Abstract
Broadly conceived, this article re-imagines the role of conjecture in textual
scholarship at a time when computers are increasingly pressed into service as tools
of reconstruction and forecasting. Examples of conjecture include the recovery of
lost readings in classical texts, and the computational modeling of the evolution of
a literary work or the descent of a natural language. Conjectural criticism is thus
concerned with issues of transmission, transformation, and prediction. It has ancient
parallels in divination and modern parallels in the comparative methods of historical
linguistics and evolutionary biology.
The article develops a computational model of textuality, one that better supports
conjectural reasoning, as a counterweight to the pictorial model of textuality that
now predominates in the field of textual scholarship. “Computation” is here
broadly understood to mean the manipulation of discrete units of information, which,
in the case of language, entails the grammatical processing of strings rather than
the mathematical calculation of numbers to create puns, anagrams, word ladders, and
other word games. The article thus proposes that a textual scholar endeavoring to
recover a prior version of a text, a diviner attempting to decipher an oracle by
signs, and a poet exploiting the combinatorial play of language collectively draw on
the same library of semiotic operations, which are amenable to algorithmic
expression.
The intended audience for the article includes textual scholars, specialists in the
digital humanities and new media, and others interested in the technology of the
written word and the emerging field of biohumanities.
In an essay published in the
Blackwell Companion to Digital
Literary Studies, Stephen Ramsay argues that efforts to legitimate humanities
computing within the larger discipline of literature have met with resistance because
well-meaning advocates have tried too hard to brand their work as “scientific,” a
word whose positivistic associations conflict with traditional humanistic values of
ambiguity, open-endedness, and indeterminacy [
Ramsay 2008]. If, as Ramsay
notes, the computer is perceived primarily as an instrument for quantizing, verifying,
counting, and measuring, then what purpose does it serve in those disciplines committed
to a view of knowledge that admits of no incorrigible truth somehow insulated from
subjective interpretation and imaginative intervention [
Ramsay 2008, 479–482]?
Ramsay's rich and nuanced answer to that question has been formulated across two
publications, of which “Toward an Algorithmic Criticism” is
the earliest.
[1] Drawing on his experience as both
a programmer and a scholar, he suggests that the pattern-seeking behavior of the
literary critic is often amenable to computational modeling. But while Ramsay is
interested in exposing the algorithmic aspects of literary methods, he concedes that in
searching for historical antecedents, we may be more successful locating them in the
cultural and creative practices of antiquity rather than in scholarly and critical
practices [
Ramsay 2003, 170]. His insight is born of the fact that a
text is a dynamic system whose individual units are ripe for rule-governed alteration.
While these alterations may be greatly facilitated by mechanical means, historically
they have been performed manually, as in the case of the “stochastic” aesthetics of
the
I Ching or the “generative aesthetics” of the
Dadaists and Oulipo [
Ramsay 2003, 170]. “Ironically,” Ramsay writes, “it is not the methods of the scholar that
reveal themselves as ‘computational,’ but the methods of the gematrist and
the soothsayer”
[
Ramsay 2003, 170]. Ramsay's emphasis on prophecy is apt, for it allows us to link the divinatory
offices of the poet and soothsayer with the predictive functions of the computer. It is
interesting to note in this context that one of the earliest uses to which a commercial
computer was put was as an engine of prediction: the UNIVersal Automatic Computer
(UNIVAC), the first digital electronic computer to debut in the United States,
successfully predicted the outcome of the 1952 Eisenhower-Stevenson presidential
race.
[2] The computer’s pedigree in
symbolic logic, model-based reasoning, and data processing make it a predictive machine
par excellence.
With these observations in mind, the principal purpose of this essay is to establish an
ancient lineage for what we might call
computational prediction in the
humanities, a lineage that runs counter to Ramsay's assertions insofar as it
is distinctly critical or scholarly rather than aesthetic in character. Specifically, I
argue that within the field of textual scholarship, conjectural criticism (the
reconstruction of literary texts) can be profitably understood as a sub-domain of
Ramsay's algorithmic criticism (rule-governed manipulation of literary texts). The essay
seeks to do the following:
- First, it challenges the assumption that “computational processes within the rich tradition of
interpretive endeavors [are] usually aligned more with art than
criticism
” (my emphasis) [Ramsay 2003, 167]. Although sometimes
erroneously considered “pre-interpretive,”
[3] textual
scholarship, one of our oldest branches of literary study, is a fundamentally
critical rather than artistic endeavor.
- Second, I provide preliminary evidence suggesting not only a formal, but also a
genealogical relationship between Mesopotamian prophecy and textual scholarship,
one that sanctions a prospective as well as retrospective view of the evolution of
a text. Such a proleptic viewpoint has, in fact, already been experimentally
adopted in evolutionary biology and historical linguistics, disciplines whose
conjectural methods parallel those of textual scholarship (about which see
below).
- Third, it offers an alternative theory for why the analogy between science and
the digital humanities apparently has so little traction among traditional
literary critics. Ramsay's contention is that the tasks at which a computer excels
are frequently judged, rightly or wrongly, to be more compatible with the
certitude of hard knowledge than the incertitude of soft knowledge. An equally
compelling (and complementary) reason is that the computer is too often seen
exclusively as a device for processing numbers rather than manipulating text. But
if the computer can count numbers like a mathematician, it can also play with
letters in ways, as we shall see, that poets and textual scholars alike would
recognize.
- Fourth, the essay reconfigures the relationship between humanities computing
and science by exploring the common denominator of literacy rather than numeracy.
In other words, the essay brings into focus those scientific disciplines that
manipulate a symbol system that semiotically — operationally, we
might say — more closely resembles letters than numbers, namely linguistics and
bioinformatics. The essay further posits that when viewed historically, the
relationship among the three disciplines isn't unidirectional, but rather deeply
reciprocal. There is compelling circumstantial evidence that the conjectural
methods of historical linguistics and evolutionary biology were largely derived
from those of textual criticism in the nineteenth century. Subsequently, however,
linguistics and biology were (and to some extent remain) more active in exploiting
the computer's ability to execute algorithms on strings as a way to predict,
model, and analyze evolutionary change — or in other words to automate the methods
first expounded by textual critics more than a century earlier.
Broadly conceived, then, this essay re-imagines the role of conjecture in textual
scholarship at a time when computers are increasingly pressed into service as tools of
reconstruction and forecasting. Examples of conjecture include the recovery of lost
readings in classical texts and the computational modeling of the evolution of a
literary work or the descent of a natural language. Conjectural criticism is thus
concerned with issues of transmission, transformation, and prediction (as well as
retrodiction).
In the first section of the essay I attempt to define conjecture, often viewed in the
humanities as a misguided and anti-methodical pursuit, and rationalize it as a form of
subjunctive knowledge, knowledge about what might have been or could be or almost was.
The object of conjecture is notional rather than empirical; possible rather than
demonstrable; counterfactual rather than real. This subjunctive mode, I contend, is not
antithetical to the humanities, but central to it. Whether it is a student of the
ancient Near East deciphering a fragmented cuneiform tablet or a musician speculatively
completing Bach's unfinished final fugue or a literary scholar using advanced 3D
computer modeling to virtually restore a badly damaged manuscript, the impulse in each
instance — vital and paradoxical — is to go beyond purely documentary states of
objects.
The essay develops a computational model of textuality, one that better supports
conjectural reasoning, as a counterweight to the material model of textuality that now
predominates.
Computation is here broadly understood to mean the systematic
manipulation of discrete units of information, which, in the case of language, entails
the grammatical processing of strings
[4] rather than the mathematical calculation of numbers to
create puns, anagrams, word ladders, and other word games. The essay thus proposes that
a textual scholar endeavoring to recover a prior version of a text, a diviner attempting
to decipher an oracle by signs, and a poet exploiting the combinatorial play of language
collectively draw on the same library of semiotic operations, which are amenable to
algorithmic expression and simulation.
In an effort to overcome common objections to analogies between the humanities and
sciences,
[5] I offer a reflection — part historical, part formal or theoretical — on the
parallel importance of the tree paradigm in evolutionary biology, textual criticism, and
historical linguistics. By
tree paradigm, I mean the grouping of
manuscripts, languages, or genomes into families and showing how they relate to one
another in genealogical terms, and using these relationships to conjecture about lost
ancestors or archetypes. My themes are the interdependence and correspondence of tree
methods (and their associated algorithms) in three diverse knowledge domains. From tree
structures, I turn to a form of causal transmission known as a transformation series, a
recognized phenomenon in the three disciplines surveyed. Because of their similarity to
a genre of word puzzle known as doublets, transformation series allow us to revisit the
connection between wordplay and divination established earlier in the argument.
A Rationale for Conjecture
In textual scholarship, conjecture is the proposal of a reading not found in any
extant witness to the text. It is predicated on the idea that words are always signs
of other words; the received text also harbors the once and future text. When A. E.
Housman alters a line from Catullus's
Marriage of Peleus and
Thetis (c. 62-54 BCE) so that it reads "
Emathiae
tutamen, Opis carissime nato," instead of "
Emathiae tutamen opis, carissime nato," he is practicing the art of
conjecture.
[6] Housman's small orthographic tweaks produce sizable semantic shifts: by
relocating a comma and capitalizing “Opis” so that it is
understood not as the Latin term for “power,” but as the
genitive of “Ops,” the mother of Jupiter in Roman mythology, he
substantially alters the meaning of the line: “Peleus, most dear to his son, is the protector of the power of Emathia,”
becomes “Peleus, protector of Emathia, most dear to
the son of Ops [Jupiter].” The emendation, as the fictional Housman
explains in Tom Stoppard's
The Invention of Love,
restores sense to nonsense by ridding the language of anachronism: “How can Peleus be
carrisme nato, most dear to his son, when his son
has not yet been born?”
