Abstract

This paper describes a digital tool called the Textual History Tool in detail. This tool captures the historical evolution of a text through various temporal stages, and inter-related data culled from various types of related texts. This tool also provides a historical view of the transmission of a text through the manuscript tradition. This tool provides an online interface which allows philologists to enter manuscript data for a text. It also provides an online interface which helps philologists compare the variants in a separate mode. It allows the user to generate phylogenetic trees, for the text, based on distance methods using the data entered in the tool. It also contains the facility to generate critical edition using a semi-supervised approach. This tool also divides the text into meaningful functional units and helps achieve a better comparison among the manuscripts. The text of the KV and its textual history is mentioned as a specific example to demostrate the features of this tool.