Text History Meets Book History: Data Driven Manuscript Study in the Digital Era

Greek manuscript study has seen a number of significant advancements which are reflected in the catalogues that are being produced in recent years. Descriptions of the binding, detailed quire structures and ruling patterns are usually given, just to name a few of the items that modern codicology is paying attention to. In addition, in the realm of Biblical manuscript studies art historians are making progress in clustering larger numbers of manuscripts according to regional distribution (e.g., Weyl Carr). Moreover, New Testament Textual Criticism has produced test passage collations for all available NT manuscripts in order to group them and select the ones that merit further study because they exhibit peculiar patterns. All that research - book historical and text historical - produces enormous amount of data from the same objects albeit largely unconnected, sometimes even unnoticed. The digital medium gives us the opportunity to digest almost infinite numbers of data points from every domain involved in the study of (Biblical) manuscripts. I will give examples of currently available tools and describe attempts at integrating them into larger frameworks for an integrated study of (Biblical) manuscripts.