The Saxon Ministry of Culture has awarded the University of Leipzig a €1.1 million grant, with support from the European Social Fund and from the State of Saxony, to form an early career research group to help develop new methods of publication, predicated upon open data and open access, for the Humanities in general and for students of historical languages such as Greek and Latin in particular. This grant provides a first step towards reestablishing Leipzig as an international center for humanities publication, especially in technologically challenging areas such as ancient languages and music – and doing so in a framework that is born-digital from the start and that assumes the constraints and possibilities of an open, digital environment.
Continue readingRediscovering Philology
Gregory Crane
Alexander von Humboldt Professor of Digital Humanities
University of Leipzig
Professor of Classics
Tufts University
Editor in Chief, Perseus Project
This paper began as a contribution to the debate on whether or not the APA should change its name. A hundred and forty years later, the central leadership of the American Philological Association (APA) has resolved to abandon the name of philology and proposed to adopt for the association the name “Society for Classical Studies.” I would argue against this on three grounds. First, we need to retain a qualifier in our name that reflects the fact that the APA is the organization to which most professional students of Greco-Roman culture in the United States turn. Second, classics and classical studies are now problematic names for a group that focuses primarily upon Greco-Roman culture because the term “classics” has been used to assert the primacy of Greek and Latin and of Western culture in general.
Most of what follows, however, focuses more generally upon a third point, the nature and role of philology. The challenge for students of Greco-Roman culture is not to run away from, but to make the case for, philology. The members of the American Philological Association may draw upon the material record and upon methods from around the academic world, but they combine these sources and methods with the written record to understand the Greco-Roman world as broadly and deeply as possible. If few now in the English speaking world understand what philology is, then that presents an opportunity for those of us who have the privilege to work with Greek and Latin for a living. We should blow the dust off the ancient and (I believe) easily explained term philology — easily explained and easily justified if we use the term in its broadest and most dynamic sense. Philology entails — or should entail — everything that we can learn about the past from the linguistic record. Philology is neither narrow nor antiquated. It is an expansive set of practices, now undergoing a rebirth as students of the past adapt to the new opportunities of a digital space. If the twentieth century saw the rise of Classics in modern language translation, the digital technologies already at our disposal allow us to make the Greek and Latin sources directly accessible to a global audience.
For the full discussion, see Rediscovering Philology.
The Open Philology Project and Humboldt Chair of Digital Humanities at Leipzig
Initial Research Plan (April 2013)
Alexander von Humboldt Chair of Digital Humanities
The University of Leipzig
Abstract: The Humboldt Chair of Digital Humanities at the University of Leipzig sees in the rise of Digital Technologies an opportunity to re-assess and re-establish how the humanities can advance the understanding of the past and to support a dialogue among civilizations. Philology, which uses surviving linguistic sources to understand the past as deeply and broadly as possible, is central to these tasks, because languages, present and historical, are central to human culture. To advance this larger effort, the Humboldt Chair focuses upon enabling Greco-Roman culture to realize the fullest possible role in intellectual life. Greco-Roman culture is particularly significant because it contributed to both Europe and the Islamic world and the study of Greco-Roman culture and its influence thus entails Classical Arabic as well as Ancient Greek and Latin. The Humboldt Chair inaugurates an Open Philology Project with three complementary efforts that produce open philological data, educate a wide audience about historical languages, and integrate open philological data from many sources: the Open Greek and Latin Project organizes content (including translations into Classical Arabic and modern languages); the Historical Language e-Learning Project explores ways to support learning across barriers of language and culture as well as space and time; the Scaife Digital Library focuses on integrating cultural heritage sources available under open licenses.
The Humboldt Chair of Digital Humanities at Leipzig will create the Open Philology Project. In this we advance a digital successor to that philology which sees in language a source for what Augustus Boeckh in 1822 termed “the understanding of all antiquity, including the events of both the physical and intellectual world.”[1] Philology brings the past to life as deeply and as broadly as possible through the use of surviving linguistic sources. From the human perspective philology constitutes a set of language-based critical scholarly skills — not only annotating (annotation is the basic genre), but also comparing, connecting, interpreting, proving or rejecting hypotheses, finding evidence; critical apparatuses and commentaries often preserve condensed fruits of such reasoning, and Open Philology doesn’t let the scholarly heritage of manuscript and print culture vanish, converting it into digital form and using it as a training field for next generations.
