Anne-Catherine Schaaf (College of the Holy Cross)
This summer, my team and I are examining a diverse set of Iliad manuscripts in order to identify commonalities in the content of their scholia, as part of the ongoing Homer Multitext Project (HMT). As members of this project, we read, transcribe, and edit high resolution images of 10th and 11th century CE Byzantine manuscripts of the Iliad and their scholia to produce diplomatic editions that are publicly available online. These manuscripts are the earliest surviving complete editions of the Iliad, and before the HMT published images of them, were only available by obtaining permission to look at them in the various monasteries and libraries in which they reside. These manuscripts contain fascinating differences and disparities reflecting their origin as oral compositions. Likewise, the scholia of these manuscripts hold centuries worth of fascinating commentary and intellectual debate with roots in 3rd century BCE scholarship from the Library of Alexandria, yet most are untranslated and their content is still unknown. Within these scholia, we can directly see divergent evolution throughout the texts. While most scholia scholarship has explored the differences between manuscripts, this summer we aim to identify textual “units” of scholia content found in multiple manuscripts and trace their diverging and converging paths to understand the transmission of these cultural materials. These “units” have been compressed, expanded, or combined in the different manuscripts because the scholia were creatively modified through transmission, so there is not an obvious linear relationship. Using a new methodological framework, we will create a composite model of the relationships between the scholia using textual analysis like topic modelling, Levenshtein edit distance, and word vectors. While members of our research team have previously applied these models to the text of the manuscripts, this will be the first time the scholia themselves have been analyzed in-depth using modern digital humanities tools.