Sébastien de Valeriola: Mining legendaries: a quantitative approach to hagiographic manuscripts

Since the middle of the 17th century, scholars have been systematically describing numerous medieval manuscripts preserved in libraries and religious institutions that contain hagiographic texts, that is texts recounting the lives of saints. In this talk, we will show how one can apply quantitative tools to the resulting database to consider these codices from a new point of view.

As such, we study their internal organization, that is the order in which their texts are arranged. We first present a visualization tool that allows to grasp this structure at a glance. Then, we describe a model to automatically classify manuscripts according to their internal organization, based on a constrained spline regression. The results of this classification task make it possible to identify the manuscripts that have a particular internal organization, called per circulum anni (“following the course of the year”), and thus to study their properties. Furthermore, they open the possibility to obtain clues regarding the origin of some codices and potential kinship links between them.

Vortrag im Rahmen des „Digital History“-Forschungskolloquiums
Zeit: Mittwoch, 10. Juli 2024, 16-18 Uhr
Ort: Zoom-Konferenz (Zugang auf Anfrage oder via Mailingliste)

---

---