Towards Automatic Variant Analysis of Ancient Devotional Texts
We address in this paper the issue of text reuse in liturgical manuscripts of the middle ages. More specifically, we study variant readings of the Obsecro Te prayer, part of the devotional Books of Hours often used by Christians as guidance for their daily prayers. We aim at automatically extracting and categorising pairs of words and expressions that exhibit variant relations. For this purpose, we adopt a linguistic classification that allows to better characterize the variants than edit operations. Then, we study the evolution of Obsecro Te texts from a temporal and geographical axis. Finally, we contrast several unsupervised state-of-the-art approaches for the automatic extraction of Obsecro Te variants. Based on the manual observation of 772 Obsecro Te copies which show more than 21,000 variants, we show that the proposed methodology is helpful for an automatic study of variants and may serve as basis to analyze and to depict useful information from devotional texts.
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