Canterbury Tales
There are two ways to be successfull. You can be super-genius-freaky-smart and think of something before everyone else has thought of it. In this case you run the risk of being excommunicated, burnt at the stake, ridiculed or just plain ignored. I'd like to say this was no longer the case but I can't. If you are ahead of your time you run this risk.
The other way to be successful, that often avoids the unpleasant fates I just mentioned, is to take the advances someone has made in one field and apply them to a new field. Given the specialization of disciplines there are an increasing number of possibilities for such inter-disciplinary transfers. This applies to the arts just as well as it does to the sciences.
Which brings me to something I mentioned in class today. The application of cladistic techniques to textual analysis. It turns out that the analysis of Chaucer by cladistic techniques has gone from strength to strength. They have their own website now and the project must be reaching it's first decade anniversary soon.
Textual analysis using cladistic techniques has become an accepted technique these days and has been used on texts ranging from old Norse manuscripts to the New Testament.
Labels: Evolution
posted by John Latto @ 10:17 PM
2 comments
2 Comments:
is that a bit over the top?
i mean can cladistics really be applied? Human brains doesn't work the way nature do..
But think about the way that copying errors work. In many ways text copying is VERY similar to DNA copying with insertions (ever copied text and found yourself writing the same line twice....), deletions, insertions etc. The techniques of cladistics are perfect for disentangling the ORDER in which such errors were introduced. Thus allowing us to estimate which copy may have been most close to the original.
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