Investigating Myth in Iliad Scholia: New Computational Approaches

In this project I analyze ancient scholarly discussions of Trojan War myth in Byzantine Iliad manuscripts. These stories are central to Greek and Roman culture, but ancient critical works (by grammarians such as Aristarchus of Samothrace and Zenodotus of Ephesus) discussing them have been lost. I edit book 6 of the Iliad across several manuscripts, use computational methods to recover some of their content, and experiment with new composite methods - such as topic modeling, chronology, scholia length, and first-word analysis - that my team developed last summer for identifying relevant myth content scattered across thousands of scholia. I hope the results will give a new perspective to Trojan War myth that I can apply as one of the sources in my senior thesis, so I can better understand how contemporary viewers would have approached Pompeiian frescoes of the Iliad.