[
Stoppard 1997, 37].
Expressed in grammatical terms, conjecture operates in the subjunctive and
conditional moods.
[7] Because
its range of motion extends beyond the pale of the empirical, its vocabulary is
replete with
coulds,
mights,
mays, and
ifs. Such a vocabulary reflects not caution — on the contrary,
conjecture is a radical, audacious editorial style — but rather a refusal to settle
for attested states of texts. In this it is opposed to the current wave of archival
models of editing, which, in their rejection of speculative and inferential readings,
opt for representation in the indicative mood.
Conjecture has at various moments in history held a place of honor in our repertory
of editorial paradigms. Taken collectively, for example, Housman’s critical writings
offer a magnificent apologia of
divinatio, as conjecture is still
sometimes called. The strength of conviction, the peremptory eloquence, the sheer
depth and breadth of knowledge contained in those pages brook no protests about the
bugbear of intentionalist editing or the death of the author. But at the same time,
conjecture is a foundling, strangely lacking a well-defined history, theory,
methodology. Discussion of it, which more often than not occurs incidentally, tends
to take place not on an expository or historical plane, but on a homiletic or poetic
one. Thus, for example, amid all his scientific discourse on compounded variational
formulas, ancestral groups, successive derivation, and other arcane topics pertaining
to recension, W. W. Greg falls almost quiet when he turns to the subject of
conjecture: “the fine flower” of textual criticism he calls it, choosing
metaphor over definition [
Greg 1924, 217]. Treatments of
conjecture characterized more by brevity than rigor are the norm: the process is
hazily glossed metaphorically or else grounded in the successful critic’s abstract
qualities of mind, which do not always lend themselves to analysis (e.g., intuition,
judgment, confidence, insight, authority, charisma). For these reasons, conjecture
has customarily been seen as either a practitioner’s art, the conspicuous absence of
a meta-literature a symptom of the bottom-up approach it tends to favor, or a
prophet’s.
The scholarly language can at times suggest the intervention of a supernatural agent.
The classicist Robin Nisbet speaks of a “Muse of Textual Conjecture,” whom he
playfully christens, appropriately enough, Eustochia.
[8] As one response to the exquisitely difficult recovery mission that conjecture
sets for its critics, Eustochia might be perceived as a sad contrivance to a
misguided endeavor; a
deus ex machina called in to artificially resolve
all textual difficulties. But consider, for a moment, the bleak alternative: a world
in which conjectural knowledge never was or could be an article of faith. Samuel
Johnson’s plaintive verdict that conjecture “demands more than humanity
possesses”
[
Johnson 1765, para. 105] gives our imaginations something to work with; now envision that same
despondency on a collective rather than individual scale. Instead of Erasmus proudly
proclaiming the reconstruction of ancient texts the noblest task of all, we’d have
only Stoppard’s Housman making a Faustian pact, born of despair, to suffer the fate
of Sisyphus if only each time the stone rolled back he were given another fragment of
Aeschylus [
Stoppard 1997].
What does this general silence indicate about conjecture, its status in textual
criticism, and its practice? E. J. Kenney’s position (which he officially co-opts
from the nineteenth-century critic Boeckh, but which nevertheless seems to be
prevalent among Classical editors) that the solution to the more “difficult
cases” of conjecture “comes in a flash or not at all”
[
Kenney 1974, 147] is tantalizing, but the idea of a lucid eureka moment — eerily similar to the
romantic notion of inspired creativity (“At its inception, a [romantic] poem is
an involuntary and unanticipated donnée”
[
Abrams 1953, 24]) — shouldn’t curtail discussion; it should open the floodgates. And because
the archival model holds conjecture in abeyance, an entire new generation of young
textual critics who have cut their critical teeth on documentary precepts are all but
forbidden at the outset to engage in it. For this reason alone conjectural criticism
should inspire inquiry, but also precisely because it pretends to elude historical,
cognitive, or technical understanding.
Would it be possible for conjecture to assume again a position of prominence in
editorial theory? It would take a concerted inquiry into history, method, and theory.
We would need to seriously engage the psychology of intuition, the AI and cognitive
literature of inference, and the history of conjecture as divinatory art and
scientific inquiry. We would need to keep apace with advancements in historical
linguistics and evolutionary biology (two fields whose relevance to textual criticism
is vastly under-appreciated) and the burgeoning psycholinguistic literature of
reading. Indeed, we would reap many rewards from outreach to the linguistic
community. We would need to dispel the myth that conjecture is a riddle wrapped in a
mystery inside an enigma. A curriculum for conjecture would give us better insight
into the method underlying the prediction — or retrodiction — of ancient readings of
texts. Not least, we would need to work decisively to bring conjectural criticism
into the 21st century. Because it has traditionally been described as a balm to help
heal a maimed or corrupted text, conjecture is in desperate need of a facelift; the
washed-up pathological metaphors long ago ceased to strike a chord in editorial
theory.
So what would an alternate language of conjecture sound like?
We might, for starters, imagine conjecture as a knowledge toolkit designed to perform
“what if” analyses across a range of texts. In this view, the text is a
semiotic system whose discrete units of information can be artfully manipulated into
alternate configurations that may represent past or future states. Of course the
computing metaphors alone are not enough; they must be balanced by, among other
things, an appreciation of the imponderable and distinctly human qualities that
contribute to conjectural knowledge. But formalized and integrated into a curriculum,
the various suggestions outlined here have the potential to give conjecture a new
lease on life and incumbent editorial practices — much too conservative for a new
generation of textual critics — a run for their money.
A Formal Definition and Methodological Overview
What do I mean by conjecture, then? Giovanni Manetti's pithy definition — “inference to the imperceptible” — is good insofar
as it captures the cognitive leap (“inference”) from the known to the unknown.
[9] But it fails to denote the temporal
dimension of conjecture so essential to a field like textual criticism, which deals
with copies of texts that are produced in succession and ordered in time. Moreover,
inference is not a monolithic category but can be further subdivided
into inductive inference, deductive inference, abductive, intuitive, probabilistic,
logical, etc. Manetti's definition thus needs to be massaged into something more
apropos to textual scholarship. For the purposes of this essay, I'll define it as
follows: conjecture is
allographic inference to past or future values of the
sign.
Allographic is a semiotic term given currency by the
analytic philosopher Nelson Goodman in his seminal
Languages of
Art and refers to those media that resolve into discrete, abstract units
of information — into what might be more loosely called
digital units —
that can be systematically copied, transmitted, added to, subtracted from,
transposed, substituted, and otherwise manipulated. Conjecture as it is understood in
this work is indifferent as to whether the mode of allographic manipulation is
manual, cognitive, or mechanical. Allographic contrasts with autographic, or
continuous, media. Examples of the former include musical scores, alphabetic script,
pixels, and numerical notation; examples of the latter, paintings, drawings, and
engravings. Painter and theorist Julian Bell summarizes Goodman like this: “Pictures differ from other sign systems,
such as writing, by being continuities in which every mark is interdependent,
rather than operating through a combination of independent markers like the
alphabet. (In computational terminology, they are ‘analog’ rather than
‘digital’ representations.)”
[
Bell 1999, 228]. Words are conventionally allographic, images autographic, though much
important work in recent years has contested the validity of these distinctions and
examined borderline cases, such as pattern poetry. Indeed, the last two decades of
textual criticism have witnessed a wealth of scholarship promoting the text's
bibliographic or iconic codes. Despite the virtues of such visual approaches to
textuality (and there are many), conjectural criticism has been hamstrung by their
success. The general argument in this essay is that conjecture flourishes in an
allographic environment, not an autographic one. By “allographic inference,”
then, I mean
the considered manipulation or processing of digital signs with
the goal of either recovering a prior configuration or predicting a future or
potential one.
If we set aside for a moment the original terms of my definition (
allographic
inference) and focus instead on the terms used to gloss them (
digital
processing), then one of the salient points to emerge is that conjecture as
formalized in these pages is semiotic in the first instance and computational in the
second. Conjecture, that is to say, involves digital signal processing or, to use the
more general-purpose term,
computation.
[10] Moreover,
just as digitality, as a concept, extends beyond the boxy electronic machines that
sit on our desktops, so too does computation. As David Alan Grier reminds us in
When Computers Were Human, homo sapiens has been
computing on clay tablets, papyrus, parchment, and paper for millennia [
Grier 2005]. A
computer is simply someone or something that
systematically manipulates discrete, abstract symbols. As conventionally understood,
those symbols are numbers, and the manipulations performed on them are addition,
subtraction, multiplication, and division. But computers are text manipulators as
much as number crunchers. The subfield of computer science that operates on textual
rather than numeric data is known as
stringology. Reflecting this
broader emphasis, the symbols that are the focus of this essay are primarily
alphabetic, but also phonemic and molecular. The only criterion for the symbols to
function conjecturally, as already stated in our definition, is that they be digital,
or allographic. The processes discussed here and throughout likewise depart from
computational norms. They are not always or only mathematical operations, but also
semiotic or grammar-like operations: transposition, deletion, insertion,
substitution, repetition, and relocation. I will have more to say about them later,
but for now let me summarize the four poles around which string computation has been
organized in this project:
- Input: allographic/digital (texts, words, letters, phonemes, molecular
sequences)
- Processor: human or machine
- Processes or Operations: semiotic or grammar-like (transposition, insertion,
deletion, relocation, substitution)
- Output: textual errors (scribal copying); conjectural reconstructions or
projections (textual criticism, historical linguistics, evolutionary biology);
wordplay (poetry); auguries (divination); plain text or cipher text
(cryptography)
This framework allows us to associate activities, behaviors, and practices that
wouldn't otherwise be grouped together: wordplay, divination, textual transmission,
and conjectural reconstruction, for example. It also allows us, as we shall see, to
perceive a number of underlying similarities among a set of disciplines that for most
of the twentieth century didn't take much interest in one another, namely textual
criticism, historical linguistics, and evolutionary biology.
