The Canterbury Tales Project aims to investigate the textual tradition of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to achieve a better understanding of the history of its composition and publication before 1500. The project researchers have:

• established a system of transcription for all the manuscripts and early printed editions of the Canterbury Tales into computer-readable form.
• transcribed around 65% of the texts using this system.

The project aims to:

• compare all the manuscripts, creating a record of their agreements and disagreements with a computer collation program (CollateX and the Collation Editor).
• use computer-based methods, some drawn from evolutionary biology, to help reconstruct the history of the text from this record of agreements and disagreements.
• publish all the materials, the results of our analysis, and the tools which we use in electronic form.