Find research datasets worth reusing

Social network position experiences more variable selection than weaponry in wild subpopulations of forked fungus beetles

1. The phenotypic expression and fitness consequences of behaviors that are exhibited during social interactions are especially sensitive to their local social context. This context-dependence is expected to generate more variation in the sign and magnitude of selection on social behavior than that experienced by static characters like morphology. Relatively few studies, however, have examined selection on behavioral traits in multiple populations. 2. We estimated sexual selection in the wild to determine if the strength and form of selection on social phenotypes is more variable than that on morphology. 3. We compared selection gradients on social network position, body size, and weaponry of male forked fungus beetles (Bolitotherus cornutus) as they influenced mating success across nine natural subpopulations. 4. Male horn length consistently experienced positive sexual selection. However, the sign and magnitude of selection on individual measures of network centrality (strength and betweenness) differed significantly among subpopulations. Moreover, selection on social behaviors occurred at local scale ("soft selection"), whereas selection on horn length occurred at the metapopulation scale ("hard selection"). 5. These results indicate that an individual with a given social phenotype could experience different fitness consequences depending on the network it occupies. While individuals seem to be unable to escape the fitness effects of their morphology, they may have the potential to mediate the pressures of selection on behavioral phenotypes by moving among subpopulations or altering social connections within a network.

Data from: Detecting and quantifying social transmission using network-based diffusion analysis

1. Although social learning capabilities are taxonomically widespread, demonstrating that freely interacting animals (whether wild or captive) rely on social learning has proved remarkably challenging. 2. Network-based diffusion analysis (NBDA) offers a means for detecting social learning using observational data on freely interacting groups. Its core assumption is that if a target behaviour is socially transmitted, then its spread should follow the connections in a social network that reflects social learning opportunities. 3. Here, we provide a comprehensive guide for using NBDA. We first introduce its underlying mathematical framework and present the types of questions that NBDA can address. We then guide researchers through the process of: selecting an appropriate social network for their research question; determining which NBDA variant should be used; and incorporating other variables that may impact asocial and social learning. Finally, we discuss how to interpret an NBDA model's output and provide practical recommendations for model selection. 4. Throughout, we highlight extensions to the basic NBDA framework, including incorporation of dynamic networks to capture changes in social relationships during a diffusion and using a multi-network NBDA to estimate information flow across multiple types of social relationship. 5. Alongside this information, we provide worked examples and tutorials demonstrating how to perform analyses using the newly developed NBDA package written in the R programming language.

Data collected by fruit body– and DNA-based survey methods yield consistent species-to-species association networks in wood-inhabiting fungal communities

Inferring interspecific interactions indirectly from community data is of central interest in community ecology. Data on species communities can be surveyed using different methods, each of which may differ in the amount and type of species detected, and thus produce varying information on interaction networks. Since fruit bodies reflect only a fraction of the woodinhabiting fungal diversity, there is an ongoing debate in fungal ecology on whether fruit body– based surveys are a valid method for studying fungal community dynamics compared to surveys based on DNA metabarcoding. In this paper, we focus on species-to-species associations and ask whether the associations inferred from data collected by fruit-body surveys reflect the ones found from data collected by DNA-based surveys. We estimate and compare the association networks resulting from different survey methods using a joint species distribution model. We recorded both raw and residual associations that respectively do not and do correct for the influence of the abiotic predictors when estimating the species-to-species associations. The analyses of the DNA data yielded a larger number of species-to-species associations than the analyses of the fruit body–based data as expected. Yet, we estimated unique associations also from the fruit-body data. Our results show that the directions of estimated residual associations were consistent between the data types, whereas the raw associations were much less consistent, highlighting the need to account for the influence of relevant environmental covariates when estimating association networks. We conclude that even though DNA-based survey methods are more informative about the total number of interacting species, fruit-body surveys are also an adequate method for inferring association networks in wood-inhabiting fungi. Since the DNA and fruit-body data carry on complementary information on fungal communities, the most comprehensive insights are obtained by combining the two survey methods.