Historically, we have referred to the source of a message about the future as an
“oracle” or “sibyl” or “seer”; within the contexts specified in
this essay, we can alternately refer to that agent, whether human or mechanical, as a
“computer.” From this standpoint, divination is not “knowledge in advance
of fact” so much as knowledge that is a (computational) permutation of fact
[
Jonese 1948, 27]. Justin Rye, for example, author of the
imaginary language “Futurese,” a projection of American English in the year 3000
AD, proposes that the word “build” will be pronounced /bIl/ in some American
dialects within a century or more as a consequence of consonant cluster
simplification [
Rye 2003]. Underlying this speculation is a simple
deletion operation that has been applied to a factual state of a word to compute a
plausible future state. Transition rules of this kind are key ingredients in all of
the examples of conjecture discussed in this project: the wordplay of Shakespeare's
fools, soothsayers, and madmen; the puns of the Mesopotamian or Mayan priest; the
“emendations” of textual scholars; the doublets of Lewis Carroll; the
molecular reconstructions of geneticists; the projections of conlangers (creators of
imaginary languages); the transformation series of historical linguists, textual
scholars, and evolutionary biologists.
These devices and systems are unified by their semiotic and, in some cases, cognitive
properties and behaviors: a pun resembles an editorial reconstruction resembles a
speech error resembles a genetic mutation, and so forth. Each of these transitive
relations is explored in the course of this essay. Consider, as a preliminary
example, the analogy between textual and genetic variation. It is the allographic
equivalence between the two — the fact that both are digitally encoded — that makes
possible a strong theory of translation, allowing one system to be encoded into the
other and, once encoded, to continue to change and evolve in its new state.
Brazilian-born artist Eduardo Kac, who coined the term
transgenic art to
describe his experiments with genetic engineering, exploits this allographic
equivalence in
Genesis (1999), a commissioned work for
the Ars Electronica exhibition. Kac's artist statement reads in part as follows:
The key element of the work is an
“artist's gene,” a synthetic gene that was created by Kac by
translating a sentence from the biblical book of Genesis into Morse Code, and
converting the Morse Code into DNA base pairs according to a conversion
principle specially developed by the artist for this work. The sentence reads:
“Let man have dominion over the fish of the
sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moves
upon the earth.” It was chosen for what it implies about the dubious
notion of divinely sanctioned humanity's supremacy over nature. The Genesis
gene was incorporated into bacteria, which were shown in the gallery.
Participants on the Web could turn on an ultraviolet light in the gallery,
causing real, biological mutations in the bacteria. This changed the biblical
sentence in the bacteria. The ability to change the sentence is a symbolic
gesture: it means that we do not accept its meaning in the form we inherited
it, and that new meanings emerge as we seek to change it.
[Kac 1999]
Kac’s elaborate game of code-switching is enabled by what Matthew Kirschenbaum calls
“formal materiality,” the condition whereby a system is able to “propagate the illusion (or call it
a working model) of immaterial behavior.”
[
Kirschenbaum 2008, 11]. Because this model is ultimately factitious, succeeding only to the extent
that it disguises the radically different material substrates of the systems
involved, it cannot be sustained indefinitely. But at some level this is only to
state the obvious: abstractions leak,
[11] requiring ongoing regulation, maintenance, and
modification to remain viable. This fundamental truth does not diminish the power or
utility — what I would call the
creative generativity — of models.
Conjecture as Wordplay
I first became sensitive to the convergence of conjecture and wordplay while studying
Shakespeare as a graduate student. The ludic language of Shakespeare's fools,
soothsayers, and madmen seemed to me to uncannily resemble the language of
Shakespeare's editors as they juggled and transposed letters in the margins of the
page, trying to discover proximate words that shadow those that have actually
descended to us in the hopes of recovering an authorial text. The pleasure George Ian
Duthie, a postwar editor of Shakespeare, shows in permutating variants — juxtaposing
and repeating them, taking a punster's delight in the homophony of stockt, struckt,
and struck; hare and hart; nough and nought
[12] — finds its poetic complement in
the metaplasmic imagination of Tom O'Bedlam in
King Lear
or the soothsayer Philarmonus in
Cymbeline. Kenneth
Gross points to what he calls Tom's “near
echolalia” on the heath in the storm scene, the “strange, homeless babble” that “presses up from within Tom's lists, in
their jamming up and disjunctions of sense, their isolation of bits of
language[:] . . . toad/tod-pole, salads/swallows, wall-newt/water.”
[
Gross 2001, 184]. There is something scribal and exegetical in Tom's babble, just as there is
something poetic and ludic in Duthie's editing. And in the way both manipulate signs,
there is also something fundamentally conjectural.
[13] Conjecture, then, can be profitably understood by
adopting a semiotic framework — expressed here in computational terms — within which
we can legitimately or persuasively correlate the rules and patterns of conjectural
transformation with those of mantic codes and wordplay.
Consider, too, the soothsayer Philarmonus, solicited by Posthumus near the close of
Cymbeline to help decipher Jupiter’s prophecy,
inscribed on a scroll that serves as a material token of Posthumus’s cryptic
dream-vision:
When as a lion's whelp shall, to himself unknown,
without seeking find, and be embrac'd by a piece of tender
air; and when from a stately cedar shall be lopp'd
branches which, being dead many years, shall after
revive, be jointed to the old stock, and freshly
grow; then shall Posthumus end his miseries,
Britain be fortunate and flourish in peace and plenty
(
Cymbeline, 5.5.436-443)
The soothsayer responds by translating keywords into Latin, isolating their
homophones, and expounding their relations through puns and false etymologies:
[To CYMBELINE]
The piece of tender air, thy virtuous daughter,
Which we call mollis aer, and mollis aer
We term it mulier; which mulier I divine
Is this most constant wife, who even now
Answering the letter of the oracle,
Unknown to you, unsought, were clipp'd about
With this most tender air
(
Cymbeline, 5.5.447-453)
Language here is an anagrammatic machine. By sleight of sound,
Philarmonus
[14] morphs
mollis aer (tender air) into
mulier (woman) and cracks the code. “Every fool can play upon the word,” quips
The Merchant of Venice’s Lorenzo 3.5.41. And so
can every prophet. What the incident in
Cymbeline
highlights is that the “capaciousness of
ear” with which Kenneth Gross attributes Hamlet applies in equal measure to
Shakespeare’s soothsayers, clowns, fools, tricksters, madmen — and, I would add,
editors [
Gross 2001, 13]. It is significant, for example, that
Posthumus should initially mistake Jupiter’s oracle for the ravings of a madman, for
the madman and the prophet hear and speak in a common register. The fool, too,
engages in the same digital remixing of sound and sense, and it is worth recalling in
this context that Enid Welsford’s classic study of the fool’s social and literary
history devotes an entire chapter to his dual role as poet and clairvoyant [
Welsford 1966, 76–112]. It is not only
titular fools
(or madmen or prophets or clowns — the terms quickly proliferate and become
functionally equivalent) but also
de facto fools who, in
King Lear for example, interface between wordplay and
prophecy. The epithet of fool, like that play’s ocular and sartorial puns, is passed
from one character to another, so that by the end of the play one is hard pressed to
identify a single character who
hasn’t tried on motley for size. By
turns the fool, Lear, Kent, Cordelia, Gloucester, and Albany bear the brunt of the
term, lending credence to Lear’s lament that his decrepit world is but a “great stage of fools”
(4.6.187).
Let me try to connect the figure of the fool, like that of the prophet, more directly
to the motifs of error, wordplay, and conjecture. A self-styled “corrupter of words”
(3.1.34), Feste in
Twelfth Night, for example, is fluent
in the dialect of riddles and puns that constitutes the shared vernacular of
Shakespeare’s fools. He subscribes to a philosophy of language that views the
manipulation of sounds as a form of sympathetic magic — a process of
world-making through
word-making (and un-making). In the
following exchange with Viola, the bawdy and jocular terms in which Feste expresses
this philosophy should not distract us from the radical theory of the sign that
underpins it: that there exists an instrumental link between signifier and signified,
such that reconfiguring the one provides a means for fashioning, shaping, or
foreshadowing the destiny of the other:
Viola: | Nay, that's certain; they that dally nicely with words may quickly make
them wanton |
Feste: | I would, therefore, my sister had had no name, sir. |
Feste: | Why, sir, her name's a word; and to dally with that word might make my
sister wanton. |
Considered within the context of these lines, “corrupter” denotes someone who
has the power to pervert the world by deforming (“dallying with”) the language used to signify it. But Shakespeare mobilizes
other meanings as well. In the domain of textual scholarship, the term
corrupt has historically been used to describe a text riddled with
copy errors. Because Feste’s cunning mispronunciations and nonsense words hover
between intelligibility and unintelligibility, they closely parallel scribal error: “I did impeticos thy gratillity”
(2.3.27), Feste nonsensically proclaims to Sir Andrew, prompting one critic to wryly
note that “words here are at liberty and have
little meaning apart from that which editors, at the cost of great labor,
finally manage to impose upon them”
[
Grivelet 1956, 71]. The “great labor” to which Michel Grivelet alludes involves exploiting
the digitally encoded phonological structure of language to conjecturally recover
authentic words from corrupt ones:
petticoat from
impeticos, or
gratuity (perhaps
gentility?)
from
gratillity. Impressionistically, then, it can often feel as though
the play’s
textual
“corruptions” — easily confused with its fictional
vocal
corruptions - were originating from within the story rather than from without; as if
the text were inverting itself, such that the source of error were imaginary rather
than real, with the fool becoming not only the
object of a flawed
transcription but also — impossibly — the
agent of it. Because they
mimic textual corruption, Feste’s broken, disfigured puns seem to compress
temporality, exposing what the linguist D. Stein would call “diachronic vectors in synchrony.”
