A New Method in Establishing Quantitative Relationships Between Manuscripts of the New Testament

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Abstract

New Testament textual critics have for decades calculated the similarities between the manuscripts in a similar manner, using collations and variation units. This conventional methodology requires enormous amounts of time and manual work. Here is proposed a new method that does not require these preprocessing steps, enabling the establishment of quantitative relationships using manuscript transcriptions only. This is achieved by applying a technique called shingling, where the manuscript transcriptions are turned in a computerized manner into smaller pieces called tokens or k-grams. Then, a string metric is used to calculate the similarities between the tokenized strings. This method is efficient, meaning that it allows critics to consider all textual evidence in each manuscript tradition. At the same time, it returns similarity values that are compatible with those of conventional approaches.

Original languageEnglish
JournalDigital Scholarship in the Humanities
Volume38
Issue number1
Pages (from-to)151-166
Number of pages16
ISSN2055-7671
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 3 Apr 2023
MoE publication typeA1 Journal article-refereed

Fields of Science

  • 614 Theology
  • 113 Computer and information sciences

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