Computational philology at the intersection of games and prognostication: an edition of the German “Prenostica Socratis Basilei” (PSB)

• Applicant: Dr. Elisa Cugliana
• Subject Area: German Medieval Studies (Medieval German Literature)
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 556223861

Goal of the project is to edit the medieval German versions of a sortes text with Arabic origins, the “Prenostica Socratis Basilei” (PSB), first documented in Latin in the 13th century. Five medieval German versions of the PSB have come down to us in ten witnesses of the 15th and 16th centuries. Sortes texts, a genre with roots in late Antiquity, embody a divination practice that gained considerable popularity throughout the Middle Ages and beyond, despite often facing censorship by the Church. These texts were not intended for linear reading; instead, randomising tools were required to move from a list of questions to their answers, following a chain of hints. Their highly interactive nature led to their reinterpretation as social games in medieval times. Existing editions of the sortes focus predominantly on their textual dimension, overlooking the illuminations, diagrams, and interactive tools that often accompany the texts. Surprisingly, no sortes text has ever been published as a Digital Scholarly Edition, although the representation of these sources would greatly benefit from the highly dynamic and interactive nature of a digital environment. Moreover, making these historical documents accessible to a wider audience is valuable for several reasons. Anthropologically, they offer insights into the doubts, wishes, and troubles of medieval people. Linguistically, these texts, classified within common literature, did not conform to literary standards, likely preserving authenticity. The unique layouts limited space for textual content, leading to sentence interruption and extensive use of abbreviations. An examination of the textual witnesses of the PSB clearly reveals that traditional methods fall short in accommodating the structural variance, interactive nature and missing linearity of the texts. The transcriptions of the German witnesses of the PSB will be therefore modelled in the graph database Neo4j, facilitating multiple annotation layers and intra- and intertextual connections. Various formats, such as XML and RDF, can be extracted from Neo4j for sustainability. After normalisation and collation, the textual data will be transformed into a binary matrix for phylogenetic analysis. Binary matrices will also be created to analyse the variance of the game structures and the diagrammatic and illustrative dimensions of these sources. Hermeneutical analyses will explore associations between different components of the works, such as topics, realia (culture-specific objects), and oracle-functioning authorities, to identify meaningful patterns. The resulting online edition will feature both a text and a game mode. It will offer critical, diplomatic, and normalised texts for each of the German versions of the PSB and a synoptical presentation to facilitate traditional study. Additionally, it will enhance the intrinsic interactive dimension of these sources by creating a game edition focusing on their multimodal nature.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants