Editing and Analysing Numerical Tables: Towards a Digital Information System for the History of Astral Sciences
A collection on a craft that is not usually taught: how to edit and analyse numerical tables. Not to interpret but to analyse — to recover parameters from the numbers themselves, to tell a copyist's error from a variant reading, to identify an untitled table by its own differences.
Six hundred and twenty-six pages, with papers on Greek, Arabic, Latin, Sanskrit and Chinese tables; the common frame is a digital description system designed so that tables from different traditions can be compared.
For us this is the closest book in spirit in the whole section. We do exactly the same: we have a corpus of numbers printed by a program, and from them we recover rules and constants that nobody published. The methods are the same — convergence across features, separating noise from regularity, testing on a held-out part of the material.
Edited by Matthieu Husson, Clemency Montelle and Benno van Dalen; Ptolemaeus Arabus et Latinus, Studies, volume 2, published by Brepols.
Details: 626 pages, 37.4 MB.