[15]
Let me pause here to gather together a number of threads: my central tenet is that
the linguistic procedures of Shakespeare's editors often seem to mimic those of
Shakespeare's most inveterate “computers” of language. To emend a text — to
insert, delete, and rearrange letters, phonemes, or sequences of words — is to
ritualistically invoke a divinatory tradition of wordplay that dates back to at least
the third millennium BC. For a benign alien power observing human textual rites from
afar, the linguistic manipulations of a Duthie or a Housman would, I imagine, be for
all intents and purposes indistinguishable from those of a Philarmonus or Feste or
Tom O’Bedlam or Chaldean or, for that matter, a computer programmer using
string-rewriting rules to transform one word into another. What all these examples
have in common are digital units manipulated by computers (programmers, soothsayers,
madmen, fools, punsters, poets, scribes, editors) using a small set of combinatorial
procedures (insertion, deletion, transposition, substitution, relocation) for
conjectural, predictive, or divinatory ends. Duthie and Tom O'Bedlam, computer
programmers and Kabbalists, Philarmonus and historical linguists: they all compute
bits of language.
As an editorial method, such alphabetic computation is dismissed by Housman as a
wanton orthographic game. Finding a kindred spirit in a nineteenth-century German
predecessor, he approvingly quotes the following:
Some people, if they see that anything
in an ancient text wants correcting, immediately betake themselves to the art
of palaeography . . . and try one dodge after another, as if it were a game,
until they hit upon something which they think they can substitute for the
corruption; as if forsooth truth were generally discovered by shots of that
sort, or as if emendation could take its rise from anything but a careful
consideration of the thought.
(Qtd. in Housman 1921.)
And yet the conjectures of, for example, Richard Bentley (1662-1742), one of
the few textual critics for whom Housman professes admiration, are as much the
product of letter play and combinatorial art as they are of careful deliberation and
thought. (Given the structure and workings of the mental lexicon, discussed below, we
might reasonably assert that letter play is the
sine qua
non of conjectural thought.) Lamenting the corrupt state of the blind
Milton's
Paradise Lost, which, according to Bentley, was
not only dictated to a tone-deaf amanuensis, but also, adding insult to injury, later
copy-edited by a derelict acquaintance, Bentley attaches a preface to his edition of
the poem that includes a table of the “monstrous Faults” disfiguring the
masterpiece, alongside Bentley's proposed emendations [
Bentley 1732].
Reflecting the editor's conviction that “Words of a like or near Sound in Pronunciation” were substituted
throughout for what Milton intended [
Bentley 1732], the table reads
like a dictionary of wordplay: “is Judicious” is emended to “Unlibidinous”;
“Nectarous” to “Icarus”; “Subtle Art” to “Sooty Chark”;
“Wound” to “Stound”; “Angelic” to “Adamic.”
[16] The same “near echolalia” that characterizes Tom
O'Bedlam's speech in the storm scene also characterizes Bentley's editorial
method.
To adjudicate among variants, Bentley finds evidence and inspiration in diverse
knowledge domains. Milton's “
secret top of Horeb” in the opening lines of
Paradise Lost is conjecturally restored to “sacred top” through an appeal to
literary tradition, geology, meteorology, and logic. According to Bentley, “secret top” finds little precedent in
the works of antiquity, while “sacred
top” has parallels in the Bible, Spenser, and various classical authors
[
Bentley 1732, 1n6]. Emending a text by bringing it into
alignment with literary antecedents is a technique in which Bentley takes recourse
again and again, as though a poem were best thought of as a commonplace book filled
with its author's favorite quotations. The model of authorship that underwrites this
approach is one that stresses sampling and collage over originality and solitary
genius. The more allusive and intertextual the work, the more susceptible it will be
to conjectural reconstruction.
Whatever the shortcomings of Bentley's appeal to precedent, it has the effect of
helping systemize and guide his wordplay. His paronomastic methods are constrained by
other factors as well: the double articulation of natural language, comprised of a
first level of meaningful units (called morphemes) and a second level of meaningless
units (called phonemes), imposes order and rules on the process. There are in English
a total of twenty-six letters of the alphabet capable of representing some 40-45
separate phonemes, and phonotactic and semantic constraints on how those letters and
sounds may be combined. The sequence “ptk” in English, for example, is
unpronounceable, and the sequence “paf,” while pronounceable, is at the time of
this writing meaningless, except perhaps as an acronym. Bentley's wordplay is thus
bounded by the formal and historically contingent properties of the natural language
with which he works, properties that theoretically prevent his substitutions and
transpositions from degenerating into mere gibberish.
The importance of digital or allographic units to computation, as I have defined it
here, is underscored by Gross's observation that what Tom O'Bedlam manipulates are
“
bits of language” (my emphasis). Likewise, Elizabeth Sewell
repeatedly emphasizes that nonsense poetry and wordplay require “the divisibility of its material into
ones, units from which a universe can be built”
[
Sewell 1952, 53]. She goes on to say that this universe “must never be more than the sum of its parts, and must
never fuse into some all-embracing whole which cannot be broken down again into
the original ones. It must try to create with words a universe that consists of
bits
” (my emphasis) [
Sewell 1952, 53–4]. It is precisely the
fusion of parts into an indivisible whole that has made pictures — particularly
dense, mimetic pictures — historically and technologically resistant to manual
computation and, by extension, conjectural reconstruction.
Textual Transmission as Wordplay
The similarities between scribal and poetic computation (understood in the sense in
which I have defined it) are brought home by even a casual look at the editorial
apparatus of any critical edition of Shakespeare, where editors have traditionally
attempted to ascertain whether a particular verbal crux is a poetic device in need of
explication or a misprint in need of emendation. The Shakespearean text is one in
which an error can have all the color and comedic effect of an intentional
malapropism, and an intentional malapropism all the ambiguity and perplexity of an
inadvertent error. Is Cleopatra's “knot
intrinsicate” a deliberate amalgam of “intricate” and
“intrinsic,” one that deploys “half a dozen meanings,” or, by contrast, an accidental blend introduced
into the text by a distracted compositor? Is Hamlet's “sallied flesh” an alternative spelling of
“solid,” one that also plays on “sullied,” or, more mundanely, a
typesetting mistake? Does the Duke's “headstrong weedes” in
Measure for Measure
encapsulate some of the play's core themes, or is it an inadvertent and nonsensical
deformation of “headstrong
steeds
”?
[17] We are in general too
hasty, insists M. M. Mahood in
Shakespeare's Wordplay,
in dismissing these and other odd readings as erroneous variants rather than
appreciating them for what they in many instances are: the artful “twists and turns” of a great poet's
mind [
Mahood 1957, 17].
That Mahood feels compelled to devote several pages to the problem of distinguishing
between errors and wordplay in Shakespeare's text is worth lingering over. It
suggests that there is something fundamentally poetic about the changes — or
computations — a text undergoes as it is transmitted through time and
space. This holds true regardless of how we classify those computations, whether as
errors, creative interpolations, or conjectural emendations. It is as if a poem, at
its most self-referential and rhetorical, were recapitulating its own evolution, or
the evolution recapitulating the poem.
To clarify the point, consider the phenomenon of metathesis, the simple transposition
of elements. Metathesis is a law of sound change (historical linguistics), a cipher
device (cryptography), a poetic trope (classical rhetoric), a scribal error (textual
criticism), and a speech error (psycholinguistics). There are entries for metathesis
in both
A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms (a guide to
formal rhetoric) and
A Companion to Classical Texts (a
primer on textual criticism, which includes a typology of scribal error).
[18] The overlaps
between the two reference works are, in fact, considerable, with entries for
epenthesis (the insertion of an element), homeoteleuton (repetition of words with
similar endings) and other basic manipulations common to both. While it would be a
stretch to claim that the lists contained in them are interchangeable, it wouldn't be
much of one. Wordplay, one might conclude, is a poetics of error.
Cognitive evidence supports this view. Clinical experiments, slips of the tongue,
slips of the pen, and the speech and writing disorders of aphasics (those whose
ability to produce and process language has been severely impaired by a brain injury)
all provide insight into the structure and organization of the mental lexicon.
Current research models that lexicon as a web whose connections are both acoustic and
semantic: like-sounding and like-meaning words are either stored or linked together
in the brain [
Aitchison 2003]. These networks of relation make certain
kinds of slips or errors more probable than others. As natural language users, for
example, we sometimes miss a target word when speaking or writing and instead replace
it with one that occupies a nearby node, making substitutions like
profession for
procession or
medication for
meditation relatively common [
Aitchison 2003, 145]. Transpositions like
pasghetti for
spaghetti or blends
like
frowl (
frown plus
scowl) are also legion
and suggest that the unit of production and manipulation is the individual phoneme or
grapheme: discrete, digital, and mobile [
Aitchison 2003, 216]. For
many aphasics, these errors completely overtake normal speech: clip might become
plick; butter, tubber; or leasing, ceiling [
Aitchison 2003, 22].
