Collating Medieval Vernacular Texts. Aligning Witnesses, Classifying Variants

International audienc

heiEDITIONS – eine Heidelberger Infrastruktur für Editionen (nicht nur) mittelalterlicher Texte

Die seit 2018 an der Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg unter dem Namen heiEDITIONS entwickelte Infrastruktur für digitale Editionen baut auf Erfahrungen in der Digitalisierung, in der virtuellen Rekonstruktion von Sammlungen und in der Handschriftenerschließung auf und fügt sich als Teil der Heidelberg Research Infra­structure (heiRIS) zu den in Heidelberg strategisch vorangetriebenen Maßnahmen zur Förderung wissenschaftlichen Publikationswesens im Open Access. Besonderer Wert wird darauf gelegt, dass die Datenmodellierung und Visualisierung den vielfäl­ti­gen Dimensionen der edierten Gegenstände gerecht werden. Gerade den Bedarfen der Altgermanistik kommt dabei eine wichtige Rolle zu

Exercises in modelling: textual variants

The article presents a model for annotating textual variants. The annotations made can be queried in order to analyse and find patterns in textual variation. The model is flexible, allowing scholars to set the boundaries of the readings, to nest or concatenate variation sites, and to annotate each pair of readings; furthermore, it organizes the characteristics of the variants in features of the readings and features of the variation. After presenting the conceptual model and its applications in a number of case studies, this article introduces two implementations in logical models: namely, a relational database schema and an OWL 2 ontology. While the scope of this article is a specific issue in textual criticism, its broader focus is on how data is structured and visualized in digital scholarly editing

Querying Variants: Boccaccio's ‘Commedia' and Data-Models

This paper presents the methodology and the results of an analytical study of the three witnesses of Dante's Commedia copied by Giovanni Boccaccio, demonstrating how these extraordinary materials allow us to further our knowledge of Boccaccio's cultural trajectory as a scribe and as an author. In the first section, the manuscripts and their role in previous scholarship are introduced. A thorough analysis of a choice of variants is then offered, applying specific categories for organizing the varia lectio. This taxonomy shows how fundamental it is to combine the methodological tools for studying copies (as usual in medieval philology) and those for studying author’s manuscripts (as usual in modern philology) in dealing with the three manuscripts of Boccaccio’s Commedia: in fact, the comparative analysis of the three manuscripts has much to reveal not only of their genetic relationship but also of Boccaccio's editorial practices. Furthermore, the analytic categories inform the computational model behind the web application La ‘Commedia’ di Boccaccio, <http://boccacciocommedia.it/>, created for accessing and querying the variants. The model, implemented in a relational database, allows for the systematic management of different features of textual variations, distinguishing readings and their relationships, without setting a base text. The paper closes on a view to repurposing the model for handling other textual transmissions, working at the intersection between textual criticism and information technology

Software Support for Discourse-Based Textual Information Analysis: A Systematic Literature Review and Software Guidelines in Practice

[Abstract] The intrinsic characteristics of humanities research require technological support and software assistance that also necessarily goes through the analysis of textual narratives. When these narratives become increasingly complex, pragmatics analysis (i.e., at discourse or argumentation levels) assisted by software is a great ally in the digital humanities. In recent years, solutions have been developed from the information visualization domain to support discourse analysis or argumentation analysis of textual sources via software, with applications in political speeches, debates, online forums, but also in written narratives, literature or historical sources. This paper presents a wide and interdisciplinary systematic literature review (SLR), both in software-related areas and humanities areas, on the information visualization and the software solutions adopted to support pragmatics textual analysis. As a result of this review, this paper detects weaknesses in existing works on the field, especially related to solutions’ availability, pragmatic framework dependence and lack of information sharing and reuse software mechanisms. The paper also provides some software guidelines for improving the detected weaknesses, exemplifying some guidelines in practice through their implementation in a new web tool, Viscourse. Viscourse is conceived as a complementary tool to assist textual analysis and to facilitate the reuse of informational pieces from discourse and argumentation text analysis tasks.Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad; FJCI-2016-6 28032Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades; RTI2018-093336-B-C2

Handbook of Stemmatology

Stemmatology studies aspects of textual criticism that use genealogical methods. This handbook is the first to cover the entire field, encompassing both theoretical and practical aspects, ranging from traditional to digital methods. Authors from all the disciplines involved examine topics such as the material aspects of text traditions, methods of traditional textual criticism and their genesis, and modern digital approaches used in the field

Translation Alignment Applied to Historical Languages: methods, evaluation, applications, and visualization

Translation alignment is an essential task in Digital Humanities and Natural Language Processing, and it aims to link words/phrases in the source text with their translation equivalents in the translation. In addition to its importance in teaching and learning historical languages, translation alignment builds bridges between ancient and modern languages through which various linguistics annotations can be transferred. This thesis focuses on word-level translation alignment applied to historical languages in general and Ancient Greek and Latin in particular. As the title indicates, the thesis addresses four interdisciplinary aspects of translation alignment. The starting point was developing Ugarit, an interactive annotation tool to perform manual alignment aiming to gather training data to train an automatic alignment model. This effort resulted in more than 190k accurate translation pairs that I used for supervised training later. Ugarit has been used by many researchers and scholars also in the classroom at several institutions for teaching and learning ancient languages, which resulted in a large, diverse crowd-sourced aligned parallel corpus allowing us to conduct experiments and qualitative analysis to detect recurring patterns in annotators’ alignment practice and the generated translation pairs. Further, I employed the recent advances in NLP and language modeling to develop an automatic alignment model for historical low-resourced languages, experimenting with various training objectives and proposing a training strategy for historical languages that combines supervised and unsupervised training with mono- and multilingual texts. Then, I integrated this alignment model into other development workflows to project cross-lingual annotations and induce bilingual dictionaries from parallel corpora. Evaluation is essential to assess the quality of any model. To ensure employing the best practice, I reviewed the current evaluation procedure, defined its limitations, and proposed two new evaluation metrics. Moreover, I introduced a visual analytics framework to explore and inspect alignment gold standard datasets and support quantitative and qualitative evaluation of translation alignment models. Besides, I designed and implemented visual analytics tools and reading environments for parallel texts and proposed various visualization approaches to support different alignment-related tasks employing the latest advances in information visualization and best practice. Overall, this thesis presents a comprehensive study that includes manual and automatic alignment techniques, evaluation methods and visual analytics tools that aim to advance the field of translation alignment for historical languages