Attempt at a Lexical Analysis and stemma codicum of Eighty-Three Kadosh Knight Rituals from the Research Workshop Sources Collection
Eighty-three rituals for the Kadosh Knight grade of the Scottish rite, dated approximately from 1750 to the present day, are digitally processed by methods of text mining or lexical analysis. To facilitate the understanding of our work, these methods are briefly described and software implementations are compared. For these texts, dates of first appearance are often uncertain, and so we attempt to establish chronological criteria and elements of kinship. A phylogenetic dendrogram appears as a necessary resource to determine the probable parentage of these rituals. Such a tree is built on the concept of distance and thus allows to compare the numerical proximity (similarity) or distance (dissimilarity) of these texts. For the purpose of digital processing, a metric based on Muller’s method or khi2 is used a priori on the graphical forms. It appears in retrospect that the same metric, when used on syntactic functions, leads to a nearly identical phylogenetic tree.