The Open Philology Project will initially focus particularly upon pre-modern society but its methods and goals apply to any society for whom traces of their languages survive. Philology provides an opportunity to advance the intellectual life of individual societies and, equally important, dialogue across civilizations, transcending not only barriers of space and time but of language and culture. Digital technology plays a critical role as a catalyst because — and only because — it allows us to re-imagine how we can more fully achieve, and indeed transform our ability to achieve, these ancient goals of philology. This is not a digital philology or digital humanities project. The Open Philology Project is about philology.
To address the vast challenge of an Open Philology that embraces all historical languages, the Humboldt Chair begins by advancing within a European and a global space the role of that Greco-Roman culture out of which Europe largely emerged. Greco-Roman culture has also contributed significantly to the Islamic world and Europe depended upon Arabic sources. Our goal in this activity is not only to increase the intellectual accessibility of European cultural heritage but also to foster exchange of cultural heritage sources such as Persian, Sanskrit, Classical Chinese, Egyptian from the earliest forms through Coptic, and the Cuneiform Languages of the Ancient Near East, and Classical Mayan from the Western Hemisphere. As a platform for this activity, the Open Philology Project builds upon, and helps develop, the Perseus Digital Library, working with colleagues in Europe, North America and elsewhere to expand open collections and services and to reach an increasingly global audience.
The greatest challenge of humanistic scholarship lies, in our view, in making available the human cultural heritage to the global community. Digitization is a necessary but, by itself, insufficient step in this process. Human cultural heritage must be represented in a way that supports intellectual access across barriers of language and culture. This requirement in turn has implications for the technologies but also for the rights regime that we choose. Open data provides the best strategy by which to promote the circulation of sources within a global context. Collections that are protected behind subscription barriers may serve the interests of specialist communities. Collections that cannot be freely modified and re-circulated may be useful for reference. But scholarship in general and philology in particular must build upon open data if it is to realize its intellectual and social obligations to advance the common understanding of human culture. The Humboldt Chair is therefore committed to open source publication, with machine-actionable Creative Commons licenses requiring attribution and sharing of data and allowing commercial reuse (CC-BY-SA) as the preferred mode of distribution.
The larger Open Philology Project begins with three specific, complementary activities, addressing the challenge of creating comprehensive open resources, providing the education needed to understand and to contribute to those resources, and integrating open resources from many different sources into an integrated computational framework for analysis, annotation, and preservation.
First, the Open Greek and Latin Project makes Greek and Latin sources freely accessible, both digitally and intellectually, to a global public. Second, the Historical Language e-Learning Project provides distributed e-learning of historical languages such as Greek and Latin so that as many as possible may penetrate as deeply as they choose into the sources from which the present has been fashioned. Third, support from the Humboldt Foundation allows us to contribute, after years of planning, to the Scaife Digital Library. The SDL develops methods to aggregate and integrate from various sources open data, textual and archaeological alike, in any medium, about human cultural heritage, including, but not limited to, the Greco-Roman world.
All three of these projects focus on the production, analysis, and preservation of machine-actionable annotations. All data about historical records is based upon transcriptions, whether from text-bearing objects or from sound recordings, which are themselves annotations that describe the textual content from a region of a written surface or a time interval in a recording. We will continue to make arguments in the digital successors to notes, articles and monographs but we should increasingly integrate into, and use as the foundation for, those arguments machine actionable links to the sources upon which they are based. These links include not only citations to particular sources (e.g., a machine actionable link to a particular reading in a particular edition of Aeschylus) but also to aggregate data (e.g., the results of a search posed as they appeared at a particular time). In the end, born-digital notes, articles and monographs — if they preserve labels inherited for the form of a book — may preserve a family resemblance to their predecessors but they will surely evolve into something qualitatively different as the adapt to the different gravity, if not fundamentally different physics, of a digital space.
1. The Open Greek and Latin Project.
The ultimate goal is to represent every source text produced in Classical Greek or Latin from antiquity through the present, including texts preserved in manuscript tradition as well as on inscriptions, papyri, ostraca and other written artifacts. Over the course of the next five years, we will focus upon converting as much Greek and Latin, available as scanned printed books, into an open, dynamic corpus, continuously augmented and improved by a combination of automated processes and human contributions of many kinds. The focus upon Greek and Latin reflects both the belief that we have an obligation to disseminate European cultural heritage and the observation that recent advances in OCR technology for Greek and Latin make these intertwined languages ready for large-scale work. This focus also builds upon years of work by many projects in Greek and Latin, including Papyri.info and the Homer Multitext Project, the Inscriptions of Aphrodisias., and CIL Open Access.
