A Collaborative Ecosystem for Digital Coptic Studies

Scholarship on underresourced languages bring with them a variety of challenges which make access to the full spectrum of source materials and their evaluation difficult. For Coptic in particular, large scale analyses and any kind of quantitative work become difficult due to the fragmentation of manuscripts, the highly fusional nature of an incorporational morphology, and the complications of dealing with influences from Hellenistic era Greek, among other concerns. Many of these challenges, however, can be addressed using Digital Humanities tools and standards. In this paper, we outline some of the latest developments in Coptic Scriptorium, a DH project dedicated to bringing Coptic resources online in uniform, machine readable, and openly available formats. Collaborative web-based tools create online 'virtual departments' in which scholars dispersed sparsely across the globe can collaborate, and natural language processing tools counterbalance the scarcity of trained editors by enabling machine processing of Coptic text to produce searchable, annotated corpora.Comment: 9 pages; paper presented at the Stanford University CESTA Workshop "Collecting, Preserving and Disseminating Endangered Cultural Heritage for New Understandings Through Multilingual Approaches

A Linked Coptic Dictionary Online

We describe a new project publishing a freely available online dictionary for Coptic. The dictionary encompasses comprehensive cross-referencing mechanisms, including linking entries to an online scanned edition of Crum’s Coptic Dictionary, internal cross-references and etymological information, translated searchable definitions in English, French and German, and linked corpus data which provides frequencies and corpus look-up for headwords and multiword expressions. Headwords are available for linking in external projects using a REST API. We describe the challenges in encoding our dictionary using TEI XML and implementing linking mechanisms to construct a Web interface querying frequency information, which draw on NLP tools to recognize inflected forms in context. We evaluate our dictionary’s coverage using digital corpora of Coptic available online

deplacy: a CUI-based tree visualizer for Universal Dependencies

[じんもんこん2020]人文科学とコンピュータシンポジウム, 日程: 2020年12月12日(土)-13日(日), 会場: オンライン開催 (拠点)筑波大学筑波キャンパス春日エリア, 主催: 情報処理学会(IPSJ) 人文科学とコンピュータ研究会 (SIG-CH)Universal Dependenciesは, カレル大学のLINDAT/CLARINを中心に製作中の多言語係り受けコーパスであり, 現在, 90の言語に及んでいる. Universal Dependenciesを用いた係り受け解析ツールや, 係り受け可視化ツールも数多く製作されており, グラフィカルな画面に解析結果が出力されるようになってきている. ただ, 係り受け解析作業そのものは, CUI上でpythonなどのスクリプト言語を用いておこなうのが主であり, できれば解析結果もCUI上で見たい. そのような要求に答えるべく, 可視化ツールdeplacyを製作した. deplacyは, Universal Dependenciesにもとづく係り受け有向グラフを, CUI上に表示するpython3モジュールである. さらに, 50以上の書写言語にdeplacyを適用し, 各言語用のデモページをGoogle Colaboratory上に製作した. https://koichiyasuoka.github.io/deplacy/で公開中である.Universal Dependencies (UD) is a framework for annotation of parts-of-speech (POS) and syntactic-dependencies across different human languages. So many tools have been developed for UD: tokenizers, POS-taggers, dependency parsers, graphical visualizers of dependency graphs, etc. In this session the author shows deplacy, a CUI-based tree visualizer for UD across 50+ languages, and demonstrates deplacy on Google Colaboratory

Girls and Girlhood in Sources from the White Monastery: A Preliminary Study

Women lived as monks in their own houses, in communities of women, and possibly as semi-hermits in caves or tombs. In particular, at the White Monastery Federation, across the Nile from modern Akhmim and ancient Panopolis, a community of monastic women, one that included girls, existed from the fourth century on. In conducting my research for a forthcoming book on children and family, I found concrete evidence for the presence of girls in some monasteries – especially in the White Monastery Federation. Unfortunately the evidence was scarce. Therefore, writing a comprehensive social history of girls in late antique Egyptian monasticism proved difficult.This is the version of record, first published in volume 19 of Coptica. It has been made available in SHAREOK with the permission of the journal editor.Ye

Coptic SCRIPTORIUM: Digitizing a Corpus for Interdisciplinary Research in Ancient Egyptian

Coptic, having evolved from the language of the hieroglyphs of the pharaonic era, represents the last phase of the Egyptian language and is pivotal for a wide range of disciplines, such as linguistics, biblical studies, the history of Christianity, Egyptology, and ancient history. The Coptic language has proven essential for the decipherment and continued study of Ancient Egyptian and is of major interest for Afro-Asiatic linguistics and Coptic linguistics in its own right. Coptic manuscripts are sources for biblical and extra-biblical texts and document ancient and Christian history. Coptic SCRIPTORIUM will advance knowledge in these fields by increasing access to now largely inaccessible texts of historical, religious, and linguistic significance. The project designs digital tools and methodologies and applies them to literary texts, creating a rich open-access corpus

Coptic SCRIPTORIUM:A Corpus, Tools, and Methods for Corpus Linguistics and Computational Historical Research in Ancient Egypt

Coptic, having evolved from the language of the hieroglyphs of the pharaonic era, represents the last phase of the Egyptian language and is pivotal for a wide range of disciplines, such as linguistics, biblical studies, the history of Christianity, Egyptology, and ancient history. Coptic SCRIPTORIUM provides the first open-source technologies for computational and digital research across the disciplines as applied to Egyptian texts. The project is developing a digitized corpus of Coptic texts available in multiple formats and visualizations (including TEI XML), tools to analyze and process the language (e.g., the first Coptic part-of-speech tagger), a database with search and visualization capabilities, and a collaborative platform for scholars to contribute texts and annotations and to conduct research. The technologies and corpus will function as a collaborative environment for digital research by any scholars working in Coptic

Digital Classical Philology

The buzzwords “Information Society” and “Age of Access” suggest that information is now universally accessible without any form of hindrance. Indeed, the German constitution calls for all citizens to have open access to information. Yet in reality, there are multifarious hurdles to information access – whether physical, economic, intellectual, linguistic, political, or technical. Thus, while new methods and practices for making information accessible arise on a daily basis, we are nevertheless confronted by limitations to information access in various domains. This new book series assembles academics and professionals in various fields in order to illuminate the various dimensions of information's inaccessability. While the series discusses principles and techniques for transcending the hurdles to information access, it also addresses necessary boundaries to accessability.This book describes the state of the art of digital philology with a focus on ancient Greek and Latin. It addresses problems such as accessibility of information about Greek and Latin sources, data entry, collection and analysis of Classical texts and describes the fundamental role of libraries in building digital catalogs and developing machine-readable citation systems