As Jean Aitchison observes, “the problems of aphasic patients are
simply an exaggeration of the difficulties which normal speakers may
experience”
[
Aitchison 2003, 22]. But what is uncontrollable in the aphasic is deliberate in the poet. “There is a sense in which a great poet or
punster is a human being able to induce and select from a Wernicke
aphasia,” writes George Steiner in
After Babel
[
Steiner 1998, 297]. To which I would add: or from everyday speech
and writing errors.
Steiner’s insight repays further attention. Poets, like artists in general, often
creatively stress-test the system or medium with which they work, probing its edges,
overloading it, and pushing it beyond normal operational capacity. Discovering where
language breaks down or deviates from regular use is the business of both poet and
neuroscientist, providing a means of gaining insight into the mechanisms of language
perception, processing, and production. But whereas the neuroscientist gathers data
from aphasic patients in a clinical setting, the poet becomes, as it were, his own
research subject, artificially manipulating the cognitive networks of meaning and
sound that form his dataset. As Steiner notes, when intentionally created, ordered,
and embedded in larger textual or linguistic structures, such distortions become
poetry.
Divination as Wordplay
The mantic wordplay in Shakespeare's
Cymbeline has
forerunners in divination methods indigenous to cultures as diverse as those of the
Quiché Maya of South America and the Sumerians of the ancient Near East. Mayan
priests still practice a type of calendrical prophecy that involves uttering the
words of a specific date and interpreting their oracle by punning on them [
Tedlock 2000, 263]. Notably, the Quiché term for punning is
sakb'al tzij, “word dice,” which in the
context of Mayan daykeeping makes links among wordplay, divination, and games
explicit [
Tedlock 2000, 263]. Later, we shall examine the kinds of
string metrics that one can apply to puns and textual variants to compute optimal
alignment, edit distance, and edit operations. What these are and why one might want
to compute them are the subjects of another section; for now, it is enough to note
that these algorithms rest on the premise that words and texts change procedurally —
by adhering to the same finite set of legal operations we've previously
discussed.
We can also demonstrate the formalism of divinatory practice by looking at some of
the earliest inscribed prophecies of the ancient Near East, which make extensive use
of the same conditional blocks found in modern computer programs to control the flow
and “output” of the mantic code:
If it rains (zunnu
iznun) on the day (of the feast) of the god of the city — [then] the
god will be (angry) (zeni) with the city. If the bile
bladder is inverted (nahsat) — [then] it is worrying
(nahdat). If the bile bladder is encompassed (kussa) by the fat — [then] it will be cold (kussu).
[Manetti 1993, 10]
The divinatory apparatus consists of an “if” clause (in grammatical terms the
protasis), whose content is an omen; and the “then” clause (the
apodosis), whose content is the oracle. We should be wary about
assuming, as James Franklin does, that the divinatory passage from omen to oracle is
an entirely arbitrary one (“all noise and no laws”
[
Franklin 2001, 162]). As the examples make clear, the passage is allographically motivated, “formed by the possibility of a chain of
associations between elements of the protasis and elements of the
apodosis,”
[
Manetti 1993, 7] specifically a phonemic chain in the examples given above. What we are looking
at, once again, is a
jeux de mots. One word
metamorphoses into another that closely resembles it by crossing from the IF to the
THEN side of the mantic formula.
[19]
The divinatory mechanism may be construed as a program for generating textual
variants: the
baru, the divinatory priest or technician,
inputs the protasis-omen into the system. A finite set of legal operations
(substitution, insertion, deletion, relocation, transposition) is performed on its
linguistic counters, which are then output in their new configuration to the
apodosis-oracle.
[20] Understood algorithmically, the Mesopotamian divinatory code is a
proto-machine language, one that precedes by several millennia Pascal or Java or
C++.
[21]
Textual Criticism as Divination
The allographic operations used to generate a future text in Mesopotamian divination
are formally consonant with those that produce variant readings in an open print or
manuscript tradition. Mesopotamian divination
simulates textual
transmission, by which I mean that it seems to accelerate or exaggerate, as well as
radically compress, a process that would normally occur over centuries or millennia —
and one, moreover, that would in a great many of its particulars occur inadvertently
rather than (as in Mesopotamian divination) deliberately. It is as if we were
watching a text descend to posterity through time-lapse photography. These conceptual
and behavioral associations are visually reinforced by the traditional emblems of the
baru, which consist of a writing tablet and stylus.
[22]
The scholarship on Mesopotamian omen sciences published within the last two decades
suggests that divinatory systems in the ancient Near East exerted profound influence
not only on the content of the literary genres of the ancient world, including the
written record of the Israelites, but also on the interpretive practices of their
exegetes.
[23] The
affinity between Sumerian divination and early textual scholarship of the Hebrew
Bible is expertly established by Michael Fishbane in
Biblical
Interpretation in Ancient Israel, an extraordinary study of the scribal
phenomenon of inner-biblical exegesis. Fishbane writes as follows:
Sometimes these [Mesopotamian
prophecies] are merely playful jeux de mots;
but, just as commonly, there is a concern to guard esoteric knowledge. Among
the techniques used are permutations of syllabic arrangements with obscure and
symbolic puns, secret and obscure readings of signs, and numerological ciphers.
The continuity and similarity of these cuneiform cryptographic techniques with
similar procedures in biblical sources once again emphasizes the variegated and
well-established tradition of mantological exegesis in the ancient Near East —
a tradition which found ancient Israel a productive and innovative tradent
[i.e., transmitter of the received tradition].
[Fishbane 1989]
Fishbane’s work demonstrates through exhaustive research that mantic practice of the
ancient Near East is a crucially important locus for understanding early textual
analysis and emendation of the Hebrew Bible. Our working hypothesis must therefore be
that the connections between these hermeneutic traditions are causal as well as
formal. Historically, then, and contrary to popular belief, prediction has been as
much a part of the knowledge work of the humanities as of the sciences — as much our
disciplinary inheritance as theirs. It is time that we own that legacy rather than
disavow it. We have for some time now outsourced conjecture to the Natural, Physical,
and Computational Sciences. Paradoxically, then, it is only through
interdisciplinarity that we can possibly hope to reclaim disciplinarity.
Trees of History
This section looks at the shared “arboreal habits,” to use Darwin's term [
Darwin 1871, 811], of conjectural critics in three historical
disciplines: textual criticism, evolutionary biology, and historical linguistics.
More than a century after the publication of Darwin's
On the
Origin of Species, which helped popularize the Tree of Life, tree
methodology remains at the center of some of the most ambitious and controversial
conjectural programs of our time, including efforts to reconstruct macrofamilies of
languages, such as Proto-Indo-European, and the Last Universal Common Ancestor
(LUCA), a single-celled organism from which all life putatively sprang.
[24] At the outposts of the biological and
linguistic sciences, conjecture is prospective as well as retrospective: synthetic
biologists and language inventors are known to experiment with modeling future states
of genomes and languages, respectively.
[25]
In an article entitled “Trees of History in Systematics and
Philology,” Robert J. O’Hara, a biologist with impressive interdisciplinary
credentials, draws attention to the presence of “trees of history,” glossed as
“branching diagrams of genealogical
descent and change,” across the disciplines of evolutionary biology,
historical linguistics, and textual criticism. Figures 1, 2, and 3 after O’Hara
reproduce three such trees [
O'Hara and Robinson 1993, 7–17], all published
independently of one another within a forty-year span in the nineteenth-century.
Figure 1 is Darwin’s well-known tree of life from
On the Origin of Species (1859).
Figure 2, the first manuscript stemma ever printed,
diagrams the lines of ancestry and descent among a group of medieval Swedish legal
texts (1827). And
Figure 3 is a genealogy of the Slavic
languages (1853). As an evolutionary biologist — a
systematist to use
the technical term — O’Hara’s interest in “trees of history” stems from his work
in cladistics, a system of classification based on phylogenetic relationships in
evolutionary groups of organisms. Over the last several decades, cladistics has
become a highly sophisticated computer-assisted methodology, one that has outpaced
stemmatics and its linguistic counterpart technically if not conceptually. It is
unsurprising, then, that in addition to satisfying a general theoretical curiosity
about the coincidence of trees of history in three seemingly disparate fields,
O’Hara’s research is also an outreach project. He has, for example, collaborated with
Peter Robinson to produce cladistic analyses of Chaucerian manuscripts [
O'Hara and Robinson 1993, 53–74]. Such outreach has awakened both textual critics
and linguists to the application of bioinformatics to their respective fields. But
while O'Hara triangulates all three historical sciences, the link between textual
scholarship and linguistics receives comparatively less attention than the links each
of them shares with evolutionary biology. It is this third leg of the triangle that I
want first to consider.
The evidence suggesting a direct historical relationship between stemmatics in
textual criticism and the comparative method in linguistics is relatively hard to
come by in the secondary literature, and what little of it there is, is
circumstantial. The English-language textual scholarship has almost nothing to say on
the subject,
[26] although I suspect the situation with respect
to German-language scholarship may be different, and the linguistic and biological
literature for the most part falls in step. Standard accounts of the comparative
method, as the genealogical approach is known in historical linguistics, are more apt
to note the influence of Darwinian principles than textual ones. But a small cadre of
linguists and biologists, following the lead of the late Henry Hoenigswald, have set
about revising what we think we know about tree visualizations in the nineteenth
century.