The Open Greek and Latin Project aims at providing at least one version for all Greek and Latin sources produced during antiquity (through c. 600 CE) and a growing collection from the vast body of post-classical Greek and Latin that still survives. Perhaps 150 million words of Greek and Latin, preserved in manuscripts, on stone, on papyrus or other writing surface, survive from antiquity. Analysis of 10,000 books in Latin, downloaded from Archive.org, identified more than 200 million words of post-classical Latin. With 70,000 public domain books listed in the Hathi Trust as being in Ancient Greek or Latin, the amount of Greek and Latin already available will almost certainly exceed 1 billion words.
Where existing corpora of Greek and Latin have generally included one edition of a work, Open Greek and Latin Corpus is designed to manage multiple versions of, and to represent the complete textual history of, a work: every manuscript, every papyrus fragment, and every printed edition are all versions within the history of a text. In the short run, this involves using OCR-technology optimized for Classical Greek and Latin to create an open corpus that is reasonably comprehensive for the c. 150 million words produced through c. 600 CE and that begins to make available the billions of words produced after 600 CE in Greek and Latin that survive.
The Open Greek and Latin Project assumes the following modules:
A. The Philological Workflow Module enables a digital representation of a written source, available in a 2D or 3D form, to be converted into machine actionable text, corrected, and annotated with an increasing range of information (named entities, morphology, syntax, and other linguistic features, alignments between different versions of the same text, whether in the same language or translated across multiple languages, text re-use detection, including quotation, paraphrase and citation). Automated methods include Optical Character Recognition, Text Alignment, Syntactic Parsing, etc. In each case, human annotation can augment automated annotations or substitute for them altogether where automated methods are not yet able to produce adequate initial results (e.g, manual transcription of inscriptions and medieval manuscripts).
B. The Distributed Review Module provides a range of options by which to assess and represent the reliability produced, whether by automated systems or by human contributors, as part of the Philological work flow. In many cases annotations can be released even when their reliability is not necessarily high (e.g., noisy OCR-generated text). The point is to identify annotations that most require subsequent attention, whether manual correction or action of some other kind (e.g., poor OCR data may reflect the need to create a new scan of a printed book). The Distributed Review Module assumes that multiple annotations may be equally trustworthy (i.e., experts back different interpretations) and can track inter-annotator disagreement among experts. The Distributed Review Module provides default values but also allows for different weights to be placed upon different validations (e.g., include all readings in a particular version of a text, whether these are readings in a particular manuscript or the readings chosen and emendations proposed by a particular editor, include all prosopographical identifications proposed by one particular scholar). The Distributed Review Module should support searching by both text characteristics (specific passages, authors), annotator characteristics (expert, novice, native language etc.), and annotation characteristics (emendations, grammatical or interpretive comments, degree of inter-annotator disagreement, etc.). But it should also permit browsing the history of annotation by passage, annotator, magnitude of disagreement etc.
C. The Philological Repository Module can preserve all published philological data, including the transcriptions and all subsequent annotations (e.g., identifying a transcribed word as being in Latin, a place name, in the accusative case etc.) as well as the provenance of each annotation (e.g., the annotation is born-digital and was published by a particular individual at a given time or the annotation was extracted from a print book by a particular author and published at a given time, with or without human verification, and with an estimated accuracy). The repository is based upon the Canonical Text Services/CITE Architecture for textual sources developed by researchers at the Center for Hellenic Studies within the larger framework developed by the DataConservancy.org.
D. The e-Portfolio Module aggregates and distributes particular subsets of user contributions for particular audiences. The e-Porfolio Module can identify any published contributions according to type, date, and author (e.g., all syntactic analyses published by a particular person during a particular time interval). The e-Portfolio Module can also make selected materials that are not yet published available to selected audiences (e.g., an editorial board or the admission committee for a degree program). The Perseids Project from Tufts University provides a starting point for this work.
