Digital Preservation and Access to Cultural and Scientific Heritage: Presentation of the KT-DigiCult-BG Project

The fast development and wide application of digital methods, combined with broadened access to the Internet and falling computing costs, have created intense interest in electronic presentation and access to cultural and scientific heritage resources. Information technologies have offered cultural institutions new opportunities for the presentation of their holdings, which are now made accessible not only to the specialists, but also to the citizens and interested parties worldwide. The paper presents an overview of the Bulgarian experience in the field of digital preservation and access and on-going work on the project “Knowledge Transfer for the Digitisation of Scientific and Cultural Heritage to Bulgaria” (MTKD-CT-2004-509754) supported by the Marie Curie programme of the FP6 of the EC

New Developments in Tagging Pre-modern Orthodox Slavic Texts

Pre-modern Orthodox Slavic texts pose certain difficulties when it comes to part-of-speech and full morphological tagging. Orthographic and morphological heterogeneity makes it hard to apply resources that rely on normalized data, which is why previous attempts to train part-of-speech (POS) taggers for pre-modern Slavic often apply normalization routines. In the current paper, we further explore the normalization path; at the same time, we use the statistical CRF-tagger MarMoT and a newly developed neural network tagger that cope better with variation than previously applied rule-based or statistical taggers. Furthermore, we conduct transfer experiments to apply Modern Russian resources to pre-modern data. Our experiments show that while transfer experiments could not improve tagging performance significantly, state-of-the-art taggers reach between 90% and more than 95% tagging accuracy and thus approach the tagging accuracy of modern standard languages with rich morphology. Remarkably, these results are achieved without the need for normalization, which makes our research of practical relevance to the Paleoslavistic community.Peer reviewe

The Influence of Byzantine Law in East Central Europe

The first part of the chapter is dedicated to the sources of Byzantine law, that is, secular and ecclesiastical. The most important secular laws are: 1) the Farmer’s Law from the 7 th or 8 th century, concerning the peasantry and the villages; 2) the Ecloga (726 or 741) issued by Emperor Leo III and his son Constantine V; 3) Legislation of the Macedonian dynasty or the so-called ‘Re-cleansing of the Ancient Laws,’ including Epanagoge, Procheiron, Basilika, and the Novels of Leo VI; and 4) Hexabiblos (Six Books), which is a private codification compiled by Constantine Harmenopoulos, judge of Thessalonica. The most important ecclesiastical laws are: 1) Synopsis Canonum, a summary of abridged canons arranged in alphabetical or chronological order; 2) ‘Systematic collections’, Synagoge, and Syntagma Canonum, organized by topic; 3) Nomokanons, compilations of secular laws and canons; and 4) Matheas Blastares’ Syntagma and Constantine Harmenopoulos’ The Epitome of the Holy and Divine Canons. The second part of the text treats the reception of Byzantine law in Slavonic countries: 1) the Slavonic Ecloga and the oldest preserved Slavonic legal text Zakon Sudnyj Ljudem (Law for Judging the People or Court Law for the People); 2) the Slavonic Nomokanons or Kormchaia kniga; and 3) the Stefan Dušan’s codification, consisting of the Serbian translation of Matheas Blastares’ Syntagma, Justinian’s Law (a short compilation of 33 articles regulating agrarian relations), and Dušan’s law code in the narrow sense. The third part of the chapter refers to the reception of Byzantine law in the Danubian principalities (Wallachia and Moldavia) transmitted through the Serbs and the Bulgars and their processed Slavic legal works received through Byzantine officials and through the church. The last part of the text is dedicated to the Byzantine public law’s ideas in East Central Europe. The most important and common ideas espoused in the work are: 1) the Roman, Byzantine, and Slavonic concepts of law, 2) the idea of Rome and a hierarchical world order, 3) the emperor’s task, and 4) concordance or ‘symphonia’ between the church and the state

"Arising from the depths" (Kupala) : a study of Belarusian literature in English translation

