How to find a parallel gloss: applying DNA-sequencing methods on early medieval gloss corpora

Early medieval glossing traditions provide invaluable insights into manuscript and text production of that time, serving as direct evidence of connections between languages and cultures during that era. Of particular importance are parallel glosses, which are annotations explaining the same lemma of a primary text found in separate manuscripts of that same text. However, the manual detection of these concurrently transmitted annotations can be work-intensive and time-consuming. This article proposes a novel approach which introduces a workflow that employs DNA sequencing methods with the Multiple Sequence Alignment by CLUSTALW, the Phylogenetic analysis pipeline by ETE3, and the Python-based Parallelor to (semi-)automatically identify parallel glosses in early medieval manuscripts and construct phylogenetic trees. This method, which achieves high accuracy, can substantially expedite the process of identifying parallel glosses, thus offering new opportunities for research into early medieval glossing traditions.