(29-09-2025, 02:01 AM)LisaFaginDavis Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Torsten, as I have told you on many occasions, Archetype is only a tool. It was just a way for me to organize my thoughts. I can't share it, because it was a bespoke databank that lived on an old computer whose operating system is now out of date and unbootable. But that doesn't matter. Ultimately, my work depends on my own experience and expertise. Archetype didn't do the work for me. It's not a neural network. It's just a tool. You are welcome to disagree with my conclusions, as is anyone, as paleography is a subjective methodology. After thirty years of studying hundreds, if not thousands, of medieval manuscripts, cataloguing and describing them, publishing five books and dozens of articles, elected by my peers to the International Committee on Latin Paleography, my expertise speaks for itself.
Dear Lisa,
I am fully aware of what Archetype is—I maintain my own instance on my computer. See the following screenshot:
[
attachment=11525]
One of its advantages, in fact, is that it can be deployed as a Docker container, which makes it relatively straightforward to preserve and share between systems. As long as the underlying files are available to you, the entire environment can be copied and restored on a new computer. If helpful, I would be glad to provide you with a copy of my own instance.
That said, my first point concerns the lack of documentation. In your publications you present results, but the underlying evidence remains inaccessible to other researchers. Without access to the working materials, it is impossible to verify or reproduce the analysis. Independent scrutiny requires more than an appeal to authority; it requires access to data.
My second point concerns the scale of the material used. The screenshots of your Archetype project indicate that only 44 of 225 pages—roughly 20% of the manuscript—were uploaded for analysis. This limitation is never clearly stated in your 2020 paper, nor is it specified which pages were included. The omission is significant, since paleographical comparisons may be sensitive to manuscript section. For instance, when I compare instances of
iin between the Herbal A (e.g., f2r) and the Pharma section (e.g., f99r), I find consistent differences in the length of the final stroke for
iin.
See the screenshots for You are not allowed to view links.
Register or
Login to view. and f99r:
[
attachment=11527][
attachment=11526]
Since you attribute both the Herbal A and Pharma sections to the same scribe, it would be important to clarify which specific folios from the Pharma section you examined in your analysis.
In short, without open access to the underlying documentation, your conclusions cannot be independently verified. With so few research details available, it is impossible to validate or even to assess your results.
My third point concerns your assertion that Scribes 1, 3, and 5 render the k-glyph with a single stroke. However, there is clear evidence that these scribes executed the k-glyph using two distinct strokes. Your failure to address this evidence is, in itself, highly significant.
BTW: Scribe 1 also renders the t-glyph using two distinct strokes (see for instance oltchey on f1v):
[
attachment=11528]
Best regards,
Torsten