Abstract
Manuscripts are no longer studied as purely textual witnesses in a bottom-up approach as in stemmatological philology, but also as physical objects. Current computational developments enable new top-down approaches. Graph databases visualise in an intuitive way complex relationships between chunks of data, coming from – in our case – metrical paratexts of the Database of Byzantine Book Epigrams (Ricceri et al. 2023). We carried out a pilot-study in which we clustered 200 occurrences of the same epigram based on textual differences and linguistic annotations (Swaelens et al. 2024). This already revealed complex relationships in the graph representation between clusters of texts, triggering scholars to dive deeper into the reasons why they are grouped. The current paper explores how a graph-based approach can present even more intricate connections between manuscripts by adding metadata (date, place, scribe) to the textual data. A qualitative analysis of both bottom-up and top-down approaches reveals that they complement each other and provide researchers with new perspectives.
Practical information
This lecture will be given at the “International Medieval Congress”, organised by the Institute for Medieval Studies at the University of Leeds. IMC 2025 will take place from Monday 07 July to Thursday 10 July 2025.
Date & time: Wednesday 9 July 2025, 14:15
Location: Leeds
More information about this conference and the full programme can be found here.