The Tree of Texts: Towards an empirical model for text transmission and evolution.

This research intends to put a step forward in the field of textual criticism, more particularly stemmatology, by providing a model of the evolution of manuscript traditions, based on the analysis of several sets of data. As long as a model of the evolution of texts will remain deficient, if not totally missing, it is unavoidable that already existing statistical evolutionary tools (used for example in biology) will not be properly used: in using them we rely by default on a biological model, which is not satisfying for textual data. While several philologists have carried out a methodological reflection applied to their own data, no one has yet attempted to establish a model based on a larger, comparative approach.

Keywords:Computer sciences, Stemmatology, Textual criticism, Digital philology

Disciplines:Information sciences, Other information and computing sciences, Library sciences, Historical theory and methodology