Tara Andrews: But is it a tree? Application of graph analysis to texts and their stemmata

In this talk I will give a report on the Tree of Texts project that has been running in Leuven. The objective is to formulate an empirical model of medieval text transmission; we are doing this, first through modelling the text variation as a graph, and then through modelling stemmata for the text (whether real, derived, or hypothesized) as a connected rooted directed acyclic graph (CRDAG) and analysing the variant locations according to the text graph. I will present the interim results of the analysis for two artificial traditions as well as for two known traditions, and talk about future directions for the work.

Daniel Apollon: Wikipedia text evolution

Documents have been handed down through history using a wide spectrum of physical supports. Manuscript texts have been transmitted through a complex process of imperfect copying, producing various changes, inventions, corrections at each stage of the transmission. Copy errors and sporadic physical damage to e.g. manuscripts have driven textual evolution. Stemmatologists combining editorial philology with various computer-based methods have deployed considerable efforts to produce retrospective reconstructions of past textual traditions. Other cultural artefacts that exhibit patterns of variation and diffusion have also been subject to such analytical efforts, Massive digital texts have grown providing exhaustive genealogical and editorial track-records. The mere availability of such fully documented text traditions calls for combining both old and new editorial perspectives. Wikipedia constitutes today the most formidable evolving digital text traditions that provides the digital editorial philologist with a nearly exhaustive genealogical and editorial archive — documenting millions of Wikipedia articles and thousands of families of Wikipedia articles in various languages. Such freely available material may be researched to obtain new insights in the evolution of digital texts. My presentation will highlight through some examples remarkable aspects of the evolution of the Wikipedia encyclopaedia from the perspective of editorial philology and stemmatology with special emphasis on growth, stabilisation and hybridisation of text versions.

Thomas Bein: Limits of stemmatology

I would like to demonstrate some (I hope: fine) examples for limits of stemmatological reconstructions. The examples are taken from my studies on the manuscript tradition of the works of Walther von der Vogelweide. Again and again we encounter scenarios like this one: one text — three or four manuscripts — up to 70–80% the same text in the manuscripts, we even find 'Bindefehler' (common mistakes)... but the left 20% differ from each other in large dimensions and so the fine architecture of a stemma that could tell us stories about the genesis of the text(s)is destroyed. What happened to the text(s) during its/their way through space and time?

Aidan Conti: Wherefore a typology of variants

Various traditions and methods of textual criticism have produced a proliferation of terminology used to describe errors (and/or variants) that arise in the process of transmission. This paper will survey descriptions of errors and their various typologies, noting especially differences in definition and perspective. In so doing, it will assess (and ask for input on) the most productive perspectives of measuring manuscript variation for the development of stemmatological models. For example, some typological assessments emphasize factors precipitating variation production, such as eye-skip; others simply characterize the nature of the error or variation itself, e.g. omission. Some analysis focus on the reproduction of individual letter forms, others on the apprehension of sense units. This examination of the classification of variation, its production and our representation thereof will, I hope, lead to a mutually beneficial discussion (taking into account the important work done in this area by several participants) relating these issues to questions of variant weighting, as well as the units for variant analysis, in the development of stemmatological modeling.

Gerd Haverling: Latin manuscripts, Indo-European languages and phylogenetics

I intend to discuss 1) similiarities and differences in dealing with manuscripts and with language families and 2) discuss the relationship between Latin and some other early Indo-European language s in Italy from this point of view.

Vincent Moulton: How can phylogenetic networks help in Stemmatology?

Phylogenetic networks, such as median networks and neighbornets, have been successfully used to analyse the origins of texts and languages. Even so, the theory of phylogenetic networks is advancing at a rapid pace, and more-and-more network building techniques are currently becoming available. Here we will speculate about how such techniques may (or may not?) be of help in Stemmatology.

Wendy J Phillips-Rodriguez: Genomic editions: some concluding remarks about a case study in Sanskrit literature

After several years studying the transmission process of the Mahābhārata by means of traditional and computerized methods, this paper will be an assessment on the following issues: What is the life spam of a critical edition? What is the standing of a traditionally made critical edition against the current state of research in Stemmatology? What can we learn from our case studies and how can we use them to portray a bigger picture on cultural evolution?