What is "stemmatics"

n. The study of multiple surviving versions of the same text with the aim of reconstructing a lost original.

n. the humanistic discipline that attempts to reconstruct the transmission of a text (especially a text in manuscript form) on the basis of relations between the various surviving manuscripts (sometimes using cladisitc analysis); "stemmatology also plays an important role in musicology"; "transcription errors are of decisive importance in stemmatics" [syn: stemmatology]