Parallel Glosses, Shared Glosses, and Gloss Clustering: Can Network-Based Approach Help Us to Understand Organic Corpora of Glosses?

TY - JOUR

T1 - Parallel Glosses, Shared Glosses, and Gloss Clustering

T2 - Can Network-Based Approach Help Us to Understand Organic Corpora of Glosses?

AU - Steinova, Evina

PY - 2023/11/9

Y1 - 2023/11/9

N2 - Glossing was an important element of medieval western manuscript culture. However, glosses are notoriously difficult to analyze because of their triviality, fluid nature, heterogeneity of origin, complex transmission histories, and anonymity. Traditional scholarly approaches such as close reading and the genealogical method often do not produce satisfactory results, especially in the case of gloss corpora that are highly organic, i.e., display the traits listed above to a significant degree. This article outlines a method for analyzing the organic corpora of glosses based on their treatment as networks. The theoretical model for the proposed method is the co-occurrence network, a network model in which relationships between entities (nodes) are established based on certain shared properties or constituent elements (edges). In the case of corpora of glosses, glossed manuscripts are assumed as nodes, and the glosses that specific manuscripts have in common constitute the edges between them. Since gloss parallelism can arise through different processes, including randomness, the article describes two strategies that reduce such noise so that the transmission of glosses can be effectively examined. The method is demonstrated on a representative corpus – the early medieval glosses to the first book of the Etymologiae of Isidore of Seville.

AB - Glossing was an important element of medieval western manuscript culture. However, glosses are notoriously difficult to analyze because of their triviality, fluid nature, heterogeneity of origin, complex transmission histories, and anonymity. Traditional scholarly approaches such as close reading and the genealogical method often do not produce satisfactory results, especially in the case of gloss corpora that are highly organic, i.e., display the traits listed above to a significant degree. This article outlines a method for analyzing the organic corpora of glosses based on their treatment as networks. The theoretical model for the proposed method is the co-occurrence network, a network model in which relationships between entities (nodes) are established based on certain shared properties or constituent elements (edges). In the case of corpora of glosses, glossed manuscripts are assumed as nodes, and the glosses that specific manuscripts have in common constitute the edges between them. Since gloss parallelism can arise through different processes, including randomness, the article describes two strategies that reduce such noise so that the transmission of glosses can be effectively examined. The method is demonstrated on a representative corpus – the early medieval glosses to the first book of the Etymologiae of Isidore of Seville.

KW - Middle Ages

KW - medieval studies

KW - medieval book

KW - manuscript studies

KW - manuscript transmission

KW - medieval Latin

KW - palaeography

KW - glossing

KW - medieval annotation

KW - Carolingian manuscripts

KW - Isidore of Seville

KW - network analysis

KW - historical networks

KW - historical network research

KW - computational humanities

KW - data analysis

KW - digital editing

KW - diffusion of innovations

KW - transmission

KW - history

KW - history of knowledge

M3 - Article

SN - 2535-8863

VL - 9

SP - 36

EP - 100

JO - Journal of Historical Network Research

JF - Journal of Historical Network Research

IS - Special Issue

ER -