Technical Term Network and Its Applications in Textual and Manuscript Studies Case-Study: Examining Arithmetic Sources in the Islamic Era (from 11th to 18th centuries AD)

Subject Areas :

Fatima  Saadatmand ¹ (MA Researcher- Institute for the History of Science, University of Tehran,, Iran)

Received: 2022-06-15 Accepted : 2022-10-21 Published : 2023-02-20

Keywords: semantic network, Linguistics, Terminology, technical term network, source criticism,

Abstract :

Technical Term Network (TTN) is an innovative method to find similarities among texts by matching technical and scientific terms used in them. This model, inspired by and built based on the semantic network of linguistics, is effective in finding the primary sources of a book and recognizing the identity of an unknown text. The treatises of mathematics and especially arithmetic ones are very similar to each other due to their logical structure; this issue sometimes causes faults in identifying the title and author of the work, especially if the copy is acephalous, i.e. missing the beginning of the text, mistaking some original Persian texts for translations, or confusing works with similar content in cataloging manuscripts in such a way. In many cases, the mentioned inaccuracies have been repeated by the researchers who rely on the information of the indexes. This research aims to introduce a new method in the classification of texts and manuscripts, especially arithmetic sources in the Islamic period (5th-13th centuries AH/11th-18th centuries AD), in order to take a novel approach by means of a targeted search instead of adapting the total content of the texts, to criticize their sources and recognize their identities.