Re-evaluating deep neural networks for phylogeny estimation: the issue of taxon sampling

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are powerful machine learning models that are widely used for classification problems, and have been recently proposed for quartet tree phylogeny estimation (Survorov et al. Systematic Biology 2020 and Zou et al. Molecular Biology and Evolution 2020). Here we present a study evaluating recently trained DNNs (from Zou et al., MBE 2020) in comparison to a collection of standard phylogeny estimation methods, including UPGMA, neighbor joining, maximum parsimony, and maximum likelihood, on a heterogeneous collection of 20-sequence datasets simulated under the same models that were used to train the DNNs, and also under similar conditions but with higher rates of evolution. Our study shows that using DNNs with quartet amalgamation (to combine quartet trees into a tree on the full dataset) is only more accurate than UPGMA, and otherwise is less accurate than all standard phylogeny estimation methods we explore (maximum likelihood, neighbor joining, and maximum parsimony). We further find that while DNNs can provide good quartet tree accuracy, some standard phylogeny estimation methods match or improve on DNNs for quartet accuracy, especially, but not exclusively, when used in a global manner (i.e., the tree on the full dataset is computed and then the induced quartet trees are extracted from the full tree). Thus, our study provides evidence that a major challenge impacting the utility of current DNNs for phylogeny estimation is their restriction to estimating quartet trees which must subsequently be combined into a tree on the full dataset: in contrast, global methods -- i.e., those that estimate trees from the full set of sequences -- are able to benefit from taxon sampling, and hence have higher accuracy on large datasets.

opencc-zeroDec 2019View details →

Beyond seedlings: ectomycorrhizal fungal networks and growth of mature Pseudotsuga menziesii

1. Mycorrhizal networks are conduits for the transfer of resources between hosts. While ectomycorrhizal networks (EMN) are known to influence seedlings, their effect on adult tree growth remains unknown and may have important implications for forest responses to future climates. 2. We used annual basal area increment of trees and previously described Rhizopogon vesiculosus and Rhizopogon vinicolor EMNs to examine an association between the number of connections between trees through an EMN and the growth of adult interior Douglas-fir. We compared this relationship for the year the networks were mapped, in 2008, with eight years previous and eight years afterward. We also compared the variation in standardized growth (2000–2016) to examine the association between growth variability and EMN variables. 3. Greater growth was positively associated with 1) the number of connections to other trees via a Rhizopogon vinicolor EMN, and 2) the number of genets of Rhizopogon vesiculosis by which a tree was colonized. Variation of growth (2000–2016) was negatively associated with increasing number of connections to other trees via Rhizopogon vinicolor. Synthesis. These findings, for the first time, indicate that EMNs may positively influence the growth of adult trees. The difference in tree growth response between the sister fungal species highlights a novel avenue to identify interspecific and intraspecific differences between species occurring at different depths in the soil. Our study has important implications when considering the role of EMNs in influencing forest health and mitigating stress from environmental conditions.

opencc-by-4.0Aug 2020View details →

Leaf Vein Network CNN Images

This download site contains the CNN vein network predictions and set of Matlab programs  that were used for the analyses in Xu et al., (2020) and Blonder et al., (2020). These require Matlab 2020a or later. They may work on earlier versions of MatLab, but this has not been tested and cannot be guaranteed. The files are as follows: <ol> <li>Zip files (e.g. BEL_downsampled_images.zip) containing a complete set of images of leaf vein predictions from a fully trained convolutional neural network (CNN), along with the ground truth data. Each folder in the unzipped file contains a sample represented by a CODE with format X-TY-BZ. X represents the name of a plot in the Global Ecosystems Monitoring network database (e.g. 'BEL'). Tree (T) Y indicates the number of a tree within a plot (e.g. '101') and Z represents the light stratum of the canopy where the leaf was collected (either 'S' for 'sunlit' or 'SH' for 'shaded').</li> <li>A set of Matlab programs (Matlab files.zip) to compare the CNN predictions against other vein extraction approaches.</li> <li>A Matlab Readme file with instructions on how to run the analyses.</li> </ol> References Software GUI: Xu, H., Blonder, B., Jodra, M., Malhi, Y. and Fricker, M.D. (2020) Automated and accurate segmentation of leaf venation networks via deep learning. New Phytol. (In press). Analysis of trait data: Blonder, B., S. Both, M. Jodra, H. Xu, M. Fricker, I. S. Matos, N. Majalap, D. F. R. P. Burslem, Y. Teh and Y. Malhi (2020) Linking functional traits to multiscale statistics of leaf venation networks. New Phytol. (In press). Original image data set and ground truths Blonder, B., Both, S., Jodra, M., Majalap, N., Burslem, D., Teh, Y. A., and Malhi, Y. (2019) Leaf venation networks of Bornean trees: images and hand‐traced segmentations. Ecology 100: e02844.<a href="https://doi.org/10.1002/ecy.2844">10.1002/ecy.2844</a>. Available from: <a href="https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:de65fc07-4b8f-4277-a6c4-82836afbdeb3">https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:de65fc07-4b8f-4277-a6c4-82836afbdeb3</a>

opencc-by-4.0Sep 2020View details →

Meaning maps and saliency models based on deep convolutional neural networks are insensitive to image meaning when predicting human fixations - data

Data from the paper: Meaning maps and saliency models based on deep convolutional neural networks are insensitive to image meaning when predicting human fixations. Preprint: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/840256v1 Marek A. Pedziwiatr marek.pedziwi@gmail.com September 2020

opencc-by-4.0Dec 2019View details →

Data of "A network-ready random-access qubits memory"

Data published in "A network-ready random-access qubits memory" npj Quantum Information

opencc-by-4.0Sep 2020View details →

Transition from Light Diffusion to Localization in Three-Dimensional Amorphous Dielectric Networks near the Band Edge

Data files and codes to generate all data considered in "Transition from Light Diffusion to Localization in Three-Dimensional Amorphous Dielectric Networks near the Band Edge", J. Haberko, L.S. Froufe-Perez, and F. Scheffold, Nature Communications 2020. DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-18571-w

opencc-zeroOct 2020View details →

Data from: Ethanol abolishes vigilance-dependent astroglia network activation in mice by inhibiting norepinephrine release

This collection of data sets was obtained during a study of the effect of acute ethanol intoxication on vigilance-dependent astroglia network activation in mice. The main findings have been that ethanol inhibits astroglia activation by inhibiting vigilance-dependent norepinephrine release. This leads to a failure of activation of alpha1A-adrenergic receptors on astroglia. Further, this study has revealed that ethanol inhibition of cerebellar Bergmann glia Ca2+ activation does not account for ataxic motor behavior, but may rather contribute to cognitive deficits.

opencc-by-4.0Oct 2020View details →

Effort data from the FLT Mediterranean Network 2008-2018

Effort data used for the analysis presented in the manuscript  "Trends in summer presence of fin whales in the Western Mediterranean Sea Region: new insights from a long-term monitoring program" - submitted for publication on PeerJ.  Shape file represent transect monitored under favourable weather condition (sea state <=4) using ferries as platform of opportunity.

opencc-zeroOct 2020View details →

Temporal and spatial changes in benthic invertebrate trophic networks along a salinity gradient

Species interactions underlie all ecosystem goods and services and are important for understanding ecosystem changes. Representing one type of species interaction, trophic networks are able to be constructed from biodiversity monitoring data and known trophic links to understand how ecosystems have changed over time. The Baltic Sea is subject to high anthropogenic pressures, and its low species diversity makes it an ideal candidate for understanding how pressures change food webs. In this study, we used benthic monitoring data from 20 years (1980-1989 and 2010-2019) from the Swedish coast of the Baltic Sea and Skagerrak to investigate changes in benthic invertebrate trophic interactions. We constructed food webs and calculated traditional food web metrics that we compared over space and time. Our results show that the west coast of Sweden (Skagerrak) showed a reduction in benthic invertebrate biodiversity by 40% between the 1980's and 2010's, and that the number of links, linkage diversity, generality of predators, and vulnerability of prey have been significantly reduced. However, connectance has not significantly changed in the Skagerrak. The other basins (Bothnian Sea, Baltic Proper and Bornholm Basin) do not show any consistent significant trends in any food web metrics investigated, demonstrating resilience at a lower species diversity. The decreased complexity of the Skagerrak food webs indicates vulnerability to further perturbations and pressures should be limited as much as possible to ensure continued ecosystem functions.

opencc-zeroOct 2020View details →

Interspecific social dominance networks reveal mechanisms promoting coexistence in sympatric charrs in Hokkaido, Japan

1. Coexistence of species requires equalizing mechanisms that minimize fitness differences, which are balanced by stabilizing mechanisms that enhance negative intraspecific interactions versus interspecific ones. Here, we develop a simple theoretical framework that allows measuring the relative strength of intraspecific versus interspecific competition in dominance hierarchies. We use it to evaluate mechanisms promoting coexistence between congeneric charrs that compete for foraging positions, which strongly influence density-dependent growth and survival. 2. Agonistic interactions (n = 761) among 71 Dolly Varden Salvelinus malma and whitespotted charr S. leucomaenis were measured by snorkeling in two pools in the sympatric zone of a Hokkaido stream during two summers. Interspecific dominance hierarchies, analyzed using three methods, were closely correlated with fish length but the species treated each other equally. Ranks for the most dominant fish in each pool, determined directly by knockout experiments, were also virtually identical to ranks by length. 3. Similarly, exponential random graph modeling of the social networks provided no evidence that either species was dominant over the other. Instead, larger fish were more likely to win contests, especially over fish of the next lower ranks. 4. These results demonstrated that the two species were nearly ecological equivalents in accessing key resources in this sympatric zone. Nearly identical growth and stable densities over 4 years further supported this inference, although Dolly Varden were a minority (29% of the assemblage), a sign of some fitness difference. 5. Detailed foraging observations coupled with two concurrent studies revealed an effective stabilizing mechanism. Dolly Varden shifted to feeding directly from the benthos when drifting invertebrates declined, a behavior enhanced by morphological character displacement, thereby partitioning food resources and enhancing intraspecific competition while avoiding agonistic encounters with whitespotted charr. 6. The plurality of evidence indicates that fitness differences between these ecologically equivalent species are small in this local assemblage, and balanced by resource partitioning, a modest stabilizing mechanism that promotes coexistence. The theoretical framework presented here is a useful tool to evaluate the strength of interspecific versus intraspecific competition, which combined with information on tradeoffs in ecological performance can contribute to a mechanistic understanding of species coexistence. 26-Oct-2020

opencc-zeroDec 2018View details →

Data from: A meta-analysis of plant interaction networks reveals competitive hierarchies as well as facilitation and intransitivity

The extent to which competitive interactions and niche differentiation structure communities has been highly controversial. To quantify evidence for key features of plant community structure, I recharacterized published data from interaction experiments as networks of competitive and facilitative interactions. I measured the network structure of 31 woody and herbaceous communities, including the intensity, distribution, and diversity of interactions at the species-pair and community level to determine the generality of competition, winner-loser relationships, and unequal interaction allocation. I developed novel methodology using meta-analysis to incorporate interaction uncertainty into estimates of structural metrics among independent networks. Plant communities were competitive, but intraspecific interactions were sometimes more intense than interspecific interactions. On the whole, interactions were imbalanced and communities were transitive. However, facilitation, balanced interactions, and intransitivity were common in individual communities. Synthesizing network metrics using meta-analysis is an original approach with which to generalize community structure in a systematic way.

opencc-by-4.0Oct 2020View details →

SAPPAN: Combined Network and Host Data

The data were acquired from a small simulated environment consisting of one Windows host (host data collection) and a router that observes all network traffic passing to the host. Two attack scenarios were performed in these small simulated environments, and data relevant to these attacks were extracted and further processed. In the case, the attack scenario was based on the Drupal web application's vulnerability, which enabled downloading and running of a malicious code that provided a remote shell to the attacker. In the case, the scenario was based on the old version of the Samba file-sharing that was vulnerable to Eternalblue attack allowing to execute commands and provide a remote shell to the attacker.  The dataset is divided into separate directories according to the attacks contained. In the case of the Drupal vulnerability scenario, datasets from a failed and successful attempt to exploit the vulnerability are included. Four datasets were created during individual phases of SMB file sharing vulnerability scenario. Each directory contains a normalized network traffic capture and corresponding host data in preformatted JSON.   Drupal Vulnerability Scenario The attack scenario is based on an old Drupal server (v 8.5.0) with known vulnerability CVE-2018-7600 (also called Drupalgeddon). This vulnerability is exploited by an attacker to remotely run code and gain access to the vulnerable server via a remote shell. This connection is realized by the Meterpreter trojan of type python/meterpreter/reverse_tcp.  The binary is created by Metasploit generator msfvenom and obfuscated using the attacker's custom obfuscation technique to bypass windows antivirus. The created binary file is delivered to the victim host using remote code execution in Drupal, based on which the "finger" command is executed to download the payload from the payload delivery server and C2 server. This trojan is then launched by an attacker using additional commands injected through the Drupal vulnerability. Once launched, it automatically establishes a connection with the attacker (remote shell) through the payload delivery and C2 server. As a result, the attacker gains full access to the system and can execute any commands (in the scenario, only the "whoami" command is executed). Two datasets were generated during the scenario and its preparation. The first was obtained during the preparatory work when the server's defense mechanisms blocked an attacker's attempt to download the file (a command "MpCmdRun.exe" is used instead of the "finger" command). The second dataset contains a complete attack performed after modifying the executed commands to overcome the mentioned defense mechanisms. Samba File Sharing Vulnerability Scenario The attack scenario is based on an unpatched Windows 7 host with known vulnerability CVE-2017-0144 (also called EternalBlue). The scenario is divided into four parts covering the individual phases of the attack and failed exploitation attempts. In the first part, the attacker performs a scan of open ports on the client device and verifies if the SMB file sharing service is vulnerable to the EternalBlue attack. In the next phase, the attacker unsuccessfully tries to exploit the vulnerability using a standard Metasploit module. This procedure does not result in a remote connection. In the third phase, a specialized exploit is used to attack the service using previously known credentials. In the fourth phase, the attacker tried another script to make the scenario more complex, enabling the attack to be performed without credentials. For each mentioned phase, a separate dataset was generated, capturing all events in the form of packet traces and corresponding host data.   Dataset Features In the case of packet capture, the dataset contains standard PCAP files containing all captured packets, including the complete application layer. The raw host data were reduced to contain only the following attributes: <ul> <li>event_id - unique Identifier of the event, assigned by a preprocessor</li> <li>event_type - a type of the event</li> <li>time_created - time when the sensor recorded the event</li> <li>event_data - event type-specific payload</li> </ul>

Networks of Shared Manuscript Transmission for Medieval European Vernacular Languages

Codices that compile different textual units in the same physical object were common in the European Middle Ages. Many reasons guided scribes when collecting a variety of works and their analysis can offer scholars insight into scribal practices and the circulation of medieval works. In order to study this shared transmission of medieval texts, methods from network analysis offer the possibility of researching the phenomenon from a general perspective and discover fundamental trends. This paper deals with the methodological and practical foundations for such an approach.   Modern digital databases of medieval manuscripts provide a big amount of relevant data for this type of research. In this presentation, I consider three online databases, each dealing with textual witnesses in vernacular languages: Handschriftencensus (German) Jonas (French and Occitan) and Philobiblon (Iberian languages). Each of these has different criteria on data collection and data modelling. For this reason, their analysis and comparison offers insight not only on medieval manuscripts and texts, but also on the consequences of different approaches when cataloguing and describing medieval manuscripts.

Pareto Fronts and metrics for the optimization design water distribution networks (Hanoi, Fossolo, Modena, and Balerma)

Approximations to the Best-known PFs using NSGA-II retrofitted by OPUS for Hanoi, Fossolo, Modena, and Balerma, Approximations to the Best-known PFs using NSGA-II for Hanoi, Fossolo, Modena and Balerma, Hypervolume (HV) and Modified Inverted Generational Distance (IGD+) for Hanoi, Fossolo, Modena, and Balerma. <ul> <li>Hanoi (30 simulations)</li> <li>Fossolo (30 simulations)</li> <li>Modena (1 simulation)</li> <li>Balerma (1 simulation)</li> </ul>

Recognized trophoblast-like cells conversion from human embryonic stem cells by BMP4 based on convolutional neural network

The use of models of stem cell differentiation to trophoblastic cells provides an effective perspective for understanding the early molecular events in the establishment and maintenance of human pregnancy. In combination with the newly developed deep learning technology, the automated identification of this process can greatly accelerate the contribution to relevant knowledge. Based on the transfer learning technique, we used a convolutional neural network to distinguish the microscopic images of Embryonic stem cells (ESCs) from differentiated trophoblasts -like cells (TBL). To tackle the problem of insufficient training data, the strategies of data augmentation were used. The results showed that the convolutional neural network could successfully recognize trophoblast cells and stem cells automatically, but could not distinguish TBL from the immortalized trophoblast cell lines in vitro (JEG-3 and HTR8-SVneo). We compare the recognition effect of the commonly used convolutional neural network, including DenseNet, VGG16, VGG19, InceptionV3, and Xception. This study extends the deep learning technique to trophoblast cell phenotype classification and paves the way for automatic bright-field microscopic image analysis of trophoblast cells in the future.

