This program is designed for use in phylogenetic studies by biologists. Its use in analysing the descent of manuscripts was suggested in the article "Computer-Assisted Methods of Stemmatic Analysis" by Robert O'Hara and Peter Robinson (Canterbury Tales Project Occasional Papers, vol. 1, 1993).
In reading diagrams produced by this program it is necessary to bear in mind that it does not distinguish between the case in which one MS is a direct copy of the other and the case in which each is a copy of a common exemplar. It is also necessary to remember that each branching can be rotated; rotations would produce diagrams of different appearance but the same meaning.
The program can be instructed to treat some variants as being more significant than others, but we have not done that. Therefore no great weight should be given to the finer detail of the diagrams. We have used the program to check whether there were other patterns of possible relationship that had not caught our attention, but in fact the main features of the diagrams have been consistent with our own hypotheses.
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