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mkmss

Tim Finney, 2015

Introduction

The mkmss computer program simulates incremental development of a textual corpus as changes are introduced to instances of the text as they are propagated through multiple copying events. The simulated corpus is comprised of computer-generated copies descended from an initial text which is represented by a sequence of some number of ones.

1111111111

Each 1 represents the initial state of a character of the initial text. The broadest meaning of character is "something that can vary" and might include differences of orthography (relating to spelling, diacritics, punctuation). However, semantic variations (affecting meaning) are typically uppermost in researchers' minds.

Whenever the program makes a copy, the states of zero or more characters are subject to change. A copy of the initial text might therefore look like this:

1112111211

A copy of the copy might look like this:

1113111212

At some point in the future an explanation of user inputs and program components is planned to be provided in the mkmss wiki pages. In the mean time, discussion relating to an earlier version of the program is available here.

Download, install, and run mkmss

The mkmss program uses the R language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. While the simulation can run using R alone, many will prefer to interact with mkmss through a graphical interface provided by the RStudio integrated development environment (IDE) and RStudio's Shiny package. R, Rstudio, and Shiny are all free software.

R can be downloaded from one of the sites listed here; the RStudio desktop edition is available here; Shiny is installed by starting R then typing the following at the R command prompt. (An Internet connection is required.)

install.packages("shiny")

mkmss uses a number of other R packages which need to be installed as well.

install.packages("graphics") install.packages("cluster") install.packages("ape")

The mkmss program itself is installed as follows:

  1. Create a directory to hold the program components. (For example, you could make a folder called "mkmss" on your desktop.)
  2. Download server.R, ui.R, and helpers.R to the directory created at step 1.

To launch mkmss with the graphical interface:

  1. Start RStudio.
  2. Open server.R or ui.R within RStudio.
  3. Press the Run app button.

To launch mkmss as a standalone program:

  1. Enable output from the standalone component helpers.R by opening the file with an editor (such as RStudio) then changing the "2" to a "1" in the following line located near the end of the file: if (c(TRUE, FALSE)[2]) {.
  2. Edit the input parameters immediately below the if (c(TRUE, FALSE)[2]) { line to have whatever values are desired.
  3. At the R command prompt set the R working directory to the directory where helpers.R is located. On Mac and Linux systems this would be achieved by typing setwd("~/Desktop/mkmss") if ~/Desktop/mkmss were the path to the directory where helpers.R is installed. On other systems the path syntax may differ; e.g. on Windows something like C:\Desktop\mkmss would be required.
  4. Run helpers.R by typing source("helpers.R") at the R command prompt.

When output is enabled for the helpers.R standalone component it saves the data and distance matrices for recovered texts as comma separated vector files named mkmss.data.txt and mkmss.dist.txt. These are saved in the R working directory, and can be opened for inspection using a spreadsheet program or text editor.

If output is enabled then the entire domain object is also made available as a variable named world. This object contains every item produced during a run of the simulation program, and is potentially large. Consequently it is not a good idea to attempt to view the world object directly (e.g. by typing world at the command prompt). Components of the world object may be inspected using $ notation at the command prompt; a few examples are listed below:

  • world$nn.stt List numbers of states for all characters used in the current run of the simulation.
  • world$pll[["Rome"]]$stt List of preferred states for each character for the Place object named Rome. (By default helpers.R has Place objects for Rome, Ephesus, Antioch, and Alexandria.)
  • world$pll[["Rome"]]$tt.extant[[1]] First Text object in the collection of extant texts for Rome.
  • world$pll[["Rome"]]$tt.lost[[1]] First Text object in the collection of lost texts for Rome.
  • world$pll[["Rome"]]$tt.lost[[1]]$events List of events for the first Text object in the collection of lost texts for Rome.

(The final step of the simulation process recovers a number of texts from the extant and lost collections of each Place.)