> Her discipline of philology, the study of the development of texts over time, requires comparing manuscripts to each other, building a stemma, or genealogy of

> Her discipline of philology, the study of the development of texts over time, requires comparing manuscripts to each other, building a stemma, or genealogy of texts, from a parent or original manuscript. She tells me that this is precisely the same skill one needs to read phylogenetic trees of mutating bacteria in order to trace the history of the disease. There are some algorithmical similarities, but bioinformaticians have a lot of concerns that linguists don't, so I very much doubt that these are the same; and I also doubt that a historian without professional training in bioinformatics could perform such research on her own.