[27] Hoenigswald, a historical
linguist as well as a historian
of linguistics, has managed to unearth
interesting connections by operating at a granular level of analysis.
[28] He succeeds where
others fail because he has something of a detective mentality about him: his work
demonstrates that to successfully trace the itinerary of ideas, one sometimes has to
be willing to track the movements of the individuals who propagated them. Who knew
who when, where, and under what circumstances? His lesson is that it is useful to
think in terms of coteries and their membership if the objective is to map the spread
of ideas. While other scholars write very generally about the diffusion of the
arboreal trope in the nineteenth century, Hoenigswald — and perhaps we see the
imprint of the genealogical method here — attempts to discover direct lines of
influence.
Any account of the origins of the comparative method in historical linguistics must
take into account the achievements of A. Schleicher (1821-1868), the founding father
of the
Stambaumtheorie, or genealogical tree model, by
which the relations of the variously known IndoEuropean languages were set forth in a
pedigree, and an asterisked hypothetical ancestral form postulated.
Comparative
method is a misnomer to the extent that it suggests comparison is the focal
activity of the method, when in fact it is more like a means to an end. Comparisons
of variants between two or more related languages are undertaken with the purpose of
reconstructing their genealogy and proto-language. While the method
is partially indebted to the Linnean taxonomic classification system, Hoenigswald is
quick to point out a second, perhaps more significant influence: as a student,
Schleicher studied classics under Friedrich Ritschl (1806-1876), who, along with
other nineteenth-century figures such as Karl Lachmann and J. N. Madvig, helped
formalize the science of stemmatology [
Hoenigswald 1963, 5]. The
affinities between textual criticism and historical linguistics are such that very
minor adjustments to the definition of comparative method would produce a textbook
definition of stemmatics:
Comparative method: Comparisons of variants between two or more
related languages are undertaken with the purpose of reconstructing their
genealogy and proto-language.
Stemmatics: Comparisons of variants between two or more related
texts are undertaken with the purpose of reconstructing their genealogy and
archetype.
[29]
Formal Theories
In order to better understand how an unattested text, language, or genome is inferred
from attested forms, I want to briefly look at two competing classes of stemmatic
algorithms: maximum parsimony and clustering. Broadly speaking, clustering or
distance methods compute the overall similarities between manuscript readings,
without regard to whether the similarities are coincidental or inherited,
[30] while maximum parsimony computes the
“shortest” tree containing the least number of change events still capable of
accommodating all the variants. The difference is often expressed in evolutionary
biology as that between a phenetic (clustering) versus a cladistic (parsimonious)
approach. Here is how Arthur Lee distinguishes the two:
Cladistic analysis is sharply differentiated from cluster
analysis by that which it measures. Cluster analysis groups the objects being
analysed or classified by how closely they resemble each other in the sum of their
variations, using statistical “distance measures.” Cladistic analysis, on the
other hand, analyses the objects in terms of the evolutionary descent of their
individual variants, choosing the evolutionary tree which requires the smallest
number of changes in the states of all the variants.[31]
In cladistic analyses, the evidentiary gold standard excludes most of the
textual data from consideration: only shared derived readings as opposed to shared
ancestral readings are believed to have probative value. An ancestral reading, or
retention, is any character string inherited without change from an ancestor. A
derived reading, by contrast, is a modification of a reading inherited from the
ancestor, often motivated rather than arbitrary from a paleographic, metrical,
phonological, manual, technological, aesthetic, grammatical, cognitive, or some other
perspective (for example, the
Canterbury Tales scribe
who, when confronted with the metrically deficient line “But tel me, why hidstow with sorwe” in the Wife of Bath's
Prologue, alters “why” to “wherfor” to fill out the meter). When such
readings are contained in two or more manuscripts, they are regarded as potentially
diagnostic. Having made it through this initial round of scrutiny, they are then
subject to a second round of inspections, which will result in exclusions of variants
that have crept into the text via routes not deemed genealogically informative. The
transposition of the
h and the
e of
the when keyed into a computer is a mundane example. So
pedestrian is this error that your word-processing program most likely automatically
corrects it for you when you make it. In the terminology of Don Cameron, it is an
adventitous rather than
indicative error.
[32] The stemmatic challenge is
to screen out the adventitious variants, and successfully identify and use the
indicative variants.
Phenetic or clustering analyses involve the use of a distance metric to determine
degrees of similarity among manuscripts. The Levenshtein Distance algorithm, for
example, named after the Russian scientist who created it, tabulates the number of
primitive operations required to transform one variant into another. We can
illustrate its application with one of the most notorious variants in the
Shakespearean canon. In Hamlet's first soliloquy, we encounter the following lines:
O that this too too sullied flesh would melt,
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew . . .
(1.2.129-30)
The first folio reads “solid flesh,”
while the second quarto has “sallied flesh.”
The Levenshtein or edit distance between them is determined as follows: let
“solid” equal the source reading and “sallied” the target reading. The
first task is to align the words so as to maximize the number of matches between
letters:
[33]
s o - l i - d | | | | s a l l i e d
Sequence alignment, as the method is called, is a form of collation. Identifying all
the pairings helps us compute the minimum number of procedures needed to change one
string into another. A mismatch between letters indicates that a substitution
operation is called for, while a dash signals that a deletion or insertion is
necessary. Three steps get us from source to target: a substitution operation
transforms the “o” of “solid” into the “a” of “sallied”; an
insertion operation supplies the “l” of “sallied”; and another insertion
operation gives us the penultimate “e” in our target variant:
solid — >
salid salid — > sallid sallid — > sallied
A distance of three edit
operations (one substitution and two insertions) thus separates the two character
strings. In clustering, the greater the edit distance between different readings, the
more dissimilar they are assumed to be.
Although heterogeneous in their approach, both clustering and maximum parsimony are
ars combinatoria. That is, both involve making
assumptions about and/or modelling various orders, numbers, combinations, and kinds
of — as well as distances between — primitive operations that collectively account
for all the known variants in a text's transmission history. Both also take entropy
for granted: they assume the depredations of time on texts to be relentless and
non-reversible, with the result that the more temporally remote a descendant is from
an ancestor, the more dissimilar to the ancestor it will be. In terms of our tree
graph, this means that a copy placed proximally to the root is judged more similar to
the archetype than a copy placed distally to the root.
[34]
Conjecture as Wordplay (Redux)
In biology, textual criticism, and historical linguistics, a transformation series
(TS) is an unbroken evolutionary sequence of character states. The changes that a
word or molecular sequence undergoes are cumulative: state A gives rise to state B,
which in turn generates C, and so on. The assumption is that each intermediary node
serves as a bridge between predecessor and successor nodes; state C is a modified
version of B, while D is a derivation of C. The changes build logically on one
another and follow in orderly succession. Consider, for example, a hypothetical (and
admittedly idealized) textual series: head/heal/teal/tell/tall/tail.
[35] Each word differs from the
next by exactly one letter. The transitions are gradual rather than abrupt, striking
a balance between continuity and change. “If we can
discover such a transformation series,” writes H. Don Cameron, “we have strong evidence for the relationship of the
manuscripts” in which the readings occur.
[36]
Those readings might relate to one another in the vertical direction, in which case
the task of the textual critic is to determine their order and polarity:
Conversely, they might relate to one another as leaf nodes in the
horizontal direction,
[37] under which circumstances
the editorial challenge is to infer vertical relationships:
From this diagram, one can reconstruct plausible vertical variants, which
recapitulate the horizontal:
In this graph, each internal node generates two children, one of which
preserves the reading of the parent, the other of which innovates on it. The
innovations, or mutations, collectively constitute the TS and form a single
evolutionary path through the tree.
Both distance and parsimony methods shed light on transformation series. The degree
of difference between two leaf nodes, for example, reflects their degree of
relationship: in our reconstruction,
tail and
tall, which
differ by only one character, share a more recent common ancestor than
tail and
head, which differ by four.
[38] The variants are also ordered so as to minimize the total number of mutations
along the vertical axis, consistent with the principle of parsimony.
Now an admission: the source of the head/heal/teal/tell/tall/tail series is the
nineteenth-century British author and mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better
known by the pseudonym Lewis Carroll, who uses it to illustrate not textual
transmission or biological evolution, but rather a word game of his own invention,
which he called “doublets”
[
Carroll 1992, 39]. Alternately known as “word ladders,”
doublets is played by first designating a start word and end word. The objective is
to progressively transform one into the other, creating legitimate intermediary words
along the way. The player who can accomplish this in the fewest number of steps
wins.
The congruity between doublets and biological evolution is the subject of an
ingenious essay by scientist David Searls, entitled “From
Jabberwocky to Genome: Lewis Carroll and Computational
Biology.”
[39] Searls begins his section on
doublets by quoting the opening lines of Carroll's nonsense poem “Jabberwocky,” famous for its portmanteaux, neologisms, and word puzzles:
Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
“Jabberwocky,” was originally published in
Through the Looking Glass (1871), Carroll's sequel to
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865). In chapter 6, the
character of Humpty Dumpty, who comments at some length on the poem's vocabulary,
interrupts Alice's recitation to observe of the first verse that “there are plenty of hard words there. ‘BRILLIG’ means
four o'clock in the afternoon — the time when you begin BROILING things for
dinner.”
[40]
“Upon hearing this explanation,”
writes Searls, computational biologists “will of course feel an irresistible urge to do something like the
following:”
b r o i l - i n g | | | | | | b r - i l l i - g
[
Searls 2001, 340].
