Improved distance measures for 'fixed-content miscellanies': an adaptation for the collections of sayings of the desert fathers and mothers.

Collections of sayings of the desert fathers and mothers are extant in manuscripts in many languages and are organized differently. They are 'fixed-content miscellanies' (FCM): they include material that belongs to the same genre, but is variable both when it comes to appearance and order. Distance...

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Published in:Digital Scholarship in the Humanities Vol. 38; no. 1; pp. 127 - 151
Main Authors: Göransson, Elisabet, Maurits, Luke, Dahlman, Britt, Sarkisian, Karine Åkerman, Rubenson, Samuel, Dunn, Michael
Format: Article
Published: Oxford University Press / USA Apr2023
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Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
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      dt: Apr2023
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        atl: Improved distance measures for 'fixed-content miscellanies': an adaptation for the collections of sayings of the desert fathers and mothers.
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          Göransson, Elisabet
          Maurits, Luke
          Dahlman, Britt
          Sarkisian, Karine Åkerman
          Rubenson, Samuel
          Dunn, Michael
        affil:
          Centre for Languages and Literature and Centre for Theology and Religious Studies, Lund University , Sweden
          Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology , Germany
          Centre for Theology and Religious Studies, Lund University , Sweden
          Department of Modern Languages, Uppsala University , Sweden
          Department of Linguistics and Philology, Uppsala University , Sweden
      su:
        Linear orderings
        Mothers
        Deserts
        Collections
        Fathers
        Fixed effects model
      sug:
        subj:
          Linear orderings
          Mothers
          Deserts
          Collections
          Fathers
          Fixed effects model
      ab: Collections of sayings of the desert fathers and mothers are extant in manuscripts in many languages and are organized differently. They are 'fixed-content miscellanies' (FCM): they include material that belongs to the same genre, but is variable both when it comes to appearance and order. Distance measurement methods are particularly suitable for large text traditions including variable content in the so-called mixed-content miscellanies, such as recipes, anthological compilations of shorter text passages, or catalogues, but can also be suitable for text genres like collections of sayings, that are equally variable in appearance and order of sayings, even though the genre is fixed; hence 'fixed-content miscellanies'. In the article, collections of sayings in seven languages were compared using four distance measures methods. Each segment of the sayings was given a unique id to be comparable. The first method used, the Jaccard distance measure, disregards the linear order of items and instead considers each collection compared only as a 'bag of stories'. In two other methods used (Birnbaum and Levenshtein methods), the order in which the narratives of each saying appear is compared. All three methods yielded interesting results, but the collections that were apparently closely related were clustered together so tightly that it was not possible to make more nuanced analyses. In order to remove false negatives, particulars concerning lacunes in the material were taken into account in the proposed modified Levenshtein method, the fixed-content miscellanies (FCM)-Levenshtein method. By applying the FCM-Levenshtein method, previously unknown relations between collections witnessed in different languages could be detected.
      pubtype: Academic Journal
      doctype: Article
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    language: English
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