Ancient Greek Historians in the Digital Age

Ein Beitrag zur Digital History 2023: Digitale Methoden in der geschichtswissenschaftlichen Praxis: Fachliche Transformationen und ihre epistemologischen Konsequenzen, Berlin, 23.-26.5.2023. Abstract: This paper presents results of ongoing digital projects on ancient Greek historians. The research question is the analysis of the language used by ancient sources to refer to historians and cite their works with a particular reference to lost historians (the so-called fragmentary authors). If a lot of scholarship has been devoted to collect fragments of many different genres and try to reconstruct the texts from which they were taken, less effort has been spent on collecting data pertaining to the language used by ancient authors to refer to them and their works. The paper discusses the use of Computational Linguistics techniques and Named Entity Recognition to extract and annotate information about ancient Greek historians and their works from the sources where they are preserved. Morevoer, the paper describes a new catalog of ancient Greek authors and works based on the extraction and annotation of references to them in ancient sources

Editorial

During our workshop scholars who represent several academic disciplines and institutions gathered to talk about their projects. We invited Digital Humanists who have experience with specific issues in Classical Philology and who presented methods and outcomes of their research

Classical philology goes digital: working on textual phenomena of ancient texts: workshop, Klassische Philologie, Universität Potsdam, Februar 16 - 17, 2017

Digital technologies are constantly changing our daily lives, including the way scholars work. As a result, also Classics is currently subject to constant change. Greek and Latin sources are becoming available in a digital format. The result is that Classical texts are searchable and can be provided with metadata and analyzed to find specific structures. An important keyword in this new scholarly environment is “networking”, because there is a great potential for Classical Philology to collaborate with the Digital Humanities in creating useful tools for textual work. During our workshop scholars who represent several academic disciplines and institutions gathered to talk about their projects. We invited Digital Humanists who have experience with specific issues in Classical Philology and who presented methods and outcomes of their research. In order to enable intensive and efficient work concerning various topics and projects, the workshop was aimed at philologists whose research interests focus on specific phenomena of ancient texts (e.g., similes or quotations). The challenge of extracting and annotating textual data like similes and text reuses poses the same type of practical philological problems to Classicists. Therefore, the workshop provided insight in two main ways: First, in an introductory theoretical section, DH experts presented keynote lectures on specific topics; second, the focus of the workshop was to discuss project ideas with DH experts to explore and explain possibilities for digital implementation, and ideally to offer a platform for potential cooperation. The focus was explicitly on working together to explore ideas and challenges, based also on concrete practical examples. As a result of the workshop, some of the participants agreed on publishing online their abstracts and slides in order to share them with the community of Classicists and Digital Humanists. The publication has been made possible thanks to the generous support of the Open Science Office of the Library of the University of Leipzig

The Digital Rosetta Stone Project

Presentation of the project «Digital Rosetta Stone», a pilot project to align languages (in this case: Middle Egyptian, Demotic, and Ancient Greek) on the base of a new 3D image of the Rosetta Stone in the British Museum. Furthermore, syntax and morphology of the three texts of the decree have been annotated to visualize the languages in a treebanking model, for the first time for Ancient Egyptian

Omission and compromise : The sacredness of moral foundations in political groups in Italy

Sacred values are moral foundations that may make public and political debates among groups hard to resolve. A taboo trade-off framework offers the opportunity of measuring the inviolability and the "sacralization" of moral foundations. In this study, moral foundations in a taboo trade-off framework were assessed in a convenience sample of Italians (N = 224) using a new measure to assess sacred values, the Omission as a Compromise on Moral Foundations scale (OC-MF). The OC-MF measures the willingness of individuals to omit moral foundations in exchange for money. It was predicted that Italian center and left-wing participants would be less willing to compromise individualizing moral foundations as opposed to binding ones, and that center and right-wing participants would be less willing to compromise on binding moral foundations than left-wing participants. Confirmatory Factor Analyses demonstrated the two-factor structure of the OC-MF: individualizing and binding. As predicted, Repeated Measures Anova showed that political orientation was related with differential adoptions of moral foundations as sacred values, with center and left-wing participants refusing to compromise more on individualizing than on binding moral foundations. Moreover, left-wing participants were more willing to compromise on binding moral foundations than center and right-wing participants. The OC-MF shows the hypothesized differences between Italian political groups and offers a new understanding of moral reasoning. These findings provide opportunities for improving ideological debates concerning sacred values.Peer reviewe

The miRNA Pull Out Assay as a Method to Validate the miR-28-5p Targets Identified in Other Tumor Contexts in Prostate Cancer

miR-28-5p is an intragenic miRNA which is underexpressed in several tumor types showing a tumor suppressor (TS) activity. Routinely, the known miR-28-5p targets are validated in specific tumor contexts but it is unclear whether these targets are also being regulated in other tumor types. To this end, we adopted the miRNA pull out assay to capture the miR-28-5p targets in DU-145 prostate cancer (PCa) cells. Firstly, we demonstrated that miR-28-5p acts as a TS-miRNA in PCa, affecting cell proliferation, survival, and apoptosis. Secondly, we evaluated the enrichment of the 10 validated miR-28-5p targets in the pull out sample. We showed that E2F6, TEX-261, MAPK1, MPL, N4BP1, and RAP1B but not BAG1, OTUB1, MAD2L1, and p21 were significantly enriched, suggesting that not all the miR-28-5p targets are regulated by this miRNA in PCa. We then verified whether the miR-28-5p-interacting targets were regulated by this miRNA. We selected E2F6, the most enriched target in the pull out sample, and demonstrated that miR-28-5p downregulated E2F6 at the protein level suggesting that our approach was effective. In general terms, these findings support the miRNA pull out assay as a useful method to identify context-specific miRNA targets