PROJECT LostMA

LostMA is a project funded by the European Research Council, as a StartingGrant, for the period 2024-2029.

LOSTMA aims at understanding how human cultures are constituted andevolve, through the question of the transmission of written cultural artefacts.

The project strives to establish in what measure the transmission (andsubsequent preservation or loss) of written artefacts, texts and ideas deviatesfrom pure chance, and, if it deviates, by how much and why. This will be investigated by analysing the way in which texts in manuscript form were copied, transformed or destroyed, in a similar manner to the evolution of living organisms or that of language variants, through processes of innovation/mutation, fixation or extinction. As such, the goal of this project is not only to understand the processes behind the transmission of texts, but also to grasp the extent to which humans are the actors of the transmission of their own culture and how much the survival of texts or the constitution of cultural canons are due to chance.

LostMA will attempt a paradigm-shift in philological methods, by combining artificial intelligence, complexity science and philological expertise. On the mathematical sciences side, the work will range from theoretical to numerical and statistical:stochastic models (birth-and-death processes, branching processes, random trees, …), computer simulations (agent-based models, in particular), machine learning and data analysis will be used to emulate andcomprehend the processes and mechanisms of textual transmission. A case

study will be undertaken, regarding chivalric literature in European context.

Supported by deep learning methods, large-scale data collection will be made on a corpus of 4000 documents in Romance, Germanic and Celtic languages,with a full-text zoom on approx. 1000 Old French manuscripts. Data will provide observable values to be compared to simulation results, in order to measure deviations from chance, make inferences on non observable values such as loss/survival rates of works and manuscripts, and understand the dynamics at work behind the transmission of texts.

MISSIONS

The PhD student will work under the supervision of Jean-Baptiste Camps, inside the LostMa project team, including two research engineers and one

post-doc. She or he will pursue a PhD in the topics covered by the project. In particular, the PhD student will work on the cartography and analysis of the production of works, texts, and manuscripts, of a part of the LostMa corpus. This corpus is centred on Medieval chivalric romances in Romance, Germanic and Celtic languages (e.g., chansons de geste et romans, cantar de gesta, Ridderroman, riddarasögur, …).

The PhD student will most likely specialise in one of the following :

- a specific subcorpus, with precise geographic and/or linguistic boundaries,

- a specific methodology (e.g., stylometric analysis of the manuscripts ; computational stemmatology ; …)

- or a specific topic, e.g. circulation of the texts and manuscripts between differents centres ; role of insularity or of lateral areas, circulation of texts between different centres, etc.

Ultimately, the PhD will have the goal of participating in producing estimation of the particularities of textual transmission, the role of chance and selection in the process, and the estimation of lost works and documents.

The PhD work will likely involve some of the following steps :

- delimiting a corpus of known, preserved or lost, works, witnesses and manuscripts of chivalric narratives for a given geographic space/language ;

- collecting digitisations of the manuscripts, and use the deep learning based workflow of the project for layout analysis, handwritten text recognition

- using computational methods such as stylometry, quantitative paleography, dialectometry, etc., to refine the attribution, dating or localisation of the works or documents when needed ;

- collecting information about the tradition of the texts, such as existing text genealogies (stemmata), or, if necessary, build them using stemmatological methods ;

- applying the methodology of the project and the results of its modelling to this specific case, as well as maybe, other related methodologies (e.g., unseen species), to assess the particularities of the process of textual transmission, survival or destruction of works and manuscripts for the chosen corpus.

The work of the PhD will take place mostly in the following work packages of the project :

* WP B-1 Collection of existing stemmata, encoded as computer-readable graphs and metadata.

* WP B-2 Collection of metadata on works, authors, and manuscripts

* WP C-1 Document processing workflow