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Modelling the transmission and survival of texts and manuscripts

The medialab seminar welcomes Jean-Baptiste Camps for a session on the LostMA project on the transmission and survival of ancient texts. He will analyse how and why certain manuscripts were copied, transformed or destroyed.

Event, Research Seminar

Salle K.011, 1 place Saint Thomas d'Aquin 75007 Paris

Abstract

Why do we preserve certain antique or medieval texts and have lost others ? Why do we sometimes preserve older medieval manuscripts, and how many have we lost ? What are the main factors behind the dynamics of text transmission ? These are some of the core questions of ERC project LostMA (The Lost Manuscripts of Medieval Europe: Modelling the Transmission of Texts). This project tries to bridge philology, complexity science and artificial intelligence to gain a better understanding of the evolutionary processes that characterise textual transmission.

This presentation will discuss the project's current results and future perspectives, around case studies such as medieval chivalric litterature.

Biography

Jean-Baptiste Camps is Associate Professor in Computational Philology at
the École nationale des chartes, Paris Sciences & Lettres, principal
investigator of the European project LostMA, and co-PI of the "Grand
Programme de Recherche" PSL-CultureLab (Computational Sciences of
Culture). He has worked extensively in the fields of stylometry (Molière, Qanon, Chrétien de Troyes…) and Medieval manuscripts. Currently, he leads investigations at the intersection of historical and evolutionary methods, on the transmission of culture and texts, and on the factors of evolution, survival or extinction of literary works.

Practical informations

This seminar will be held in person and in English, on Tuesday, November 25, 2025, from 2:00 PM to 4:00 PM, in Room K.011, 1 Place Saint-Thomas d'Aquin, 75007 Paris.

Registration is mandatory via this link.