Missions and World Christianity Commons^™

Biclustering Readings And Manuscripts Via Non-Negative Matrix Factorization, With Application To The Text Of Jude, Joey Mccollum

Andrews University Seminary Studies (AUSS)

The text-critical practice of grouping witnesses into families or texttypes often faces two obstacles: the methodological question of how exactly to isolate the groups, given the chicken-and-egg relationship between “good” group readings and “good” group manuscripts, and contamination in the manuscript tradition. I introduce non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) as a simple, automated, and efficient solution to both problems. Within minutes, NMF can cluster hundreds of manuscripts and readings simultaneously, producing an output that details potential contamination according to an easy-to-interpret mixture model. I apply this method to Wasserman’s extensive collation of the Epistle of Jude, showing that the resulting clusters …