Measuring Manuscripts: Quantitative Approaches to Ancient Language and Script
Instructors:
Christian Casey
Duration: both weeks
This two-week workshop introduces participants to computational philology through hands-on work with manuscripts, text corpora, and digital tools. The course begins with traditional philological methods—textual criticism, paleography, orthography, and phonology—and then shows how these practices can be structured, modeled, and analyzed using accessible computational techniques. Participants will learn how to build small digital corpora, align textual variants, generate concordances and word lists, and encode script and linguistic data in structured formats. The workshop introduces basic quantitative approaches such as frequency analysis, diachronic comparison, simple statistical correlation, and exploratory visualization (including clustering and dimensionality reduction). Students will also explore how sound data, script data, and textual data can be treated as analyzable datasets. Throughout the course, each participant develops a small individual project based on one method covered in class (e.g., a concordance, variant alignment, paleographic clustering visualization, diachronic frequency comparison, or phonological analysis). In the final sessions, students publish their project online using lightweight, sustainable infrastructure. No prior programming experience is required. By the end of the workshop, participants will have designed, implemented, and publicly shared a small born-digital philological project grounded in structured data and computational analysis.