Stemmatology: an R package for the computer-assisted analysis of textual traditions

Given a set of witnesses of a text, determining their relations and reconstructing a stemma codicum is one of the fundamental purposes of textual criticism and philology. For this task, various computer-assisted procedures and methods have been described since the 1950's, some elaborating on traditional principles (Lachmannian, Quentinian.. .), some borrowed from other fields such as phylogenetics. In this poster, we describe Stemmatology, a new open source package for the statistical software R, that implements procedures for the computer-assisted analysis of textual traditions. We have started implementation of stemmatological methods in the package by focusing, on one hand, on procedures derived from traditional textual criticism, the " Lach-mannian " tradition in general, and particularly some of Eric Poole's method-ological insights (Poole [13, 14]); and on the other hand, we made use of methods for the detection of contamination and polygenesis, two major issues for genealogical analysis.