Patristic Sources and Scholastic Uses
Jeffrey C. Witt (Loyola University Maryland)
https://jeffreycwitt.com | jcwitt@loyola.edu
@jeffreycwitt
On the Road to the Future of Manuscripts
October 29, 2021, Radbound University, Nijmegen, Netherlands
# Outline
1. Use Cases
2. How We Can Achieve It
3. Some Examples
4. Scaling and Maintaining
1) First, a researcher should be able to call up the precise coordinate regions containing the parallel and granular textual object in any sister witnesses.
2) Secondly, a researcher should be able to move backward toward any material or formal mediating sources of the passage and from there again to the coordinate regions containing this text passage.
3) Third, a researcher should be able to move forward toward the text passage of any future texts quoting, citing, or referencing the text passage contained within the starting coordinate region and be able from there to move to any containing coordinate region.
4) Finally, the starting "target" should never be fixed. This tri-fold movement should be repeatable at any text passage or coordinate region. Thus, the source passage can become the target passage, and then one can move from here to its sources and its influences.
"Alii datur sermo sapientiae, alii sermo scientiae, ista definitio diuidenda est ut rerum diuinarum scientia sapientia proprie nuncupetur, humanarum autem proprie scientiae nomen obtineat, de qua uolumine tertio decimo disputaui, non utique quidquid sciri ab homine potest in rebus humanis ubi plurimum superuacaneae uanitatis et noxiae curiositatis est huic scientiae tribuens, sed illud tantummodo quo fides saluberrima quae ad ueram beatitudinem ducit gignitur, nutritur, defenditur, roboratur"
Augustine, De Trinitate, Liber 14, 1, 3, Paragraph adt-l14-d1e1535 [http://scta.info/resource/adt-l14-d1e1535](http://scta.info/resource/adt-l14-d1e1535 )
The above quotation is of critical importance in late scholastic debates about what theology is. But Augustine at no point uses the word theology. He simply speaks about wisdom and science.
At what point and why do later interpreters identify the discipline of theology with "scientia"?
How can we study this scientifically, i.e. exhaustively?
"Ego vero Evangelio non crederem, nisi me catholicae Ecclesiae **commoveret** auctoritas"
(Augustine, Contra epistolam Manichaei quam vocant fundamenti,
Liber 1, 5, 6, Paragraph AgCMfu-sdf83a-d1e185 @ 139-149
[http://scta.info/resource/AgCMfu-sdf83a-d1e185@139-149](http://scta.info/resource/AgCMfu-sdf83a-d1e185@139-149)
According to Heiko Oberman, in some late medieval uses of this quotation, the word...
"...'commovere' ... is replaced
by 'compellere' and interpreted as 'approbare', a term which suggests more duality between
Scripture and Church than the phrasing of Augustine's text itself’ (Oberman, Harvest,
385).
Is Oberman correct?
How can we study this scientifically rather than simply relying on the anecdotal evidence pulled from what Oberman has chosen to read and remember?
But we should equally stress the power to discover and draw attention to previously unknown passages of interest.
1. Passages (and by extension coordinate regions) that receive a high degree of re-use can be discovered through machine assisted methods, such as n-gram similarity comparison.
2. The active references marked by distributed textual editors can be inverted and then we can query for all passages that have a high frequency of re-use.
# 2. How We Can Achieve This
### Russian Doll Discovery
(Or "location based lookups")
* The institution has to be found which holds the containing codex
* The codex has to be found
* The manifest for that codex has to be found
* The page/canvas on which the figure exists has to be found
* The coordinate region on the page/canvas has to be found
## Solutions
#### Moving from Location Based Lookup to Content Based Lookup
We used to use containers to find granular places
Now we use the abstract id of granular places, and let the places locate themselves along with all their containers
### GPS for Text "Manifesting" Manuscripts
### Text Hierarchy as the GPS coordinates of our Text "Manifesting" Manuscripts
# 4. Scaling and Maintaining
At present, this means:
* 31,450,098 total assertions (triples) indexed.
* 67,226 file "questions/chapters" indexed.
* 150,935 quotations indexed.
* 55 million+ words
# Questions?
jcwitt@loyola.edu | @jeffreycwitt
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Learn more:
* The Scholastic Commentaries and Texts Archive (SCTA) Home Page: [https://scta.info](http://scta.info)
* SCTA community page: [https://community.scta.info](https://community.scta.info/)
* Various Posts and Related Articles: [https://jeffreycwitt.com/posts](https://jeffreycwitt.com/posts)
* SCTA Reading Room: [https://scta.lombardpress.org](https://scta.lombardpress.org)
* Some good "in-progress" demo pages to visit.
* Peter Lombard [http://scta.info/resource/pl-l1d1c1](https://scta.lombardpress.org/#/res?resourceid=http://scta.info/resource/pl-l1d1c1)
* Peter Plaoul [http://scta.info/resource/lectio1](https://scta.lombardpress.org/#/res?resourceid=http://scta.info/resource/lectio1)
* Youtube channel with in-progess demos [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBDRlxtGlBryslbPqG4Zz3w](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBDRlxtGlBryslbPqG4Zz3w)