Detecting Text Reuse in Nineteenth-Century Legal Documents: Methods and Preliminary Results by Lincoln Mullen.
From the post:
How can you track changes in the law of nearly every state in the United States over the course of half a century? How can you figure out which states borrowed laws from one another, and how can you visualize the connections among the legal system as a whole?
Kellen Funk, a historian of American law, is writing a dissertation on how codes of civil procedure spread across the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century. He and I have been collaborating on the digital part of this project, which involves identifying and visualizing the borrowings between these codes. The problem of text reuse is a common one in digital history/humanities projects. In this post I want to describe our methods and lay out some of our preliminary results. To get a fuller picture of this project, you should read the four posts that Kellen has written about his project:
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Quite a remarkable project with many aspects that will be relevant to other projects.
Lincoln doesn’t use the term but this would be called textual criticism, if it were being applied to the New Testament. Of course here, Lincoln and Kellen have the original source document and the date of its adoption. New Testament scholars have copies of copies in no particular order and no undisputed evidence of the original text.
Did I mention that all the source code for this project is on Github?