That “something” is sequence alignment, a preliminary step to computing the edit
distance between the two strings and creating an edit transcript specifying the
semiotic operations required to mutate one into the other. “Jabberwocky,” manifests the same metamorphic impulse that would later
guide Carroll's invention of other word games. Of the gradated form of doublets in
particular, Searls remarks that “the notion of the most parsimonious
interconversions among strings of letters is . . . at the basis of many
string-matching and phylogenetic reconstruction algorithms used in
computational biology”
[
Searls 2001, 341] — and, of course, in textual criticism and historical linguistics.
Interestingly, Carroll himself alludes to the resemblance between doublets and
Darwinian evolution in an example that anticipates by more than half a century the
linguistic and scriptural foundations of modern molecular genetics. He satirically
bridges the evolutionary gap between apes and humans with a six-step transformation
series:
APE — > ARE — > ERE — > ERR — > EAR — > MAR — >
MAN
Extending Carroll's experiment to sets of words, Searls reconstructs hypothetical
ancestors for eight leaf nodes:
Here the words at the bottom level are used to infer ancestors, but they might also
be used to project descendants. They support conjectures that converge
backward in time or diverge forward in time.
While Carroll initially conceived of doublets as a game of substitutions, involving
the exchange of one letter for another, he later also admitted transpositions, as in
the third step of the following series:
IRON — > ICON — > COIN — > CORN
— > CORD — > LORD — > LOAD — > LEAD
And although deletions and
insertions were never formally a part of doublet puzzles, they were central to
another game exploring word generation, which Carroll dubbed “Mischmasch.”
[41] Indeed, taken collectively, Carroll's games incorporate the full spectrum of
grammatical operations on strings, almost as if they were intentionally designed to
model patterns of descent with variation in cultural and organic systems.
What should we make of the fact that scientific theories of transmission and
reconstruction can be so effectively illustrated with a parlor game? Recall that a
correspondence between conjecture and wordplay was established earlier in this essay.
There we discovered that a textual critic endeavoring to recover a prior text and a
diviner attempting to decipher an oracle by signs were often united in their reliance
on letter substitutions, puns, anagrams, and other permutational devices. Noting that
the procedures underlying such word games were amenable to algorithmic expression, we
labeled both the textual critic and the prophet who perform them “computers.” At
the same time, we maintained that they were computers of a special sort, proficient
in the semiotic processing of strings rather than the mathematical reckoning of
numbers. Into their ranks we can also admit evolutionary biologists and historical
linguists, for whom the grammatical operability of signs is no less germane.
In a post-industrial, Westernized society, an individual with the proper education
who displays an aptitude for string manipulation might find gainful employment as an
evolutionary biologist or historical linguist or cryptographer. In another milieu,
that same individual might instead be inducted into the ways of the poet or prophet.
The Mayan priest who practices calendrical divination through puns, the Mesopotamian
baru who deciphers oracles through wordplay, and the Shakespearean soothsayer who
interprets auguries by means of substitutive sounds and false etymologies find their
21st-century scientific complement in the figure of the computational biologist.
Searls remarks that Carroll's doublet puzzles reveal “a turn of mind well suited to
methodologies used in modern computational biology.”
[
Searls 2001, 339] This statement has the effect of endowing what might otherwise be seen as an
idle pastime with scientific rigor and purpose. But we could also flip the words
around to observe that the computational methods of the biologist reveal a turn of
mind well suited to wordplay. By thus inverting the language, we begin to see the
poet in the scientist as well as the scientist in the poet. The contention of this
poet-scientist is that all living things evolve through combinatorial play. The Book
of Life, it would seem, is a volume of poetry, a dictionary of wordplay, and a
compendium of oracles all bound together.
Coda
In this essay I have tried to advance the proposition that conjectural knowledge in
the humanities is a manifestation of the inalienable human need to imagine what might
have been or could be or almost was. This mandate of the subjunctive is beautifully
conveyed by George Steiner in
After Babel:
It is the constructive powers of
language to conceptualize the world which have been crucial to man's survival
in the face of ineluctable biological constraints, this is to say in the face
of death. It is the miraculous — I do not retract the term — capacity of
grammars to generate counter-factuals, “if”-propositions and, above all,
future tenses, which have empowered our species to hope, to reach far beyond
the extinction of the individual. We endure, we endure creatively due to our
imperative ability to say “No” to reality, to build fictions of alterity,
of dreamt or willed or awaited “otherness” for our consciousness to
inhabit.
[Steiner 1998, xiii–xiv]
For Steiner, that “imperative ability”
is more than a psychological or linguistic impulse; more, even, than a creative or
ethical force; it is also a life instinct.
In the course of this work I have also tried to show that algorithms on strings —
vital to conjecture — are as computationally sound as algorithms on numbers. We are
so accustomed to thinking that punsters and textual critics somewhat imprecisely
reshuffle symbols, whereas mathematicians and engineers methodically calculate them
that it will perhaps take a class of scientists who process strings rather than
numbers to convince us otherwise. We have looked at just such a group of
professionals, computational biologists, whose work on the chemical “letters” of
DNA resembles nothing so much as the parlor game of doublets or word ladders. And yet
this form of wordplay is couched in the language of computation rather than poetry,
vetted by biologists rather than poets or literary scholars, and published in
scientific journals rather than poetry rags or literary monographs. Perhaps most
significantly, the similarities between the methods of the computational biologist
and the textual scholar — like those between the soothsayer and textual scholar — are
not coincidental, but causal and historical.
One of my primary objectives has been to dispute the commonplace assumption that the
inner workings of conjecture are ineffable and opaque. R. J. Tarrant, for example,
writes that “conjectural criticism advances slowly
and unsteadily,” proceeding at a “glacial
pace” and is not amenable to “discussion of methods and trends”
[
Tarrant, 121]. Remarks of this sort are scattered throughout the literature of textual
scholarship: E. J. Kenney and Martin West profess similar sentiments, as does F. W.
Hall, who remarks that, traditionally, conjecture “proceeds from no method and conveys no
certainty”
[
Hall 1913, 151]. My position, by contrast, has been that conjectural knowledge is produced in
more determinate ways than is customarily acknowledged, which is to say through not
only (or necessarily) the statistical processing of discrete symbols, but also their
grammatical or semiotic processing. Stated more generally, there are reciprocal
relations among conjecture, computation, and semiotics. This essay, then, has been
written with the conviction that a cogent theory of conjecture is a desideratum of
textual studies.
But what about conjectural methods in humanistic fields other than textual studies
and linguistics that don't rely on systems of inheritance and variation? Take
history, for instance, where the historical imaginary is our predominant tool for
filling in the missing details of the past; or digital preservation, where the
archivist must designate a primary user community for the cultural objects she
preserves. By projecting the knowledge base of this user group into the future, the
archivist makes decisions about what kind of descriptive metadata and contextual
information to include in order to “render the object
intelligible” to posterity.
[42]
If she misjudges the needs and attributes of this community — if her conjectural
faculties falter — then the archive may be less meaningful, accessible, or useful
than it would otherwise be. Are these two forms of conjecture so very different,
either from each other or from those already described, as to generally make
comparisons between them baseless? Or is it possible to create an integrated research
narrative capable of accommodating a variety of conjectural projects, perhaps through
recourse to a sophisticated typology of conjecture?
My own hunch is that there are deep structures common to many types of conjecture and
new methods available to others that await discovery and experimentation. Our success
in identifying and exploiting them, however, will depend in no small measure on how
committed the digital humanities community is in coming years to building an
information infrastructure that supports new models of scholarly communication and
research. Patrick Juola, a computational linguist at Duquesne University, for
example, is currently developing a prototype system for exploring corpus-based
approaches to conjecture in the humanities. As Juola explains, his idea is to program
the computer “to make essentially random emendations
to texts and then rank them for plausibility using a set of agreed-upon
criteria,” the underlying assumption being that the machine “is capable of devising and examining many more
possible readings than even the most prolific human author, and even if 99.9%
of the possible readings are flat gibberish, the one in a thousand may include
interesting and provocative readings that human authors have missed”
(Patrick Juola, email to the author, 3 Oct. 2008.) Noting that this data-driven approach can be extended in a variety of ways,
Juola emphasizes the versatility of the comparative framework he is proposing:
I could equally compare American and British
literature, or 19th and 20th century literature, or first-person and
third-person novels, or any other interesting category. Essentially, what the
prototype I envision will do is generate (and test superficially) random
conjectures like [Works in Category 1] use [Semantic category
B] more than [Works in Category 2].
(Juola, email to the author, 3 Oct. 2008.)
The promise of Juola's corpus-based conjectural criticism, however, is predicated on
the kind of mass digitization from which humanities researchers, as Christine Borgman
emphasizes in
Scholarship in the Digital Age, have thus
far benefited very little, at least as compared to their scientific colleagues.
[43] The
data content layer, moreover, lacks the infrastructural support that
libraries, institutions, and publishers have traditionally provided for the
document content layer.
[44] The problem is
exacerbated in the humanities by the fact that the distinction between data and
publications (or data and documents) is fuzzy to begin with [
Borgman 2007, 219]. If we can create the kind of institutional
incentives recommended by Borgman to develop, manage, and curate the data content
layer, then perhaps a new practice of conjecture will follow.
Acknowledgments
I would like to express my gratitude to the following friends, colleagues, and
mentors for the substantive feedback they provided on earlier versions of this work:
Morris Eaves, Kenneth Gross, Matthew Kirschenbaum, Julia Flanders, Alan Liu, and
Katie King. Their judicious comments and ideas enriched my thinking about the project
and formed the basis for my revisions. I am also indebted to the anonymous readers
for DHQ whose detailed suggestions helped strengthen the essay.
