论文标题
丢失的手稿和灭绝文本：文化传播的动态模型
Lost Manuscripts and Extinct Texts: A Dynamic Model of Cultural Transmission
论文作者
论文摘要
书面作品如何演变，消失或生存，随着年龄的增长？在本文中，我们在研究文本传播时提出了一个统一的，正式的框架，以解决两个基本问题：从过去的所有作品中丢失或保留了多少，为什么他们的家谱（它们的````系统发育''''呈现出我们非常特殊的形状，我们会观察到我们或更精确地重新构造？我们在这里认为这些问题与进化生物学中遇到的问题具有相似之处，可以用``遗传''漂移和``自然''选择来描述。通过基于代理的模型，我们表明，自1800年代以来，语言学家已经观察到的属性可以模拟，并与欧洲整个欧洲古代和中世纪文本收集的数据相遇，以便获得有关存在和丢失的作品和手稿数量的合理估计。
How did written works evolve, disappear or survive down through the ages? In this paper, we propose a unified, formal framework for two fundamental questions in the study of the transmission of texts: how much was lost or preserved from all works of the past, and why do their genealogies (their ``phylogenetic trees'') present the very peculiar shapes that we observe or, more precisely, reconstruct? We argue here that these questions share similarities to those encountered in evolutionary biology, and can be described in terms of ``genetic'' drift and ``natural'' selection. Through agent-based models, we show that such properties as have been observed by philologists since the 1800s can be simulated, and confronted to data gathered for ancient and medieval texts across Europe, in order to obtain plausible estimations of the number of works and manuscripts that existed and were lost.
