Recent developments in New Testament textual criticism

This is a preprint version of an article published in Early Christianity 2.2 (2011). \ud \ud The article provides an overview of recent developments in New Testament Textual Criticism. The four sections cover editions, manuscripts, citational evidence and methodology. Particular attention is paid to the Editio Critica Maior, the development of electronic resources, newly discovered manuscripts, and the Coherence Based Genealogical Method

Phylomemetics—Evolutionary Analysis beyond the Gene

Genes are propagated by error-prone copying, and the resulting variation provides the basis for phylogenetic reconstruction of evolutionary relationships. Horizontal gene transfer may be superimposed on a tree-like evolutionary pattern, with some relationships better depicted as networks. The copying of manuscripts by scribes is very similar to the replication of genes, and phylogenetic inference programs can be used directly for reconstructing the copying history of different versions of a manuscript text. Phylogenetic methods have also been used for some time to analyse the evolution of languages and the development of physical cultural artefacts. These studies can help to answer a range of anthropological questions. We propose the adoption of the term “phylomemetics” for phylogenetic analysis of reproducing non-genetic elements

Biclustering Readings and Manuscripts via Non-negative Matrix Factorization, with Application to the Text of Jude

The text-critical practice of grouping witnesses into families or texttypes often faces two obstacles: the methodological question of how exactly to isolate the groups, given the chicken-and-egg relationship between “good” group readings and “good” group manuscripts, and contamination in the manuscript tradition. I introduce non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) as a simple, automated, and efficient solution to both problems. Within minutes, NMF can cluster hundreds of manuscripts and readings simultaneously, producing an output that details potential contamination according to an easy-to-interpret mixture model. I apply this method to Wasserman’s extensive collation of the Epistle of Jude, showing that the resulting clusters correspond to human-identified textual families and their characteristic readings ccorrectly divide witnesses into their groups. Due to its demonstrated accuracy, versatility, and speed, NMF could replace prior state-of-the-art classification methods and find fruitful application in a number of text-critical settings

An analysis of the coherence-based genealogical method using phylogenetics

The Novum Testamentum Graecum: Editio Critica Maior is the first major critical edition of the New Testament for a century, aiming to document the New Testament’s textual history through its first millennium. To date, two of the six volumes have been published. As part of this project the Institut für neutestamentliche Textforschung in Münster has developed the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method (CBGM), a computer-aided method designed to handle complete sets of textual evidence and to identify their initial text and textual history. The CBGM is widely held to be difficult to understand and its results are treated with scepticism. Phylogenetics is the study of relationships between groups of organisms and their evolutionary history. Phylogenetics and the CBGM (and wider textual criticism) have many commonalities. This thesis provides a thorough examination of the CBGM using phylogenetics. Part One documents the literature surrounding the CBGM and includes a worked example of the process. Part Two explores the ECM data for John’s Gospel and identifies appropriate methods for applying phylogenetics to it. Part Three compares the results of phylogenetics and the CBGM. It concludes that the CBGM is producing valid results from the data, but could be improved in a number of ways

Software for the collaborative editing of the Greek new testament

This project was responsible for developing the Virtual Manuscript Room Collaborative Research Environment (VMR CRE), which offers a facility for the critical editing workflow from raw data collection, through processing, to publication, within an open and online collaborative framework for the Institut für Neutestamentliche Textforschung (INTF) and their global partners while editing the Editio Critica Maior (ECM)-- the paramount critical edition of the Greek New Testament which analyses over 5600 Greek witnesses and includes a comprehensive apparatus of chosen manuscripts, weighted by quotations and early translations. Additionally, this project produced the first digital edition of the ECM. This case study, transitioning the workflow at the INTF to an online collaborative research environment, seeks to convey successful methods and lessons learned through describing a professional software engineer’s foray into the world of academic digital humanities. It compares development roles and practices in the software industry with the academic environment and offers insights to how this software engineer found a software team therein, suggests how a fledgling online community can successfully achieve critical mass, provides an outsider’s perspective on what a digital critical scholarly edition might be, and hopes to offer useful software, datasets, and a thriving online community for manuscript researchers

