Towards a flexible open-source software library for multi-layered scholarly textual studies: An Arabic case study dealing with semi-automatic language processing

This paper presents both the general model and a case study of the Computational and Collaborative Philology Library (CoPhiLib), an ongoing initiative underway at the Institute for Computational Linguistics (ILC) of the National Research Council (CNR), Pisa, Italy. The library, designed and organized as a reusable, abstract and open-source software component, aims at solving the needs of multi-lingual and cross-lingual analysis by exposing common Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). The core modules, coded by the Java programming language, constitute the groundwork of a Web platform designed to deal with textual scholarly needs. The Web application, implemented according to the Java Enterprise specifications, focuses on multi-layered analysis for the study of literary documents and related multimedia sources. This ambitious challenge seeks to obtain the management of textual resources, on the one hand by abstracting from current language, on the other hand by decoupling from the specific requirements of single projects. This goal is achieved thanks to methodologies declared by the 'agile process', and by putting into effect suitable use case modeling, design patterns, and component-based architectures. The reusability and flexibility of the system have been tested on an Arabic case study: the system allows users to choose the morphological engine (such as AraMorph or Al-Khalil), along with linguistic granularity (i.e. with or without declension). Finally, the application enables the construction of annotated resources for further statistical engines (training set). © 2014 IEEE

New methods for working with old languages: Corpus Linguistics and the future of Textual Scholarship

We are seeking DFG/NEH support to allow us to host workshops in the US in the summer of 2009 and in Germany in the summer of 2010 in order to explore the application of emerging analytical technologies to classics in particular and the humanities in general. These workshops will focus not only on emerging services (such as named entity recognition, syntactic and morphological analysis, text mining) and knowledge structures (such as domain-specific ontologies), but on the new forms of scholarly knowledge and intellectual analysis that arise as a result. The 2009 workshop will produce a series of papers that document the state of language technologies in the field of classical philology and propose a roadmap for a more general cyberinfrastructure for the study of historical linguistic sources. These papers will circulate during the 2009-10 academic year and lay the foundation for the 2010 workshop in Germany, which will engage other humanities disciplines

Classical Studies for the New Millennium: Traditional Material Through new Methods and Perspectives

In her contribution ‘Classical Studies for the new millennium: traditional material through new methods and perspectives’, Eleni Bozia presents a variety of digital teaching examples that also address contemporary problems, such as identity politics from antiquity to contemporary time, the symbiotic relationship between humanities and technology, and the significance of language learning. Students are taught to work on ancient representations of ethnicity, race, and citizenship and their modern equivalents, engage with the significance of technology for the humanities and vice versa, and appreciate the politics of language in all disciplines and areas of research, by engaging in digital storytelling, using digital resources in sociolinguistic analysis of ancient and modern texts, and pursuing interdisciplinary projects

Highly Interactive and Natural User Interfaces: Enabling Visual Analysis in Historical Lexicography

Proceedings of the First International Conference on Digital Access to Textual Cultural Heritage.Information technology, through the advances provided by computational linguistics and related disciplines, has opened the door to previously unthinkable possibilities of study in linguistics. The wealth and diversity of sources that is now available is fundamental to the understanding of language evolution and dictionary-making. However, these advancements are paired with a paradigm shift, in which both the user needs and the modes in which the users interact with technology have changed so much and so rapidly, that modern lexicography would need to resort to a new generation of tools to support its tasks. We present our work developed for the Nuevo Diccionario Histórico del Español (NDHE), in which the challenges of enabling deeper insight and supporting new user's tasks in diachronic linguistics have been approached from a human-computer interaction perspective. Thus, in contrast to what has happened in other disciplines in which visual analytics has focused its efforts since earlier, the analysis tools that are made now in the hands of the experts usually provide a volume of "raw" data so vast, that the data themselves can greatly hinder the work of experts. The linguistics community has already recognized the key importance of user-friendly interfaces. However, neither more powerful tools (in terms of automatic processing) nor user-friendliness alone are sufficient to support typical analytical tasks that take out the most from the multidimensional and ever-growing data stored in corpora and dictionaries. This paper discusses the benefits of producing corpus and dictionary analysis tools that go beyond user-friendliness and presents, interactive visual analysis tools produced for the NDHE and its sources

Measuring Greekness: A novel computational methodology to analyze syntactical constructions and quantify the stylistic phenomenon of Attic oratory

This study is the result of a compilation and interpretation of data that derive from Classical studies, but are studied and analyzed using computational linguistics, Treebank annotation, and the development and post-processing of metrics. More specifically, the purpose of this work is to employ computational methods so as to analyze a particular form of Ancient Greek language that is Attic Greek, “measure” its attributes, and explore the socio-political connotations that its usage had in the era of the High Roman Empire. During the first centuries CE, the landscape of the Roman Empire is polyvalent. It consists of native Romans who can be fluent in Latin and Greek, Greeks who are Roman citizens, other easterners who are potentially trilingual and have also assumed Roman citizenship, and even Christians, who identify themselves as Roman citizens but with a different religious identity. It comes as no surprise that language is politicized, and identity, both individual and civic, is constantly reshaped through it. The question I attempt to answer is whether we can quantify Greekness of native and bilingual speakers based on an analytic computational study of Attic dialect. Chapter 1 provides a discussion of the three aforementioned scholarly fields, which were pertinent for the study. I present the precepts of computational linguistics, corpus linguistics, and digital humanities so as to further explicate what prompts this work and how the confluence of three methodologies significantly enhances our apprehension of the issue at hand. In Chapter 2, I approach Greekness, Latinity, and Atticism through the writings of Greek and Roman grammarians and lexicographers and provide the complete list of all the occurrences of the aforementioned notions. Chapters 3 and 4 explicate further the reasoning behind the usage of the Perseids framework and the Prague annotation system. They then proceed to relate the metrics developed, the computational methods, and their subsequent visualization to quantify and objectify the previously purely theoretical inferences. The metric system was developed after careful consideration of the stylistic attributes of Ancient Greek. Therefore, each metric “measures” something pertinent in the formation of the language. The visualizations then afford us a more understandable and interpretable format of the numerical results. For philologists, it is interesting to view the graphic presentation of humanistic ideas, and for the computer scientists the applicability of their methods on a topic that is predominantly philological and social. Finally, chapter 5 recontextualizes the numerical results and their interpretations, as were acquired in chapters 3 and 4, and thus sets the parameters necessary to discuss them in conjunction with readings of literary texts of the period of the High Empire. My intention is to show how numbers are “translated” into a different “language,” the language of the humanist.:Acknowledgments Page 6 Chapter 1: Introduction Page 7 1.1 Focus of the Study Page 7 1.2 Classical Studies and Digital Humanities Page 9 1.3 Corpus Linguistics Page 13 1.4 Humanities Corpus and Corpus Linguistics Page 15 1.5 Synopsis of the Project Page 17 Chapter 2: Linguistic Purity as Ethnic and Educational Marker, or Greek and Roman Grammarians on Greek and Latin. Page 22 2.1 Introduction Page 22 2.2 Grammatical and Lexicographic Definitions Page 23 2.2.1 Greek and Latin languages Page 23 2.2.2 Grammatici Graeci Page 29 2.2.3 Grammatici Latini. Page 32 2.3 Greek and Attic in Greek Lexicographers Page 48 2.4 Conclusion Page 57 Chapter 3: Attic Oratory and its Imperial Revival: Quantifying Theory and Practice Page 58 3.1 Introduction Page 58 3.2 Atticism: Definition and Redefinitions Page 59 3.3 Significance of Enhanced Linguistic and Computational Analysis of Atticism Page 65 3.3.1 The Perseids Project, the Prague Mark-up Language, and Dependency Grammar Page 67 3.4 Evaluating Atticism Page 70 3.4.1 Dionysius’s of Halicarnassus Theoretical Framework Page 73 3.5 Methods: Computational Quantification of Rhetorical Styles Page 82 3.5.1 The Perseids 1.5 ALDT Schema Page 84 3.5.2 Node-based Sentence Metrics Page 93 3.5.3 Computer Implementation Page 104 3.6 Conclusion Page 108 Chapter 4: Experimental results, Analysis, and Topological Haar Wavelets Page 110 4.1 Introduction Page 110 4.2 Experimental Results Page 111 4.3 Data Visualization Page 117 4. 4 Topological Metric Wavelets for Syntactical Quantification Page 153 4.4.1 Wavelets Page 154 4.4.2 Topological Metrics using Wavelets Page 155 4.4.3 Experimental Results Page 157 4.5 Conclusion Page 162 Chapter 5: «Γαλάτης ὢν ἑλληνίζειν»: Greekness, Latinity, and Otherness in the World of the High Empire. Page 163 5.1 Introduction Page 163 5.2 The Multiethnical Constituents of an Imperial Citizen: Anacharsis, Favorinus, and Dionysius’s of Halicarnassus Ethnography. Page 165 5.3 Conclusion Page 185 Chapter 6: Conclusion Page 187 References Page 190 Appendix Page 203 Curriculum Vitae Page 212 Dissertation related Publications Page 225 Selbständigkeitserklärung Page 22

Teaching Classics in the Digital Age

The papers and videos presented here are the result of the international conference 'Teaching Classics in the Digital Age' held online on the 15 and 16 June 2020. As digital media provide new possibilities for teaching and outreach in Classics, the conference 'Teaching Classics in the Digital Age' aimed at presenting current approaches to digital teaching and sharing best practices by bringing together different projects and practitioners from all fields of Classics (including Classical Archaeology, Greek and Latin Studies and Ancient History). Furthermore, it aimed at starting a discussion about principles, problems and the future of teaching Classics in the 21st century within and beyond its single fields