Analyzing Walter Skeat's Forty-Five Parallel Extracts of William Langland's Piers Plowman

TL;DR

This paper applies statistical and clustering methods to analyze forty-five manuscript excerpts of Langland's Piers Plowman, aiming to assist literary critics in manuscript comparison and classification.

Contribution

It introduces novel statistical techniques for analyzing manuscript variations using edit distance, including creating a best line, measuring variance, and clustering manuscripts.

Findings

Identified a 'best line' through combining manuscript versions.

Quantified manuscript variation with a string variance measure.

Clustered manuscripts into three groups based on edit distance.

Abstract

Walter Skeat published his critical edition of William Langland's 14th century alliterative poem, Piers Plowman, in 1886. In preparation for this he located forty-five manuscripts, and to compare dialects, he published excerpts from each of these. This paper does three statistical analyses using these excerpts, each of which mimics a task he did in writing his critical edition. First, he combined multiple versions of a poetic line to create a best line, which is compared to the mean string that is computed by a generalization of the arithmetic mean that uses edit distance. Second, he claims that a certain subset of manuscripts varies little. This is quantified by computing a string variance, which is closely related to the above generalization of the mean. Third, he claims that the manuscripts fall into three groups, which is a clustering problem that is addressed by using edit distance. The overall goal is to develop methodology that would be of use to a literary critic.