We examined four medieval Iliad manuscripts to understand how their textual and paratextual content have been transmitted and have evolved throughout time. We aimed to define models that could be applied to compare texts in an empirical and replicable way. Under the guidance of a classicist and a biologist, we integrated computational methods for characterizing digital text corpora in genetic models of evolutionary change. We additionally compared generic models for assessing similarity of any text to corpus specific models, such as topic modeling, Zipf’s law, and Levenshtein edit distance. Our research confirmed previous scholarly work in this area while also leading to a more multifaceted view of the texts and the variety of differences between them. This transdisciplinary work is similar to research recently published in the article “The Pace of Modern Culture” published in Nature, but extends it by developing and applying richer models for assessing "similarity" of documents.

Poster Presentation