Notes
[1]
[Ramsay 2008], [Ramsay 2003]. Both essays are part of a
larger book project that will be published by University of Illinois Press as part of
its Topics in the Digital Humanities series. [3] As a response to the widely held belief that textual criticism and
bibliography are technical rather than hermeneutic disciplines, Jerome Mcgann
has forcefully argued that creating a critical edition is a fundamentally
interpretive endeavor. See [Mcgann 1991]. [4] By “string,” I mean a sequence of
non-numeric symbols, such as letters. The term, which derives from computer science,
is explained below.
[5] As discussed earlier, Ramsay identifies and analyzes these objections
in [Ramsay 2003] and [Ramsay 2008], passim.
[6] While this is apparently a genuine conjecture of Housman's, I am
relying on the dramatic exposition of it in [Stoppard 1997, 37–8]. [7] Pages 4-5 intermittently incorporate prose I originally
drafted for an essay co-authored with Matthew Kirschenbaum in 2000 entitled “Outside the Archive,” portions of which were delivered at
the Bibliography and the Internet panel, MLA Convention, Marriott Hotel,
Washington D. C., 29 Dec. 2000. Several of the themes of this essay intersect with
those explored in the earlier paper, which I have cited where appropriate. For a
published version of these remarks, see [Kraus 2002]. [9]
[Manetti 1993, 117] To the extent that it implies specifically
human inference, “cognitive” is a misleading word choice. The inferential
leap may be either biological or artificial (with “artificial” understood as
“computational,”
“mechanical” or “automated”). [10] Not all computers, however,
are digital. The slide rule, for example, is a manually operated analog computer,
whereas the abacus is digital. The electronic analog computer, originally
developed for military, meteorological, and industrial applications, represents
information in voltages that vary continuously rather than discretely. Mechanical
analog machines known as differential analyzers were used to solve equations well
into the 1960s before being superceded by the von Neumann stored program model. It
was the speed, versatility, and (especially) accuracy of digital computers that
enabled them to eventually overtake their analog predecessors.
[12] Duthie is quoted at length in [McLeod 1983, 192–93n22]. [13] Not to mention fundamentally
postmodern. With their profusion of puns, ambiguity, and double-coded meanings,
Duthie's conjectures exhibit some of the defining traits of literary postmodernism
(if we were to transplant them onto the pages of Joyce's Finnegan's Wake or Pynchon's Gravity's
Rainbow, would the results be so very discordant?). There is, more
generally, something in the play of conjectural signification that resembles
poststructuralist theories of language: each word reverberates with the traces of
other words, and it is the promise of these other words that drives the
conjectural project.
[14] Note the aptonym: “love of sound.”
[16] Bentley n.pag.
[19] This process is grounded not in logical or
empirical relationships, as A. L. Oppenheim makes clear, but in psycholinguistic
principles, both phonological and semantic in character.
Only exceptionally are we able to
detect any logical relationship between portent and prediction, although
often we find paronomastic associations and secondary computations based on
changes in directions of numbers. In many cases, subconscious association
seems to have been at work, provoked by certain words whose specific
connotations imparted to them a favourable or an unfavourable character,
which in turn determined the general nature of the prediction.
[Oppenheim 1964, 211]
[20] While the control syntax here is relatively simple, the
branching structures of Mesopotamian prophecies were often quite complex. They
have a metaphoric affinity with control structures in computer programming. For
example, the following are actual Mesopotamian omens and oracles to which I've
affixed programming commands: IF, on the Threshold of the Door of the Palace, on
the right there is a slit — [THEN . . . ]; ELSEIF, on the Threshold of the Door of
the Palace, on the right, there is a length-wise slit — [THEN . . . ]; ELSEIF, on
the Threshold of the Door of the Palace, on the left, there is a slit — [THEN . .
. ]; ELSEIF, on the Threshold of the Door of the Palace, on the left, there is a
lengthwise slit — [THEN . . . ]; ELSEIF, in the middle of the Door of the Palace,
there is a slit — [THEN. . . ]; ENDIF; Manetti analyzes the foregoing sequence of
clauses as follows:
As may be seen, all the protases are
constructed according to a structural principle of binary opposition between
the |Threshold| and |the middle| of the Door of the Palace, between |right|
and |left|, between |slit| and |lengthwise slit|. It is thus the system
itself, understood in an ante litteram structural sense, which has prime
importance. The cases which have been observed in the past are no longer the
only ones registered, but rather all possible, conceivable cases are laid
out according to a system based on oppositions and abstract rules.
[Manetti 1993, 11]
[21] There is a question of nomenclature here. I am aware that within tech
circles, Java, Pascal, and C++ would be denoted high-level programming languages
rather than machine languages. The latter term is reserved for low-level code
legible only to the computer. By contrast, a high-level programming language is
legible to humans and must be compiled into machine language before the computer
can process it. Nonetheless, this narrow definition exists alongside a broader
one, which copposes “machine” or “artificial” language to “natural”
or “human” language, in this way distinguishing Pascal or C++ or Java from
Italian or English or Chinese. It is this more generic sense of the term that I'm
drawing on here. The fact that so-called machine or artificial languages in the
broader sense are almost always written in English adds a further layer of
cultural, technological, and linguistic complexity to these various
discriminations.
[25] While my goal in this section to draw
parallels among biogenetics, textual criticism, and historical linguistics, I am
also sensitive to potential conflicts in their aims or intentions that deserve
more attention than I can afford to give them here. One of my aspirations in
publishing this article is to raise awareness of and interest in conjecture in the
digital humanities. But I am less sanguine about the role it might play in
biogenetics, where the potential for abuse of the conjectural ethos is so great.
Take, for example, the sub-discipline of synthetic biology, or “making creatures from scratch,”
which is discussed in [Woolfson 2005]. On the reconstructive
possibilities of this emerging discipline, Woolfson muses that “it might be possible to re-create the
elusive ancestor of all human life on Earth, a hypothetical organism known as
LUCA, or the ‘least universal common ancestor’
” since “the remnants of LUCA
should be scattered across the genomes of all living things.” He goes so
far as to entertain the possibility of bringing LUCA “back to life.” It is for this reason that the
material difference between texts and bodies needs to be continually acknowledged.
Otherwise we risk glib pronouncements that fail to take into account what is at
stake in asserting only their likeness. For discussion of the origins and limits
of the analogy between genetic and textual (or informational) code, see [Thacker 2004] and [Kay 2000]. [26] Since first drafting this essay, I have been made aware that
Sebastiano Timpanaro's seminal monograph on the German classicist Karl Lachmann
has been translated from its original Italian into English by Glenn W. Most under
the title The Genesis of Lachmann's Method. The book
includes an informative chapter on the crosscurrents between textual criticism and
linguistics in the nineteenth century, which builds on the earlier work of Henry
Hoenigswald, discussed below.
[29] One could formulate a parallel definition for phylogenetics:
comparisons of characters between two or more related taxa are undertaken
with the purpose of reconstructing their genealogy and archetype. Until
recently, however, many scholars would have inserted a full stop after
“genealogy.” Less than two decades ago, for example, H. Don Cameron
insisted that “For the zoologist the
reconstructed ancestor is a fiction. It is a convenient way of presenting
the organized information about the relationships of the real animals in
question. Nobody tries to reconstruct a living, breathing theocodont or
the protodipteron.” He contrasted these attitudes and beliefs with
those in textual criticism, where the reconstructed text is “the real article, in a literal
sense the text that Euripides wrote. Reconstruction is a serious
business, and the only point of studying manuscripts at all”
[Cameron, 239]. On the contrary, reconstruction has been a desideratum of
evolutionary biology from the start: one encounters a conjectural ethos in
Darwin's Descent of Man and in the writings of, for example, Thomas Huxley,
the eminent Victorian biologist and staunch defender of Darwin's model of
evolution. The ethos has always been there, the methodology has not; or
rather, the methodology has been hobbled by the lack of a clear unit of
comparison and conjecture. But whereas conjectural criticism in recent
decades has experienced a downtick in popularity in textual studies, the
reverse is true in evolutionary and synthetic biology, where allographic
methods have taken hold. With DNA and protein sequences — digital, discrete,
and abstract — now firmly established as the clear units of conjectural
analysis in evolutionary biology, the reconstructive paradigm has begun to
flourish. [30] In
phylogenetics, this difference is expressed as that between so-called homoplastic
characters and homologous characters.
[31] Qtd. in [Salemans 1996, 44]. This volume testifies to the distinctly
Scandinavian flavor of much new work in stemmatology. [33] As Julia Flanders has pointed out to me, one could also compute the
edit distance between phonological (rather than orthographical) representations of
the words.
[34] Although I do not take up
the question of the distinction between networks and trees in this article, a
fuller exposition of the stemmatic method would need to discuss the issue of
conflated texts, which incorporate readings from two or more manuscripts. While
tree models cannot accommodate such texts, networks can.
[37] Unlike interior nodes in a tree, which have both ancestors
and descendants, leaf nodes have only ancestors.
[38] Although both
head and tail have the letter "a" in common, it occupies a different position in
each word and thus doesn't count as a “match.”
[43]
[Borgman 2007, 214–5]. Borgman also notes that “generally speaking, the humanities are
more interpretive than data-driven,” with digital humanists being one
obvious exception [Borgman 2007, 213]. [44] Borgman 225.
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