Philological Inquiry and Computational Models

Lectures by David Smith, visiting professor.

David Smith, Associate Professor at the Khoury College of Computer Sciences, Northeastern University in Boston, and Visiting Professor at EPHE-PSL (invited by Daniel Stoekl and Peter Stokes), will give a series of four lectures entitled Philological Inquiry and Computational Models.

Registration is required to attend the lectures: @email

Philology has traditionally been a field of study grounded in the close reading of small amounts of text, enriched by deep knowledge of the contexts in which these texts were composed, transmitted, and reused. We argue that computational models can be useful for formulating explicit hypotheses about these contexts and, consequently, for drawing conclusions about the content of texts and the relationships among them. Philological modes of reasoning about the information lifecycle can guide the inference process in such computational models.

Program

• March 12, 2026, 4:00–6:00 p.m., Room 26, 54 blvd Raspail, Paris 6^e- Textual Criticism as Language Modeling
• March 17, 2026, 1:00–3:00 p.m., Room 5, 54 blvd Raspail - Evidence and Explanation in Text Transcription
• March 24, 2026, 1:00–3:00 p.m., Room 5, 54 blvd Raspail -  Modeling Textual Networks
• March 26, 2026, 4:00–6:00 p.m., Room 26, 54 blvd Raspail - Interlinguistic Influence and Explainable Translation