Lost Manuscripts and Extinct Texts: A Dynamic Model of Cultural Transmission

10/29/2022
by   Jean-Baptiste Camps, et al.
0

How did written works evolve, disappear or survive down through the ages? In this paper, we propose a unified, formal framework for two fundamental questions in the study of the transmission of texts: how much was lost or preserved from all works of the past, and why do their genealogies (their “phylogenetic trees”) present the very peculiar shapes that we observe or, more precisely, reconstruct? We argue here that these questions share similarities to those encountered in evolutionary biology, and can be described in terms of “genetic” drift and “natural” selection. Through agent-based models, we show that such properties as have been observed by philologists since the 1800s can be simulated, and confronted to data gathered for ancient and medieval texts across Europe, in order to obtain plausible estimations of the number of works and manuscripts that existed and were lost.

READ FULL TEXT
research
02/01/2018

Evolutionary Model Discovery of Factors for Farm Selection by the Artificial Anasazi

Agent-based modeling has been criticized for its apparent lack of establ...
research
09/17/2022

ASIR: Robust Agent-based Representation Of SIR Model

Compartmental models (written as CM) and agent-based models (written as ...
research
04/11/2023

Mathematical and Linguistic Characterization of Orhan Pamuk's Nobel Works

In this study, Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk's works are chosen as examples...
research
11/04/2020

Phylogenetic reconstruction of the cultural evolution of electronic music via dynamic community detection (1975-1999)

Cultural phylogenies, or "trees" of culture, are typically built using m...
research
11/10/2022

BERT in Plutarch's Shadows

The extensive surviving corpus of the ancient scholar Plutarch of Chaero...
research
04/03/2023

Understanding Individual and Team-based Human Factors in Detecting Deepfake Texts

In recent years, Natural Language Generation (NLG) techniques in AI (e.g...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset