The Cloud of Artefactual Variance
Variom asks a simple question:
What is a medieval artefact when it is not a single object, but a cloud of thousands of variant states?
Where scholarship often focuses on a chosen exemplar, Variom models the whole variational field: all the readings, omissions, expansions, glosses, rearrangements, and local traditions through which an artefact—literary, artistic, documentary, or otherwise—existed in practice.
Variom is:
- A system for ingesting witnesses (diplomatic, normalised, OCR/HTR, TEI, catalogue descriptions).
- A layer for aligning, comparing, and clustering readings across witnesses.
- A model that treats the artefact as a probabilistic entity, not a fixed one.
- A visualisation of variance clouds—zones of high and low stability.
- A way of asking what counts as “the artefact” before the standardisations of the modern world.
If Graphom is the archaeology of the material world, Variom is the archaeology of its possibilities.
