Noisy medieval data, from digitized manuscript to stylometric analysis: Evaluating Paul Meyer’s hagiographic hypothesis

Jean-Baptiste Camps (1) , Thibault Clérice (2, 3) , Ariane Pinche (4, 5)

1 CJM - Centre Jean Mabillon
2 PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres
3 Lattice - Lattice - Langues, Textes, Traitements informatiques, Cognition - UMR 8094
4 CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
5 CIHAM - Histoire, Archéologie et Littératures des mondes chrétiens et musulmans médiévaux

Stylometric analysis of medieval vernacular texts is still a significant challenge: the importance of scribal variation, be it spelling or more substantial, as well as the variants and errors introduced in the tradition, complicate the task of the would-be stylometrist. Basing the analysis on the study of the copy from a single hand of several texts can partially mitigate these issues (Camps & Cafiero, 2013), but the limited availability of complete diplomatic transcriptions might make this difficult. In this paper, we use a workflow combining handwritten text recognition and stylometric analysis, applied to the case of the hagiographic works contained in MS BnF, fr. 412. We seek to evaluate Paul Meyer's hypothesis about the constitution of groups of hagiographic works, as well as to examine potential authorial groupings in a vastly anonymous corpus.

Mots clés: Stylometry; Digital humanities; Medieval French Literature; Romance Philology; Hagiography

Mots clés: Stylométrie; humanités numériques; Littérature médiévale; Philologie romane; Hagiographie; Sciences humaines computationnelles

Domaines: Histoire; Littératures

Jean-Baptiste Camps, Thibault Clérice, Ariane Pinche. Noisy medieval data, from digitized manuscript to stylometric analysis: Evaluating Paul Meyer’s hagiographic hypothesis. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 2021, 36 (Supplement 2), pp.ii49-ii71. ⟨10.1093/llc/fqab033⟩. ⟨halshs-03044086v2⟩