Estimating the Loss of Medieval Literature with an Unseen Species Model from Ecodiversity
The century-long loss of documents is one of the major impediments to the study of historic literature. Here we focus on Middle Dutch chivalric epics (ca. 1200-1450), a genre for which little archival records exist that shed light on the survival rates of works and documents. We cast the quantitative estimation of these survival rates as a variant of the unseen species problem from ecodiversity. We apply an established non-parametric method ( Chao1 ) and compare it to a number of common alternatives on simulated data. Finally, we discuss the implications of our results for conventional philolo... Mehr ...
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Dokumenttyp: | contributionToPeriodical |
Erscheinungsdatum: | 2020 |
Schlagwörter: | medieval literature / book history / unknown species problem / Middle Dutch / ecodiversity |
Sprache: | Englisch |
Permalink: | https://search.fid-benelux.de/Record/base-27026625 |
Datenquelle: | BASE; Originalkatalog |
Powered By: | BASE |
Link(s) : | https://pure.knaw.nl/portal/en/publications/b885de2d-843c-4406-ad48-eaa1a1bffb45 |
The century-long loss of documents is one of the major impediments to the study of historic literature. Here we focus on Middle Dutch chivalric epics (ca. 1200-1450), a genre for which little archival records exist that shed light on the survival rates of works and documents. We cast the quantitative estimation of these survival rates as a variant of the unseen species problem from ecodiversity. We apply an established non-parametric method ( Chao1 ) and compare it to a number of common alternatives on simulated data. Finally, we discuss the implications of our results for conventional philology: our numbers suggest that the losses sustained on the level of works may be more dramatic than previously imagined, whereas those at the document-level align surprisingly well with existing estimates in book history, although these were based on completely different data sources.