You’re Collating Just Fine and Other Lies You’ve Been Telling Yourself

Abstract

Although textual scholars agree that collation is a crucial component of the editing process, it often goes undefined and only briefly explained. This article defines the term, explains different kinds of collation, and explores some of its applications. We emphasize stemmatology and medieval textual traditions. By drawing from editorial examples and the theoretical frameworks of projects centred on works such as the Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde, Dante’s Commedia and the Greek New Testament, the article seeks to compare manual and computer-assisted approaches to collation methods. We delineate the scope of this activity and argue that computer-assisted collation minimizes the risk of missing out on relevant data. We examine the advantages of full-text collation over sample collation and conclude that no decisions about stemmatically significant variation can be made a priory and that variant distribution is the major factor weighing on significance.

3 | 1 | 2022 [re]constructions

“…Is an edition conceived in this way in fact just a "born-digital printed edition", as Bordalejo describes the Editio Critica Maior of the Greek New Testament (Bordalejo, Vázquez 2021, § 52, referring to Bordalejo 2013)? Does the print heritage of a data model preclude new ways of thinking about critical editing and editions?…”

Well-Behaved Variants Seldom Make the Apparatus: Stemmata and Apparatus in Digital Research

“…This double tree structure allows us to retrieve the first line of the first folio in the Hengwrt manuscript or the first line of Chaucer's (1996) Canterbury Tales. §7 As explained in a separate article (Bordalejo and Vázquez 2021), the Collation Editor (Smith 2019) allows textual scholars to fine-tune the processes of regularization and alignment to produce precise collations that become the bases of other analyses and of the apparatus for the project's editions. XML apparatus structure §10 Each word (a token in CollateX language) is assigned an even number; thus, 2, 4, 6, etc., leaving the uneven numbers free for use with supplemental text not present in the base text for collation.…”

“…It shows how by using a system integrating different analytical resources, specialized research tools become more accessible to scholars without the need for a background in computing. §2 The article on collation, co-authored with Adam Vázquez discusses what it means to collate, describes the full-text collations produced by the Canterbury Tales Project, and explains how collating in this manner presents multiple advantages over other approaches to the comparison of texts (Bordalejo and Vázquez 2021).…”

“…capable in principle of showing multiple affiliations. (Howe, Connolly, and Windram 2012, 56) §23 The ability to comprehensive handle data is one of the most significant aspects of the use of this software, because of the computer's capacity to accurately record the enormous amounts of data derived from a single textual tradition (for a comparison between manual and computer-assisted methods, seeBordalejo and Vázquez 2021).And yet, the open possibility of continued testing of different approaches (including different models of phylogenetic inference) cannot be underestimated. Through the years, the Canterbury Tales Project researchers have done precisely this by employing multiple methods with the same dataset.…”