Report on the Textual Criticism Challenge 1991

This announcement reports the results of attempts at the “Textual Criticism Challenge 1991” posted by Peter Robinson to various network bulletin boards in July 1991. The challenge, reproduced in part below, was to re-create by statistical or numerical means alone the table of relationships for some 44 manuscripts of the Old Norse narrative “Svipdagsmal” established by Robinson on the basis of external evidence and traditional stemmatic methods. Especially, we report the remarkable results obtained by Robert J. O’Hara, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. O’Hara used a technique known as cladistic analysis, developed over the last thirty years by evolutionary biologists for the reconstruction of the evolutionary history of organisms from study of their shared characteristics. Using cladistic analysis, specifically the computer program PAUP (Phylogenetic Analysis Using Parsimony, Swofford 1991), O’Hara was able to reproduce all the major manuscript groups hypothesized by Robinson. In all cases, the relationships between individual manuscripts suggested by cladistic analysis agreed with those known from external evidence. Most previous attempts at computer-assisted analysis of manuscript relations have used statistical clustering techniques. These methods have not been outstandingly effective. The success of cladistic analysis, based on a quite different intellectual model, may have considerable implications for scholars concerned with the exploration of large manuscript traditions.