University of Nebraska - Lincoln DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln Faculty Publications, UNL Libraries Libraries at University of Nebraska-Lincoln 5-2011 Comparing Texts of the Okmulgee Constitution: Fourteen Instrument Versions and Levenshtein’s Edit Distance Metric Charles D. Bernholz University of Nebraska-Lincoln, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/libraryscience Part of the Library and Information Science Commons Bernholz, Charles D., "Comparing Texts of the Okmulgee Constitution: Fourteen Instrument Versions and Levenshtein’s Edit Distance Metric" (2011). Faculty Publications, UNL Libraries. 231. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/libraryscience/231 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Libraries at University of Nebraska-Lincoln at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Publications, UNL Libraries by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. Comparing Texts of the Okmulgee Constitution: Fourteen Instrument Versions and Levenshtein’s Edit Distance Metric +++ Charles D. Bernholz Love Memorial Library University of Nebraska Lincoln, NE 68588 Phone: 402-472-4473 Fax: 402-472-5181 E-mail: [email protected] 6/14/2011 12:46 PM +++ 1 Abstract In 1870, the Five Civilized and other tribes within the Indian Territory initiated a series of council meetings to deal with seven federal stipulations presented at Fort Smith in 1865 and with new treaties established in 1866. One development was the so-called December 1870 Okmulgee Constitution, fashioned in the Creek capital, that provided a model for a new full-fledged Indian state to replace the Territory. Various versions of the text of that document (and of a revised rendition) were published, as part of the official and unofficial record of the sequence of proceedings. This study examined fourteen variants of that Okmulgee Constitution, in terms of the documents‘ provenance and of their variability as quantified through the application of Levenshtein‘s edit distance algorithm. 2 Comparing Texts of the Okmulgee Constitution: Fourteen Instrument Versions and Levenshtein’s Edit Distance Metric +++ ―Knowledge is affected at the stage of reproduction by the errors that seem to inevitably creep in whenever a text is reproduced. From the hand copyists of the ancient world to the latest computer composition techniques of today, the reproduction of texts has always involved the introduction of error‖ (Neavill, 1975, p. 29) +++ Preamble In an unforgettable motion picture from 1942, two of Hollywood‘s most famous characters uttered the same phrase. In that unique sentence, their song and time together in Paris were recalled in an intense stream of sadness and of desire that made the cinematic expression so visibly painful. Such moments encapsulate the very essence with which the film industry has provided instances of love reigning supreme, regardless of any surrounding chaos. ―Play it again, Sam,‖ Ingrid Bergman cooed. ―Play it again, Sam,‖ Humphrey Bogart demanded. Who could possibly forget such a significant quotation from the Big Screen? It seems that we all have, since the script of Casablanca provided for an entirely different, and a more complex, rendering of those two scenes. Bergman, as Ilsa Lund, softly spoke ―Play it once, Sam, for old time‘s sake,‖ followed by the request ―Play it, Sam. Play ‗As Time Goes By.‘‖ Bogart – in the role of Richard ―Rick‖ Blaine, owner of Rick‘s Café Américain – later angrily rebuked the same piano player: ―You played it for her and you can play it for me…. If she can stand it, I can. Play it!‖ (Koch, 1973, pp. 87 and 95). Fred R. Shapiro, editor of The Yale Book of Quotations (2006), described movie misquotations in an ―On Language‖ article for the New York Times (2010, p. 18). These specific 3 bons mots, he acknowledged, ―have come to replace Biblical verses and Shakespearean couplets as our cultural lingua franca, our common store of wit and wisdom.‖1 Yet as a student of English, Shapiro skillfully enumerated a series of possible grounds for the fracturing of such fixed lines. The variants might be compressed; they might be shortened to stand alone more firmly; they might be adjusted to increase their degree of euphony or perhaps their diction; they might be manipulated to assure that we can hold on to and thereby secure a fleeting memory; or they might just be an exhibition of ―wholesome fabrication.‖ Shapiro cited Ilsa‘s request as the most famous ―film line improved by the popular mind‖ and concluded that ―[i]t is a fitting homage to the fantasy machine of Hollywood that its verbal gems are no less compelling when their origins are themselves fantasies.