Analyzing Walter Skeat's Forty-Five Parallel Extracts of William Langland's Piers Plowman

Walter Skeat published his critical edition of William Langland's 14th century alliterative poem, Piers Plowman, in 1886. In preparation for this he located forty-five manuscripts, and to compare dialects, he published excerpts from each of these. This paper does three statistical analyses using these excerpts, each of which mimics a task he did in writing his critical edition. First, he combined multiple versions of a poetic line to create a best line, which is compared to the mean string that is computed by a generalization of the arithmetic mean that uses edit distance. Second, he claims that a certain subset of manuscripts varies little. This is quantified by computing a string variance, which is closely related to the above generalization of the mean. Third, he claims that the manuscripts fall into three groups, which is a clustering problem that is addressed by using edit distance. The overall goal is to develop methodology that would be of use to a literary critic.