I thought some might be interested:
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Kluge Lecture
Date: Mon, 24 Sep 2012 11:44:08 -0400
From: Hessler, John W <[log in to unmask]>
To: Hessler, John W <[log in to unmask]>
Colleagues and Friends,
Just wanted to let you know that I will be giving my final Kluge
Fellowship Lecture on September 27th at 4 PM in LJ-119 of the Library of
Congress. The lecture will be entitled:
*Chasing Krüger’s Dream:
**Studying the Transmission of Classical and Medieval Manuscripts Using
Lattice Theory and Information Entropy***
http://www.loc.gov/loc/kluge/news/index.html#sep27
*_Abstract_*
**
*How accurately have culturally fundamental texts from literature, law,
science, geography, and philosophy been handed down from ancient Rome
and Greece to the present by way of scribal copying in the Middle Ages?
This fundamental question of how various manuscripts from a textual
tradition have been transmitted through space and time has been the
concern of scholars since at least the founding of the great Library of
Alexandria in the third century BC. *
**
*Early Medieval scribes recognized that in the process of copying
ancient texts mistakes were made, and that these errors became part of
the textual tradition, to be passed on through history. They also
realized that this process of copying error had a random or chaotic
nature, and so they invented the demon /Tutivillus/, whom they
considered to be the error's source. Throughout the Renaissance
scholars, like Erasmus, battled this demon in their attempts to
re-construct important Latin and Greek manuscripts descended from
antiquity. Later in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries scholars,
like Karl Lachmann and Paul Krüger, tried to systematize a method in
order to determine which parts of medieval manuscripts were errors, and
which were the real readings descended from the original authors.*
**
*This paper will highlight a new computational technique to show how
modern digital philology is changing the way we think of the
transmission of medieval manuscripts through space and time, and is also
helping to solve this seemingly simple, but unfortunately, rather
complicated problem. Using the notes of the classical philologist Paul
Krüger, whose manuscripts were recently rediscovered in the Law Library
of Congress, complex three dimensional visualization techniques will be
used to show how the medieval manuscripts making up the /Codex/ of
Justinian are spatially and temporally related to each other. This talk
will also highlight how these new techniques give scholars the tools to
postulate what the structure of missing and destroyed manuscripts might
have been. Using these methods, based in lattice theory and information
entropy, this paper can be seen as a case study in how digital and
computational algorithms are changing the face of even the most
traditional of the humanities, classical philology.*
The results of this study and my year long Kluge Fellowship will be
published in the book called, */Roman Law in Ruins: a Computational
Study of the Medieval Transmission of Justinian's /Codex/"/*/. /This has
been made possible through a generous grant from the American Academy in
Rome and it will be published copyright free both in hardcover and on
the web by Franz-Steiner Verlag (Berlin) in February, 2014 as part of
their Alte Geschichte Monograph Series.
Hope to see you at the lecture*/, a reception will follow…../*
John
John Hessler
Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society
Senior Cartographic Reference Specialist
Geography and Map Division
Library of Congress
Lecturer in the History ofScience
Zanvyl Krieger Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
John Hopkins University
Research website: www.warpinghistory.blogspot.com
<http://www.warpinghistory.blogspot.com>
