Tree View

Tree View is finally working. What this does is compute the genealogical tree of a set of versions. Although this is normally of use mostly for manuscript traditions, I believe that it is also useful for printed works. It can show at a glance the relationships between texts that make up a work. Previous attempts to do this (by others) were based on collation output and didn't take account of invariants, only variants. I think this casts doubt on the accuracy of the result. Also, rather than being offline and manual this method is online and automatic. There's a basic zoom facility which is useful for the larger trees. Changing any of the options recomputes the tree. Check it out at Harpur.

Here's a small sample from the DV website. Relationships between 9 texts of Vicenzo Cerami's the Serpent Woman. This was published in a newspaper (so it's kind of a print tradition) and the author made available the pre-texts in the form of edited drafts. The length of branches is significant (it indicates the distance between versions), but in case this gets confusing you can make all the lengths the same.

If you are wondering how I produce this online the process is basically:

1. Query the MVD to produce a difference matrix (edit distance of each version from each other version)
2. Pipe the result into the Fitch-Margoliash tree-building program from Phylip.
3. Pipe the result into drawtree from Phylip. This outputs a postscript version of the diagram.
4. Pipe the result of that into Ghostscript to produce a temporary JPG file, which you can view. All this is done by executing a succession of binaries using exec() in PHP. I had to adapt fitch and drawtree extensively to get this to work with pipes. Fitch chokes a bit on the biggest tree (Sibylline Gospel), but that's to be expected. It does work, though.