By the fourth century CE there circulated a collection of texts in Greek arranged to serve the study of astronomy. Contemporary manuscript evidence for this curriculum is not extant, but what survives after the ninth century CE are the echoes of this collection in later Greek manuscripts and a corresponding curriculum, the Middle Books, in Arabic. This lecture will explore how computational methods such as database approaches, handwritten text recognition, and automated text alignments can reveal changing patterns of use in these curricular texts' histories.

Christine Roughan is a Postdoctoral Research Associate affiliated with both Princeton's Manuscripts, Rare Books, and Archival Studies initiative and the Center for Digital Humanities. She received a PhD in the Ancient World (2023) from New York University. Her research examines manuscript transmissions in the Mediterranean world, with a particular focus on works of mathematics and astronomy in Greek and Arabic.

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