Abstract
The role of human philological judgement in textual criticism, and particularly in stemmatics, has been at times hotly debated and in computational stemmatology tends to be carefully circumscribed. In this context philological judgement is deployed to distinguish ‘significant’ from ‘insignificant’ textual variation—that is, to select those variants that are more or less likely to betray information about the exemplar from which a given text was copied. This article reports on an experiment performed to assess the accuracy of human philological judgement on a set of three artificial traditions, using tools for stemma analysis developed for a prior project and available to the public as the Stemmaweb online service. We show that for most of the artificial traditions, human judgement was not significantly better than random selection for choosing the variant readings that fit the stemma in a text-genealogical pattern, and we discuss some of the implications of these findings.
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