Four Kingdom Motifs before and beyond the Book of Daniel

The four kingdoms motif enabled writers of various cultures, times, and places, to periodize history as the staged succession of empires barrelling towards an utopian age. The motif provided order to lived experiences under empire (the present), in view of ancestral traditions and cultural heritage (the past), and inspired outlooks assuring hope, deliverance, and restoration (the future). Four Kingdom Motifs before and beyond the Book of Daniel includes thirteen essays that explore the reach and redeployment of the motif in classical and ancient Near Eastern writings, Jewish and Christian scriptures, texts among the Dead Sea Scrolls, Apocrypha and pseudepigrapha, depictions in European architecture and cartography, as well as patristic, rabbinic, Islamic, and African writings from antiquity through the Mediaeval eras. Readership: Advanced students and scholars of the textual formation, apocalyptic theology, and historiographies of the book of Daniel and its diverse reception by writers and communities

The Object of Platform Studies: Relational Materialities and the Social Platform (the case of the Nintendo Wii)

Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System,by Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort, inaugurated thePlatform Studies series at MIT Press in 2009.We’ve coauthored a new book in the series, Codename: Revolution: the Nintendo Wii Video Game Console. Platform studies is a quintessentially Digital Humanities approach, since it’s explicitly focused on the interrelationship of computing and cultural expression. According to the series preface, the goal of platform studies is “to consider the lowest level of computing systems and to understand how these systems relate to culture and creativity.”In practice, this involves paying close attentionto specific hardware and software interactions--to the vertical relationships between a platform’s multilayered materialities (Hayles; Kirschenbaum),from transistors to code to cultural reception. Any given act of platform-studies analysis may focus for example on the relationship between the chipset and the OS, or between the graphics processor and display parameters or game developers’ designs.In computing terms, platform is an abstraction(Bogost and Montfort), a pragmatic frame placed around whatever hardware-and-software configuration is required in order to build or run certain specificapplications (including creative works). The object of platform studies is thus a shifting series of possibility spaces, any number of dynamic thresholds between discrete levels of a system

Nearly Perfect: Notes on the Failures of Salvage Linguistics

This dissertation examines the salvage era of American linguistics (c.19101940) and its focus on the extraction of knowledges and cultural artifacts from Indigenous groups whose civilizations were believed in peril. Through close readings of historical archives and published materials, I imbricate the history of these scientific collection practices through the interpretive frames of Science & Technology Studies (STS), deconstructive criticism, and postcolonial theory. I centre the project on the career of linguist-anthropologist Edward Sapir, seizing upon his belief that linguistics was more nearly perfect than other human sciencesthat linguistic methods were more akin to those of the natural sciences or formal mathematics. I employ Sapir as the chief focalizer of my work to map the changing topography of the language sciences in North America over these pivotal decades of disciplinary formation. Failure, here, offers a heuristic device to interrogate the linear logics of science and success which buttress that desire for perfection. Both conceptually and historically, the dialectics of failure and success throw into relief the vicissitudes of fieldwork, the uncertainty of patronage relationships, and the untenable promise of salvage that characterized these years. Through this approach, I present linguistics instead as a kairotic sciencefrom the Greek kairos, suggesting opportunitynot perfect, but situated vividly in the world, bound by space, identity, and time. I examine how linguists conducted their collection work through the extension of a scientific network (Chapter 1), their construction of a scientific identity to the gradual exclusion of amateurs and the reduction of informant contributions (Chapter 2), and the development of an experimental system within the temporalities of fieldwork (Chapter 3). My dissertation hence invites a critical intervention within the history linguistics to re-encounter the sciences disregarded past and re-think its shared responsibility toward Indigenous communities in the present

Approaching Methodology

Peer reviewe