Beyond the tree of texts: Building an empirical model of scribal variation through graph analysis of texts and stemmata

Stemmatology, or the reconstruction of the transmission history of texts, is a field that stands particularly to gain from digital methods. Many scholars already take stemmatic approaches that rely heavily on computational analysis of the collated text (e.g. Robinson and O’Hara 1996; Salemans 2000; Heikkilä 2005; Windram et al. 2008 among many others). Although there is great value in computationally assisted stemmatology, providing as it does a reproducible result and allowing access to the relevant methodological process in related fields such as evolutionary biology, computational stemmatics is not without its critics. The current state-of-the-art effectively forces scholars to choose between a preconceived judgment of the significance of textual differences (the Lachmannian or neo-Lachmannian approach, and the weighted phylogenetic approach) or to make no judgment at all (the unweighted phylogenetic approach). Some basis for judgment of the significance of variation is sorely needed for medieval text criticism in particular. By this, we mean that there is a need for a statistical empirical profile of the text-genealogical significance of the different sorts of variation in different sorts of medieval texts. The rules that apply to copies of Greek and Latin classics may not apply to copies of medieval Dutch story collections; the practices of copying authoritative texts such as the Bible will most likely have been different from the practices of copying the Lives of local saints and other commonly adapted texts. It is nevertheless imperative that we have a consistent, flexible, and analytically tractable model for capturing these phenomena of transmission. In this article, we present a computational model that captures most of the phenomena of text variation, and a method for analysis of one or more stemma hypotheses against the variation model. We apply this method to three ‘artificial traditions’ (i.e. texts copied under laboratory conditions by scholars to study the properties of text variation) and four genuine medieval traditions whose transmission history is known or deduced in varying degrees. Although our findings are necessarily limited by the small number of texts at our disposal, we demonstrate here some of the wide variety of calculations that can be made using our model. Certain of our results call sharply into question the utility of excluding ‘trivial’ variation such as orthographic and spelling changes from stemmatic analysis.

Networked reading : using AustLit to assist reading and understanding of texts from the past

In response to a focus on reading, this paper examines the notion of reading online; as such it uses the term ‘networked reading’ to describe any act of reading in an online or digital environment. In accordance with this notion of ‘networked’ reading, the paper provides a broad introduction to AustLit: the Australian Literature Resource. This is followed by an examination of a suite of services and digital tools (LORE) developed by the Aus-e-Lit project that extends the scope of AustLit records and facilitates links to external resources. The focus of the final section of the paper is on a collection of Full Text resources located within the AustLit subset Children’s Literature Digital Resources (CLDR). It proposes a number of ways in which these texts, and an accompanying anthology of critical articles, can be utilised in classrooms across the Primary, Middle and Senior School spectrum.

Literature in second language education : enhancing the role of texts in learning.

Las premisas pedagógicas de este manual son que el objeto de aprendizaje, en este caso los textos literarios, es inseparable del enfoque adoptado para la enseñanza y el aprendizaje, de la misma manera que el lenguaje es inseparable de la cultura, de la que la literatura forma parte. Este manual propone el estudio de textos literarios como un componente vital del conocimiento lingüístico y cultural del segundo idioma. La investigación, realizada con estudiantes de italiano en Australia, se sitúa en un contexto más amplio del segundo idioma, y se compara con los estudios sobre las valoraciones que los estudiantes hacen de los textos literarios en inglés y en francés en países como Canadá, Italia, Australia, Alemania y Ucrania. La primera parte del libro lleva el debate sobre la inclusión de la literatura en la enseñanza del segundo idioma como punto de partida para plantear cuestiones cruciales sobre cómo los estudiantes y educadores, ven la literatura. La segunda parte del libro evalúa un enfoque innovador para la enseñanza y el aprendizaje de la literatura en el segundo idioma. La autora llega a la conclusión de que la literatura funciona mejor cuando se lee como literatura, no como gramática, y cuando los estudiantes analizar sus reacciones a la misma como un grupo.