researchers can construct and document their intertextual “paths”.
CASE STUDIES
Christian Exegetical Works (Ancient Greek and Latin)
uBIQUity has been applied to patristic and Byzantine exegetical corpora to analyse biblical references across works and centuries. By aligning multiple ancient biblical versions with selected commentaries (in their modern critical editions) and employing domain-adapted similarity models, the tool retrieves both exact quotations and more indirect, thematic parallels that are difficult to capture using token-based approaches, thereby providing a scalable framework for the study of intertextuality in ancient writings. The aim is to generate new insights into the reuse, recontextualisation, and rewriting of biblical texts.
Qur’anic Exegesis (ḥadīth andtafsīr)
For the Qurʾanic and ḥadīth corpora, uBIQUity enables the analysis of Qur’anic and prophetic traditions and the identification of reuse patterns across exegetical literature. The platform supports semantic retrieval of both literal and non‑literal quotations, paraphrases, and textual variants across tafāsīr, sīrah, andḥadīth collections, making intertextual relations within the Islamic scholarly tradition searchable at scale.
TEAM
The uBIQUity project was coordinated by Fabrizio D’Avenia (University of Palermo) and Anna Mambelli (Scientific Coordinator and Product Owner, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia), and was supported by Sara Abram (University of Palermo), Marcello Costa (University of Palermo), Chiara Palillo (University of Palermo), and Fabio Tutrone (University of Palermo).
BEYOND ITSERR
The methodologies and tools developed in WP8 can be adapted to other large textual traditions that require the detection of textual reuse and conceptual parallels, ranging from classical literatures to legal and philosophical corpora. By modelling intertextuality through flexible similarity metrics rather than rigid categories, uBIQUity offers a reusable framework for studying the transmission and reinterpretation of authoritative texts across time, languages, and disciplines.