There are multiple scholars, in a broad range of disciplines, who are studying the transmission of textually encoded information in manuscripts. These manuscripts may be of different types, from different time-periods, containing texts in different languages, but the scholars working on them still confront many of the same issues in their research when trying to keep track of, and analyze, their materials. In recent years there has been a steady increase in the number of research projects in the humanities tackling large textual corpora, a trend that has been facilitated by the new research opportunities created by the rise of digital humanities including the development of digital databases and the application of advanced analytical methods to analyze such data. However, due to the inherent complexities of such undertakings, and the resources required to establish large-scale and often complex databases, the threshold for researchers with limited resources to implement such methods can seem daunting. Researchers with limited means therefore still often decide to use traditional methods instead, and scale down their research questions, rather than trying to scale the barrier of limited knowledge of the available digital tools, limited skills in utilizing them, and limited resources to get such projects off the ground. Moreover, researchers in the humanities who do implement advanced digital humanities methods, often spend an excess of resources reinventing the wheel and suffer reduced productivity as a consequence.
This project was thus launched with the aim of creating a free, open-source, and user-friendly research tool for scholars studying information transfer in handwritten textual corpora. It is based on the methodology developed in the ERC Consolidator Grant project APOCRYPHA, which was designed to study specifically the development and transmission of Coptic apocrypha in their manuscript contexts. The goal of TInTraMaC, on the other hand, is to use what was learned in that process and distil it into a general, flexible, low-threshold research tool that could help scholars with little or no experience with digital humanities to implement such methods with minimal investment of time and resources.
