Tuesday, February 09, 2016
A discipline that needs a name
A beautifully written article by Greg Gilbert, on how the existing Bible was transmitted through layers of copies. Explores the details and methods and problems of preserving meaning across translations and copies.
This discipline has always been important in genetics, genealogy, court proceedings [chain of evidence], libraries and seminaries. Recently its importance has spread from text to images and sounds and videos, as we try to determine which picture was photoshopped, which sound file was filtered, which DVD was pirated, which code was virused.
But we still don't have a name for the rigorous study of copying. Information theory sort of bumps into this discipline at a few points, but information theory is pretty near useless.
Archivology? Not good enough. Copyology? Nah. Evidence-chain-ology? Bleah.
= = = = =
Later, after perusing this list of ologies, found a couple of existing words that come close.
Bibliotics: study of documents to determine authenticity.
Close, but authenticity is generally a question of provenance, not the text itself. Also sounds too much like Bible.
Stemmatology: study of relationships between texts.
On the dot but sounds like it's about plants.
¶ 4:28 AM 