‖ Compression; euphony; wholesome fabrication. Perhaps we were too busy looking at Ingrid Bergman, instead of listening to her. Variants happen. The variant within literature The variant is the lifeblood of text analysis. Such entities have both plagued and rewarded countless investigations that have searched for the true underlying basis of classical as well as modern materials. In many cases, the examinations of religious texts, medieval literatures, or Shakespearian editions frequently led to conclusions that were immediately susceptible to challenge, primarily because there was never the ability to compare any of the versions at hand with the absent primary document. These derived conclusions were only 1 Such work did not go unrecognized: the New York Times Learning Network (Doyne and Schulten, 2010) later proposed an Internet-based educational exercise crafted to use these famous words to address the question ‗What do we say about ourselves when we quote lines from movies or elsewhere?‘ Shapiro included the phrase ―Play it, Sam. Play ‗As Time Goes By‘‖ in The Yale Book of Quotations (2006, p. 260). 4 transitory and speculative – and perhaps even illusory – in nature, because the original had long disappeared. The extreme text cases Thus, philology – in its interrogation of literary scholarship, and its concomitant history and criticism2 – has had to navigate through a past that began with assessing representations of religious documents such as the Bible, ―the immutable word of God that may, of course, be annotated, but not rewritten‖ (Cerquiglini, 1999, p. 35; emphasis added).3 Such restraint is particularly important for the Koran, considered by Muslims as the infallible word of Allah,4 but textual difficulties have been acknowledged (see Bellamy, 1993 and especially 1996). Ehrman (1993, pp. 275-276), in a consideration of the evolution of the New Testament, observed that before any one group had established itself as dominant and before the proto-orthodox party had refined its christological views with the nuance that would obtain in the fourth century, the books of the emerging Christian scriptures were circulating in manuscript form. The texts of these books were by no means inviolate; to the contrary, they were altered with relative ease and alarming frequency, and that [s]cribes altered their sacred texts to make them ‗say‘ what they were already known to ‗mean.‘ 2 Uitti (2005) provided a synopsis of the realm of philology. 3 See Shaheen (1984), though, regarding the 1560 publication, and the subsequent use by the Puritans and others, of the Geneva Bible. 4 Sura 47 of the Koran declares ―Allah will bring to nothing the deeds of those who disbelieve and debar others from His path. As for the faithful who do good works and believe in what is revealed to Mohammed – which is the truth from their Lord – He will forgive them their sins and ennoble their state‖ (The Koran, 1974, p. 123). 5 Smith, too, observed in 1885 that the Old Testament possessed a ―text [that] has nevertheless suffered not a little in the period which elapsed between the original writing and its definite settlement in the present form‖ (p. 344). Careful contrasts made within such studies have attempted to illuminate the exclusion and the incursion of variant elements among those renditions, with the understanding that such occurrences are part of the penalty associated with the copying process, perhaps stimulated – in whole or in part – by this text ―improvement‖ consideration of which Ehrman spoke. Problems have arisen, though, whenever an attempt has been made to recreate a lost document. The process cascades into ―one unique and supposedly established text [that] loses something that is there,‖ i.e., the course of reformulation yields yet another variant (Cerquiglini, 1999, p. 39). Many of the difficulties associated with traditional philology can be eliminated promptly when the initial document is available. Variants certainly exist for all possible forms or formats of any replicated text, but there is an immediate limit to certain aspects of speculation regarding any material if its original does indeed exist, no matter how many spelling, punctuation, and/or grammatical faults it may hold according to today‘s standards. Those blemishes frequently provoke attempts to improve the initial form, especially when ensuing renderings correct, say, blatant spelling errors. However, such editorial decisions should be based on all the data, and not just upon a currently accessible subset that might itself contribute to conjecture of what the true original might have contained. Greetham (1984), for example, assessed the influence of John Trevisa, a Middle English translator, by presenting Trevisa‘s personal approach to the task of focusing on