The whole is greater than the sum of its parts analyzing aristotle commentaries in collaboration between philology and data science

This paper aims at presenting the surplus value of collaboration between philologists and data scientists in the research on medieval digitized manuscripts. Both the great potential and the challenges of such a collaboration will be addressed. The following case study originates from research which is conducted in the Collaborative Research Center “Episteme in Motion. Transfer from the Ancient World to the Early Modern Period” which is located at the Freie Universit¨at Berlin and funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). One of the goals of this collaboration is to advance research questions in which the data basis is complex or too complex for traditional research methods. The case study presented in this paper will deal with the knowledge transfer and text transmission in manuscripts of Aristotle’s ancient Greek treatises on logic, the so-called Organon, and will focus on the manuscripts of his work de interpretatione (On Interpretation) and on commentaries and explanations which are found as paratexts in the manuscripts.