Webcast from the Library of Congress: Chasing Krüger’s Dream: Studying the Transmission of Classical & Medieval Manuscripts Using Lattice Theory and Information Entropy
New computational techniques show how modern digital philology is changing the way we think of the transmission of medieval manuscripts through space and time. Using the notes of the classical philologist Paul Krüger, whose manuscripts were recently rediscovered in the Law Library of Congress, complex three dimensional visualization techniques are used to show how the medieval manuscripts making up the Codex of Justinian are spatially and temporally related to each other. The talk also highlights how these new techniques give scholars the tools to postulate what the structure of missing and destroyed manuscripts might have been–changing the face of even the most traditional of the humanities, classical philology.
Speaker Biography: John W. Hessler is senior cartographic reference specialist in the Geography and Map Division of the Library of Congress. A fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, he has written extensively on the history of science and cartography, and has published articles in many scholarly and popular journals.
EVENT DATE: 09/27/2012
FORMAT: Video + Captions
RUNNING TIME: 65 minutes
TRANSCRIPT: View Transcript (link will open in a new window)
View the webcast here