Stemmatics: reconstructing transmission trees from shared error
Philology's stemmatic method — kin to cladistics in biology — reconstructs a family tree of copies from the errors they share, on the logic that a mistake, once made, is inherited by all descendants. The lens generalizes the move beyond words: to the tooth-modules of geared machines, the compass-holes of maps, the small variants among duplicate stelae, even the order in which an author harvests quotations. Its signature deliverable is a genealogy or a channel-detection: which copies descend from which, and where a text switched exemplars mid-stream.
Emergent lineage
Related pages, connected by this project's own research.
Related Pages
Other pages that share linked material with this one.
Record claim
About the production, transmission, survival, or filtering of the written/material record up to the pre-modern past itself -- scribal behaviour and e…
Manuscript and scribal production
Anonymous hands, production teams, witness families, codices, scribal layers, and manuscript-workshop lacunae.
Technical, recipe, and scientific texts
Recipe strata, agronomic source chains, astronomical catalogues, herbals, and practical technical corpora.
Critical apparatus
genuine variant/apparatus data at scale -- Homeric papyri, Gandhari scrolls, epic recensions, Parry-Lord recordings. V2 narrows this family to true v…
Channel dissociation
Two transmission channels for the same content predicted to carry opposite statistical signatures, including error-spectrum forensics (diagnosing the…
Published editions
critical and documentary print editions used as countable data (Meersseman, Glorieux, MGH, Kaeppeli, Schwartz's Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum, and o…
Astronomical tables
DISHAS, zij corpora, computus tables, horoscope recomputation, star catalogues, astrolabe/dial corpora.
Digitized texts
digitized full-text corpora used as countable data -- OpenITI/KITAB, ROMTEXT, and similar digitized-text projects. New A2 family.
Open conjectures — noetic, untested
Falsifiable questions posed below the evidence boundary by the 1001 Conjectures project. They are leads, not evidence, and carry no weight in this page's assessment.
- Every Greek road leads back to one salvage Already answered
- A dynasty down to one copy Already answered
- The golden book behind two histories Already answered
- Triangulating the drowned ocean Anticipated in print · untested
- The lexicon quotes the morgue, not the library Already answered
- Horoscope stemmatics Anticipated in print · untested
From the One Thousand and One Conjectures. They carry no evidential weight here; verdicts and credits live on each conjecture's own page.