Analysis of Variation Significance in Artificial Traditions Using Stemmaweb

Author(s)
Tara L. Andrews
Abstract

The role of human philological judgement in textual criticism, and particularly in stemmatics, has been at times hotly debated and in computational stemmatology tends to be carefully circumscribed. In this context philological judgement is deployed to distinguish ‘significant’ from ‘insignificant’ textual variation—that is, to select those variants that are more or less likely to betray information about the exemplar from which a given text was copied. This article reports on an experiment performed to assess the accuracy of human philological judgement on a set of three artificial traditions, using tools for stemma analysis developed for a prior project and available to the public as the Stemmaweb online service. We show that for most of the artificial traditions, human judgement was not significantly better than random selection for choosing the variant readings that fit the stemma in a text-genealogical pattern, and we discuss some of the implications of these findings.

Organisation(s)
Department of History
Journal
Digital Scholarship in the Humanities
Volume
31
Pages
523-539
ISSN
2055-7671
Publication date
12-2014
Peer reviewed
Yes
Austrian Fields of Science 2012
605007 Digital humanities, 602024 Classical philology
Portal url
https://ucris.univie.ac.at/portal/en/publications/analysis-of-variation-significance-in-artificial-traditions-using-stemmaweb(6312efee-b56a-438b-9666-c9c45a8512ca).html