Textual Studies of the Era of Big Data and Neural Networks

This article analyses the emergence of new technologies for working with big data which can be highly helpful to philologists, studying the diachronic development. First of all, that applies to the study and publication of Old Russian manuscripts with traditional liturgical texts used for church service. These manuscripts existed in a huge number of folios, and in the process of copying were subjected to considerable textual unification. That makes it very difficult to study them by the laborious methods of traditional textual criticism. Now, when the full text of the monuments can be automatically processed, the creation of the Linguistic intellectual environment (LIE) has been lounged. This tool will provide new opportunities for the study of Slavonic liturgical texts from different historical periods. As a result, we will create a corpus of liturgical texts of the 11th–17th centuries, obtained using a program for automatic text recognition of manuscripts, with annotation und search module. The user of the LIE will be able to receive a complete list of variant readings for each fragment of a liturgical book of the widest range of manuscripts. In fact, we are talking of a new type of publication of traditional liturgical texts, when the user can set the parameters for the edition in accordance with his research interests.