Witness counts (Pinakes)

Pinakes and comparable catalogues (the Bibliotheca Hagiographica Graeca and Latina) do one specific, powerful thing: for every known Greek or Latin work, they count exactly how many surviving manuscript copies -- witnesses -- exist, work by work, rather than describing texts individually.

Because a witness count is a single hard number attached to every text in a tradition, it is the natural instrument for testing statistical laws of survival and popularity directly. Manuscript Yule process and The universality class of survival both treat the distribution of witness counts across a whole tradition as following a specific mathematical growth or survival law, and The singleton census applies a method from ecology -- estimating an unseen population from how many things appear only once -- to the many works attested by a single surviving copy. The curriculum cliff and Forgeries are fitter both ask whether a work's popularity, measured this way, predicts whether it keeps being copied at all, or whether outside factors like forgery and controversy skew the count.