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Visualising Plurality: Ancient Lead White Recipes and the Potential of TheSu XML for Historical Analysis
Mon, July 13, 9:15 to 10:45am, EFI, 1.52English Abstract
This paper presents a digital and experimental analysis of ancient recipes for lead white (psimúthion/cerussa). The analysis is intended to recognise and value the plurality of procedures across different sources. Using TheSu XML, a digital schema for annotating and visualising discourse structures, a dataset has been created that maps every step and ingredient across all known ancient Graeco-Roman recipes. As will be shown, automatic visualisations generated from this dataset make divergences between texts immediately apparent. This helps identify individualities in textual sources that may be less represented in literature.
The comparative maps and diagrams that will be shown represent relationships between ancient recipes, as well as their similarities with and divergences from modern replications. These visualisations make it straightforward to compare ancient sources – such as Theophrastus, Dioscorides, and Plutarch – with one another and with modern replications. This allows for easy identification of idiosyncratic elements like specific steps, ingredients, or instruments. Even minor divergences become easily readable, making distinct details unlikely to be flattened onto apparent archetypes. The textual analysis connects to new laboratory experiments in collaboration with chemists. These experiments value each ancient recipe as a unique procedure and test its procedural and chemical distinctiveness. The aim is to link specific textual variants to potentially distinct chemical and material outcomes.
By design, TheSu XML can model the divergences and variations that characterise plural and contested sciences. Apps to utilise this schema are in development, including a user-friendly interface that will make this tool accessible to historians. Applicable, beyond procedural texts, also to the study of the evolution of concepts, arguments, and explanations, it can thus help other historians identify multiplicity and contestation within their own textual corpora.