Using Belarusian as a case study of a ‘minority’ European literature, this thesis explores the role of literary translation in the negotiation and promotion of a national identity (represented by two opposing discourses of “Old/European” and “New/Soviet” ‘Belarusianness’) as accomplished through translation from a lesser-known European tongue into the current global hegemonic language. In so doing, the research provides a wide historical panorama of all known literary translations from Belarusian to English, focusing on those published in the 20th and 21st centuries. While outlining the major tendencies of the translation process, the study considers the issues of both reception (focusing on the TL literary system) and representation (focusing on the negotiation of a Belarusian identity), recognising complex ideological, historical and political processes which accompany and, in many cases, predetermine translations and translation strategies. After examining the available terminology for the description of ‘minority’ in literary theory and translation studies, this research considers Belarus’ position as an Eastern European, post-Soviet country and discusses the case for the adoption of a postcolonial approach to the interpretation of ‘Belarusianness’. Another innovative aspect of the study lies in the contribution of a non-Western perspective to the current discussion of European minority languages in translation studies (Baer 2011; Branchadell and West 2005; Cronin 1995, 2003; Tymoczko 1995, 1999). A pioneering work on the history of Belarusian-English literary translation, this research defines several periods of translation activities: the ‘early’ translations of the 1890s – 1940s which mark the discovery of Belarusian folklore; the translations of the ‘Cold War’ period (1950s – 1980s) with two opposing ‘camps’ producing works provoked by nationalist (Western-based translations) or socialist (Soviet Union) ideologies; and, finally, the current post-independence period of Belarusian-English translation (1991-2012), with an analysis of the reasons for a relative inactivity. The evidence is based on a wide range of translations published as individual books and anthologies of poetry and prose, as well as those found in periodicals. It also includes previously unpublished findings from materials located in personal and national archives in Russia, Belarus, and the UK

The library of the Kiev Mohyla Academy (1632-1780) in its historical context.

This study of the history of the library of the Kiev Mohyla Academy (1632-1780), is a piece of interdisciplinary research, which looks into the intellectual sources of the long term development of Ukrainian and Russian culture and education. The Kiev Mohyla Academy, founded as a college in 1632 on the Jesuit model, was the first Orthodox seat of higher education in the East Slav lands. The intellectual milieu formed by the Academy in the seventeenth century may be regarded as unique and highly influential for the fostering of culture and education in the whole region. Very little has been written about the library of the Kiev Mohyla Academy and much uncertainty surrounds its history. The building that housed the library was badly damaged by fire in 1780, and there is very little documentary evidence as to what proportion of the library's collections survived that disaster. The main objective of this study is to piece together and evaluate evidence from various sources (printed references, manuscripts, archives, surviving books) so as to reconstruct a picture of the library's history, collections and organisation. Some of these sources have never been used by scholars before. In the seventeenth century the library of the Kiev Mohyla Academy offered Ukrainian intellectuals what may be called a 'heavyweight' introduction to Western printed matter. No less than 90 per cent of the total of around 8,000 volumes kept in this holding by the late eighteenth century were Latin books of a remarkably varied nature, and there are grounds for believing that the proportion was the same a century before. In this way, Kievan scholars had to cope with the full body of literature and thought which had evolved over the previous 200 years or more in the West, and to absorb it at a stroke. Printed books had important implications for knowledge in that they brought about the concept of standardisation, the reorganisation of textual space, the preservative functions of the printed word, and an awareness of the diversity and multiplicity of views which educated people could hold. These theoretical and methodological perspectives help to produce a tentative model of how the introduction of anew, Western, system of cultural symbols and stereotypes may have influenced the development of Kievan learning in the seventeenth century

Inventing and ethnicising Slavonic in the long ninth century

This article situates the scholarship on the invention of the Slavonic alphabet within the discipline of literacy studies practised in Western medieval contexts. In so doing it identifies some of the methodological assumptions that have shaped the study of the invention of Slavonic, and proposes a new reading of the invention and ethnicisation of the alphabet, from a new methodological starting point. It demonstrates that the ethnicisation of Slavonic begins in the rewriting of the invention of the alphabet found in the Life of Methodios. It then argues that this rewriting emulates the discourse about conversion found in Latin missionary texts, from Gregory the Great onwards, where it is assumed that each ethnic group needs its own Church

Modernity, History, and Politics in Czech Art

This book traces the influence of the changing political environment on Czech art, criticism, history, and theory between 1895 and 1939, looking beyond the avant-garde to the peripheries of modern art. The period is marked by radical political changes, the formation of national and regional identities, and the rise of modernism in Central Europe – specifically, the collapse of Austria-Hungary and the creation of the new democratic state of Czechoslovakia. Marta Filipová studies the way in which narratives of modern art were formed in a constant negotiation and dialogue between an effort to be international and a desire to remain authentically local

International Musicological Conference ; Beyond the East - West divide : rethinking Balkan Music's poles of Attraction ; Belgrade, 26-29 September 2013.

Радови сарадника Музиколошког института САНУ припадају пројекту Идентитети српске музике од локалних до глобалних оквира: традиције, промене, изазови, рег. бр. 177004 који финансира Министарство просвете, науке и технолошког развоја Републике Србиј

Orthographies in Early Modern Europe

This volume provides, for the first time, a pan-European view of the development of written languages at a key time in their history: that of the 16th century. The major cultural and intellectual upheavals that affected Europe at the time - Humanism, the Reformation and the emergence of modern nation-states - were not isolated phenomena, and the evolution of the orthographical systems of European languages shows a large number of convergences, due to the mobility of scholars, ideas and technological innovations throughout the period