Audible Networks: Connecting Texts through Music in 16th-Century Swiss Printed Ballads

In recent years, researchers of early modern print culture, particularly those concerned with news circulation, have increasingly embraced network analysis to account for the flow of information across different regions and media. Even though most of these studies focus on people or cities as nodes and hubs in networks of news distribution, interrelations on a textual level, such as networks of co-citation, have received some attention as well. These approaches, as well as examples of textual network analysis in media history of more recent periods, can serve as inspiration for the study of early modern printed ballads. Like in other printed objects, connections between different ballads can be discerned on a textual level, i.e. as adaptations of existing lyrics, quotation or the combination of several ballads in one print. However, and perhaps obviously, ballads can also be associated on a musical level. The practice of using already existing, popular melodies as a basis for a new text – commonly referred to as “contrafactum” – has repeatedly been shown to be relevant not only as a mnemonic device, but as a means for alluding to themes of existing songs. Previous studies have suggested that this technique was often consciously employed by the authors of songs in order to add an additional layer of meaning. This paper will present some early deliberations within the framework of an ongoing PhD project on political ballads of the 16th-century Swiss Confederation. The project as a whole examines songs from a perspective of media history, investigating their role in constructing and transmitting ideas and imaginations about diplomatic relations between the confederates. Using the example of “contrafactum-relations”, the paper will explore how a methodology inspired by network analysis might be useful in this endeavour. Based on an initial corpus of around 150 printed ballads (containing both original songs and reprints or adaptations of earlier songs) printed in Switzerland between 1530 and 1600, it will provide a visual representation of the connection between the different songs as a network in which individual printed songs function as nodes and melodies as edges. This will allow for the identification of particularly influential melodies, chains of “musical references” and clusters of songs which share the same melodies. These results, in turn, may be put in relation to the subject matter of the songs in question and compared to text-based networks, thus not only providing visual and quantitative evidence of the practice of contrafactum, but giving insight into the mechanisms by which information is transmitted through this particular medium.

From Networks of Texts to Networks of Genres? On the Classification of Texts in Compilations with a View towards Manuscript Transmission

At the end of the 14th century, Jakob Twinger von Königshofen, a cleric from Strasbourg, composed a chronicle in the vernacular that spread widely – up to today nearly 130 manuscripts are known that contain the text, wholly or in parts, and that were produced not only in Strasbourg, but as far as Cologne, Augsburg, or Tyrol. About thirty qualify as true copies, while in the big majority of the witnesses, the text is altered in various ways: abbreviated, augmented, updated, corrected, put in a dierent order, and more often than not combined with other texts, either with distinct text boundaries or resulting in new compositions made of several texts. In several manuscripts, a combination of historiographical texts – chronicles, annals, lists, etc. – can be observed, leading to the assumption that Twinger’s work was preferably copied for historiographical compilations and that its structure facilitated some historiographical activity of the recipients. But this view puts a big weight on the genre of Twinger’s work, making it a filter through which all the other texts in a codex are seen. As I have been working on the chronicle transmission, the attribute in common of the known manuscripts is of course the appearance of at least some lines of the Twinger chronicle; but the attempt to look at a single codex as objectively as possible, without giving preference to a particular text, can not only reveal connections between different manuscripts, but also the fluidity and flexibility of medieval texts. The classification of a work as part of a certain genre does not necessarily hold true for its entire transmission, for the manifestation of a distinct text – what is, on the one hand, a nuisance, but on the other a chance to better understand medieval text transmission, manuscript production and the transfer of knowledge. The co-occurrence of certain texts in several manuscripts hints towards intentional copying processes that are reflecting particular interests not only of one individual scribe or commissioner; multiple occurrences of particular compilations can reveal networks that go unseen if the content of a codex is not regarded as a whole. While a text-based analysis often faces difficulties that result from insufficient manuscript descriptions, a broader view that would compare less particular texts, but more areas of interest or fields of knowledge, has to deal with problems regarding the classification of the single texts: Apart from an inevitable subjectivity, questions about the criteria and levels of classification have to be addressed, while the danger of over- or under-representation is always lurking. Discussing these issues and the applicability and usefulness of the comparison of codices from a kind-of-genre-perspective could be fruitful to develop a better understanding for the transmission of manuscripts, of texts and of knowledge.