I have perhaps I should clear some ambiguities. We are not talking about
biblical scholarship. We are talking about genetic manuscripts and about one
of the central works of German literature, Gritus Faust. It's a centerpiece
of the Alphas' love work and it's also cornerstone of world literature and
Gritus Faust is well known to readers and to scholars as well. But that
doesn't hold for the rest of manuscripts and this is all the more
surprising because Grita worked on this on his drama over the whole time of his
lifespan from 1775 until 1832 from when he was 24 until he was 82 and so there
is a lot of archival material extant. It's about 500 manuscripts summing up
to 2,300 pages and the last critical edition to date is from 1887. It's more
than a hundred years ago and currently there is a new edition being prepared.
The digital Faust edition where Moritz, Bissenbach and I are at present working.
One of the problems of a post by the Faust manuscripts is the fact that not
all of the manuscripts are actually dated. There are very few manuscripts
who actually carry a date so the task of the scholar is to assign precise dates
to individual manuscripts or I should say to assign dates as precisely as
possible to individual manuscripts and this by or if there are no dates to be
established we have to establish relations between manuscripts and all
this fortunately there is a lot of scholarship on Gritus Faust but the
greatest bulk of the work still remains to be done. Next slide please.
Dating manuscripts is well as a rather old method but surprisingly there is very little
methodical reflection on it and when you look at the methods of dating or how the
method of dating is being performed you have a 19th century scholar would have
found that all of this is very familiar to him. Basically you need a pen and
writing surface and this might look like this. It's one of my first efforts to
date the last act of Gritus Faust and you may see well you will be thinking
well perhaps paper and two-dimensional diagrams aren't the best
thing to perform with dating procedures.
Evidence for dating manuscript is offered by explicit dates if there are
any which is very seldomly the case. There are material properties the sort
of paper the ink is being used the watermark and so on and there are what
we call external cues which means mentions and diaries, letters, table
talks and so on. If you are so lucky as to be able to assign one mention in a
diary to an individual manuscript which is sometimes very
difficult and so dating can be a very frustrating experience because it's
quite difficult sometimes. And as a fourth point we assume there is some something
like logic of the genetic of the logic of genes if
literary works so there are some rules there's some order which might be found
out. So when we talk about the come using the computer for aiding us in
dating manuscripts what could we mean by that? First we think it could be a tool
for the editors as kind of an update to the methods that they use with a pen and
the paper and the big big piece of paper on the wall. So a tool would first
of all display all the all the manuscripts and try to present them in a
way where you could have an editor could have a starting point to make sense of
the genesis. And then we would also like to make the same tool and available to
the user of our edition so that they could firstly try to try to follow the
argument of the of the editor that had been made explicit and also have the
same tools at the hands to come up with or to or to evaluate the hypotheses that
the editors of the edition have put forth. And so what we need to do is we
need to formalize the practice of dating and we need to we need something
that captures the captures the hypotheses that underlie the reconstructed
Genesis. In order to automatize the process of dating we have to to set up
some new concepts and rules and while I will in the following I will introduce to
you three notions three central basic notions and three rules which we have
devised for our first the first run of our hypothesis and the first notion is
called syntactic precedence and it's quite simple. Considered to inscriptions
or more precisely texts of inscriptions I and J and the definition of
syntactic precedence the texts of inscription I said to syntactical
precede the text of J if J follows I would respect a larger text H containing
both inscriptions. When you look at the picture this is a detail from the last
scene from Faust called Bergschluchen or mountain ravine and the the colored
columns which are automatically generated on the basis of verse numbers
are ordered in columns and you may see at the right hand the the light violet
column you may see the blue the blue column precedes the violet one and so on
this is the notion and the hypothesis of our rule is we assume that if one a text
of an inscription I precedes another inscription J then we assume that I is
Barelio Venge. And since we have transcribed all of the witnesses
and we can automatically generate these kinds of relations and it would look like
this where you can see that there is such a syntactic relation between most
manuscripts although not all for example so this manuscript starts earlier than
this one and this starts earlier than this one but between those you cannot
you do not have that relationship and what is not visible in the graph is that
obviously if this starts earlier than this and this starts earlier than this
then this must also start earlier than this but that would be too many arrows
in this graph so they're not shown so this is the the transitive reduction of
this graph that you can see. The second notion a second relation we talk about
is paradigmatic containment and perhaps it's much easier to understand it
from looking at the figure as a text of an inscription J is said to be
paradigmatic contained by the text of an inscription I if it is contained
within the overall syntactic interval of the verses and it is if it is actual
part of I so this is a notion and we our rule is if some inscription J is if the
text of some inscription J is paradigmatic contained within the text
of some inscription I we assume that J is earlier than I this rule tries to
capture the process of amplification if you have some small portion of
text J and on another manuscript you have some some larger text I then it is
very often the case that I has been written later and has is an
amplification on J the graph to this relation looks like this and you can see
that it looks very different from the other graph and you can see that most
smaller inscriptions on these kind of flow into these big notes at the bottom
which are the two big fair copies of the act which aggregate all the other the
