Visualizing Collation Results

How can the results of automated collation facilitate the analysis of witnesses’ relationships? This article introduces the tool PyCoviz, designed to process a collation obtained with CollateX, focusing on the scholarly need to detect shared errors and unique errors. The Declamations of Calpurnius Flaccus serves as a case study to show how PyCoviz allows to reproduce an editor’s conclusions on the manuscript tradition. While analyzing the collation of Calpurnius’ text, this article discusses the difficulty of comparing orthographic differences, and how PyCoviz could be improved to deal with incomplete witnesses, or to visualized editorial uncertainty