I read a great course on Greek Philosophers this week and another on Ancient Writings:
It got me thinking about the corpus for a given writer, e.g. Plato.
There must be hundreds of copies of his dialogues that have survived. Each copied at a different time, in different condition, with differing levels of completeness and errors.
Scholars must analyse each new discovery and see how it updates the main corpus. Repeat with all other ancient writers.
There must be monographs on the provenance of a given piece of writing, e.g. a single dialogue or “book” (chapter) from a dialogue. They would have to cover translation, interpretation, word choice in the case of a diversity errors, etc.
This makes the programmer in me vibrate with interest. All very technical and specific.
I was talking through this with gpt. He thinks these are called things like “A Commentary” or “A Textual History of…”.
I find this fascinating. I’d love to see some.
I figure there would be detailed description of what was found, and when, and how it impacts the main corpus, repeat for each finding relevant to the corpus.
So cool.
I bet there’s a case for turning one or more of these into a narrative. e.g. “we found this and it changed everything”. Some of the deciphering of Egyptian Hieroglyphs by Jean-François Champollion reads like this.
I guess I’m into the idea because I do something similar with my Quake archives (e.g. record what was found, and how/where and reconstruct the release history), e.g. see my essays here:
Maybe I should formalize these essays into a monograph. For posterity?
Maybe in the far future, all we have left is a print-on-demand copy of the monograph with the original files lost due to wide-spread EMPs (or something).