the other inscriptions and the other manuscripts
our third notion is called exclusive containment it's quite similar to
paradigmatic containment but the one difference that's the text of
inscription J is not actually contained by that within the text of inscription I
and our corresponding rule yeah let's get a rule
the rule is precisely the inverse one if J is exclusively contained by I then I
does precede J the reason for this rule is and the fact that many manuscripts
are subsequently subject that there are additions subsequently being made to
prior inscriptions and this is very often the case that some some small
portion of texts is being added to to one a pre-existing manuscripts and this
corresponds to our notion of exclusive containment because the manuscript record
will show often very often manuscripts who will stand in relations like that
sorry I have to correct this graphic a bit this error should be reversed in case you were
wondering so I comes before J I is earlier than J yeah so I apologize
to all these so what we have been talking about
is rules that operate on textual features that are inherent to just the transcribed text
without considering any any other cues but of course for for Faust there has been a lot of
scholarly research and another thing that we do is we take the scholarly research and
and bring it into a format that we can that we can also read in and so this is the graph
of the research that we have recorded so far but it's not complete yet we still have to do some
work on that but this is a graph that for example would say so this inscription is before this
inscription and this is the source and on the edges you can see the the name of the
publication that said it so for example this one comes before that and that was set by Hertz 1932
so another thing that we will also do is we will do our own research and we will also put it in
in the same format and once we have done that we can combine all these things all these relations
in a way that in whatever way we decide so we would say for example of course research is stronger
than than the inferred simply inferred automatically inferred relationships so we value that higher so
it beats the other relations and of course our new research would I hope be even better a bit
than the previous research so if you find out something new it would beat the others
so and then there are also some other things play into it for example the transitivity
in some relations so we have some rules for transitivity so if if A comes before B and B
comes before C obviously A comes before C and then this is what I have already mentioned the
prioritization so they are the symptomatic relationship that we introduced was it would
be the the weakest then would there would be the the containment relationships and then there would
be the explicit relationships that we have taken from research and we can combine them all in a
way that will prioritize and on the edges you can see where it where it came comes from so for
example here there is a relationship pecan and that is drawn a bit more black than the arson
because arson is the weakest and it will over always be overridden by by other by other rules
and finally when we put forth a rule that is a hypothesis basically on genesis and so on the
on the working process of the author if you will we have we can evaluate it against
something that we would consider as established knowledge so that would be the relationships
that we took from research so far and we could evaluate how how good is the assumption that
the author actually works from the front to the back of the work so that lines inscriptions that
contain earlier lines would actually be written before inscriptions that contain letter lines or
scenes of the work and so we have three measures that we can evaluate the these relationship or
the rules with that are coverage which just looks at how much does this rule actually say
and disregarding it if it if it yields us right or wrong results we have something called recall
which has how much of the information that we consider true or established is actually being
do we actually get out of this rule and then we have accuracy which just means of the of
everything this rule yields us how much is true of it and so we can so we so we have this table
and there are the three inferred relations that you that we introduce and here you have these
so you can see for the symptomatic rule it covers a lot of the graph if you look back
you can see that well you can see that it would cover everything so that all the manuscripts are
can be related by this rule but the recall is not very high that means it doesn't yield us a lot of
a lot of what what is actually known about these and the accuracy is also below way below 50 percent
which means it is not a very would suggest it might not be a very good rule to to apply it to this
and then you can see the the pecan and the paradigmatic containment which says about say
something about half of all the relations that are possible in this graph and it has a recall of
43 that means it yields 40 percent of the established true knowledge and it is always
accurate in our case which is you know when you see 100 percent accuracy you will always look for
you know mistakes that you made but i think we have a fairly small set of data so far so that
might actually be right and then we have the econ rule which has a relatively a relatively low
coverage and also a relatively low recall so that means it's a very sparse relation and it doesn't
tell us a lot but it has where it where it tells us something it is accurate accurate in 80 percent
of the cases and so with this simple the hypothesis was that you know the author works from front to
back a bit and so that doesn't yield us a lot so we have just reversed this rule and it yields us
pretty good results i mean it's pretty pretty much a stellar result and we we are a bit
confused by that and we have to look into it and one of the explanations is that these rules are
actually not are actually not independent of each other so because the symptomatic relationship
always only looks at the first line so what this antecedent relationship actually means is that
if an inscription starts with a later line then it was written earlier that's all it says and
a lot of that that is actually a superset of the of the paradigmatic containment so a lot of the
paradigmatic containment placed into this rule so what we will have to do is evaluate also rule sets
together so the individual rules by themselves
it should be taken are related among each other so we have to look at them all and that's our
results so far and we will we will have to refine these rules and and try which rules actually
yield us good results and so on and that's it