Projektbeschreibung
Sich in kulturellen Strömungen zurechtfinden
In den Strömungen der kulturellen Evolution hängt das Schicksal von Schriftartefakten vom empfindlichen Gleichgewicht zwischen kulturellen Präferenzen und Zufall ab. Wie erfahren Texte, ähnlich wie lebende Organismen, einen Prozess der Bewahrung, der Veränderung oder des Aussterbens? Zur Beantwortung dieser Frage wird im Rahmen des ERC-finanzierten Projekts LostMA KI, Komplexitätsforschung und philologisches Fachwissen miteinander verbunden, um die Geheimnisse hinter der Abweichung der Textübertragung vom reinen Zufall zu entschlüsseln. Das Team, das sich auf ritterliche Literatur im europäischen Kontext konzentriert, nutzt tiefes Lernen für eine groß angelegte Datenerfassung von 4 000 Dokumenten. Mit diesem bahnbrechenden Ansatz wird nicht nur die Überlieferung von Texten beleuchtet, sondern auch die Rolle des Zufalls bei der Gestaltung des kulturellen Kanons hinterfragt.
Ziel
LostMa aims at understanding how human cultures are constituted and evolve, through the question of the transmission of written cultural artefacts. It strives to establish in what measure the transmission (and subsequent preservation or loss) of written artefacts, texts and ideas deviates from pure chance, and, if it deviates, by how much and why it does. It will do so by analysing the way that texts in manuscript form were copied, transformed or destroyed, in a similar way to the evolution of living organisms or of language variants, through process of innovation/mutation, fixation or extinction.
As such, the goal of this project is not only to understand the processes behind the transmission of texts, but also to grasp the extent to which humans are the actors of the transmission of their own culture and how much the survival of texts or the constitution of cultural canons are due to chance.
If this notion may seem provocative to humanities researchers, evolutionary biologists have long discovered the role of random drift in the survival or extinction of genetic traits and species.
To investigate this question, this project will attempt a paradigm-shift in philological methods, by combining artificial intelligence, complexity science and philological expertise. Stochastic birth-and-death processes and computer multi-agent simulations will be used to emulate the process of textual transmission.
A case study will be taken, regarding chivalric literature in European context. Supported by deep learning methods, large-scale data collection will be made on a corpus of 4000 documents in Romance, Germanic and Celtic languages, with a full-text zoom on approx. 1000 Old French manuscripts. Data will provide observable values to be compared to simulation results, in order to measure deviations from chance, make inferences on non observable values such as loss/survival rates of works and manuscripts, and understand the dynamics at work behind the transmission of texts.
Wissenschaftliches Gebiet
Schlüsselbegriffe
Programm/Programme
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Thema/Themen
Finanzierungsplan
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsGastgebende Einrichtung
75002 Paris
Frankreich