This is the code repository for the ERC-funded project, TEXTEVOLVE:A New Approach to the Evolution of Texts Based on the Manuscripts of the Targums (grant no. 818702). TEXTEVOLVE seeks to create a new computational methodology for studying the evolution of texts over time and place. This methodology is founded on cutting-edge approaches in bioinformatics and modeled on the texts of the Targums (Aramaic paraphrastic translations of the Hebrew Bible).
This repository (all content currently in progress since 2022; due for completion in October 2024) contains the code developed through the TEXTEVOLVE project. In the spirit of making the research advancements accessible to textual scholars who do not have a computer science or programming background, all the software placed on this repository will include step-by-step tutorials for use, to enable researchers to reproduce these methods on other texts. The code here corresponds to the (currently in-progress) volume, Handbook of Computational Stemmatology (author: Estara J Arrant), with the goal that readers of that volume can access the methods referenced there through this repository. This handbook will serve as the first systematic, unified guide to the current state of the art in the computational philological analysis of text traditions. It covers topics such as variant selection, synopsis and text comparisons, phylogenetic algorithms for assessing textual variation over time and place, algorithms to compute and build stemmas, and efficient digital methods for OCRing and digitising large textual traditions. All code and data will also be hosted on Zenodo (with an associated DOI for citations).
At the end of the TEXTEVOLVE project, the sister repository (TEXTEVOLVE-OCR) will be made public, with the transcriptions of a sizeable number of medieval Targum manuscripts which were OCRed and analysed as part of the TEXTEVOLVE project.