passageand

Passageand is a fictional open-source software library designed to facilitate the extraction, linking, and analysis of passages within large text corpora. It aims to support researchers in digital humanities and information retrieval by combining passage segmentation, semantic search, and cross-document linking in a single workflow.

Etymology and concept: The project name combines 'passage' and the conjunction 'and' to emphasize the goal of composing connected passages into a navigable network. The idea is to allow users to collect related passages from multiple documents and present them as linked units.

Development: Passageand was proposed in 2024 by a collective of scholars and developers. An initial prototype was released on a public repository, with ongoing contributions from volunteers. As of 2025, the project remains in an early development phase with a community-driven roadmap.

Architecture and features: The system uses a modular pipeline including tokenizer, passage segmenter, and indexer. It offers a Python and JavaScript API, supports RESTful access, and provides a lightweight web interface for exploring passage networks. Key features include passage-level search, cross-document linking, and export to JSON, CSV, or TEI.

Applications and reception: In this hypothetical scenario, Passageand is used for digital editions, scholarly annotation, and corpus studies. Potential limitations include computational requirements for large corpora and the need for standardized annotation schemas to ensure interoperability.

See also: digital humanities, information retrieval, natural language processing.