2. The Historical Language e-Learning Project.
Anyone, anywhere, regardless of their linguistic or cultural background, whether they are a student in a formal curriculum or not, should be able to learn as much of a historical language as they need to work directly in original-language primary materials. Work in this context entails not only learning but contributing early and in increasingly sophisticated ways: students can add new, or correct existing, data as they learn to type in an unfamiliar language, while they can, in the language of gaming, “level up” to tasks such as linguistic annotation of new materials and the production of aligned, modern language translations, and see their growing proficiency concretely visualized in a way that permits them to compare it to that of others and documents it for use in e-portfolios and other records of their achievement.
In the short run, building upon existing collections and services, we will support students working with Greek, Latin and Classical Arabic texts in a system readily localized for speakers of multiple modern languages (with Croatian, English, German and French emerging as initial languages of interest). The Historical Language e-Learning Project is based upon the existence of extensible richly annotated corpora. Learners draw from the start on existing richly annotated corpora and on images of sources such as manuscripts and inscriptions. They use morpho-syntactic annotation, dictionary links, and aligned modern language translations, so that they immediately work with primary sources in the original. They learn grammar by comparing their morpho-syntactic analyses with vetted analyses already available, by creating their own aligned translations, and by using annotations and alignments to develop active as well as passive mastery of morphology, syntax, and vocabulary. They demonstrate advanced ability by expanding the corpus of richly annotated materials, proposing new annotations of their own and reviewing annotations proposed by others.
Ancient Greek, Latin and Classical Arabic Large collections such as Gallica, Google Books, and the Internet Archive have already made billions of words in Greek and Latin available to a global audience — a far larger collection than the small handful of advanced researchers can document and a far broader collection in terms of genre and style than the classical corpora on which current programs in Greek and Latin still focus. While the amount of openly licensed Classical Arabic is not yet as extensive, more than enough sources are available and require documentation and analysis. We need to train a new generation of students, who can directly analyze sources in the original languages and make substantive contributions earlier and on a wider range of sources than has previously been feasible.
Traditional programs of Ancient Greek and Latin are not designed to support students who first develop an interest in these languages during their undergraduate careers — by the time students are able to begin interacting proficiently with the primary sources, they are ready to graduate. Traditional class schedules are rigid and rarely can an institution offer more than one section of an ancient language. As for Classical Arabic, few institutions offer any formal instruction at all — Modern Language Association statistics report only 285 students enrolled in Classical Arabic in the United States in 2009.
At the same time, Ancient Greek, Latin, and Classical Arabic must also compete for students with fields where students regularly contribute as members of laboratory teams and can often expect to develop their own research projects as undergraduates. The strongest academic programs not only demand that students master complex disciplinary knowledge but also provide students with an opportunity to use that knowledge to make substantive contributions and to develop significant research projects of their own.
Open Greek and Latin creates an inexhaustible range of substantive activity to which any student of these languages can aspire — whether working on manuscripts of well-known authors (e.g., the Homer Multitext Project), creating the first modern language translations of Greek and Latin sources (e.g., Tufts’ Medieval Latin), or adding critical linguistic annotation (e.g., the Perseus Greek and Latin Treebanks).
The Historical Language e-Learning project depends upon the following:
A. Global Editions of Historical Languages include all features of a traditional edition (including textual notes) but are designed to make primary sources available to the widest possible audience. Global editions are richly encoded source materials that include enough annotation so that readers with a general understanding of grammar and of language are able to work directly with primary sources in a historical language that they have not studied. Core elements to this infrastructure include morphological and syntactic analyses, links to machine readable dictionaries (ideally with data about word sense of a given word in a given context), and one or more aligned modern language translations that themselves have substantial annotation and are designed to facilitate machine translation into many other modern languages.
B. Preliminary Source Texts are digital texts that do not yet have the mature annotations needed for global editions. Students of a language can aspire to begin adding new annotations within the opening weeks of study, working at first with each other and with their instructors but ultimately working to level up to roles with more trust and responsibility as they demonstrate their increasing skills. It is both a goal and a necessity to engage students as collaborators, because we believe that this is a good thing in itself, because we believe that this increases learning, and because so many historical sources are already available that we cannot depend upon a handful of professionals to analyze and annotate them all.
C. Machine Actionable Models of Language Competence provide methods by which to assess knowledge of historical languages at every level, from introductory exposure to the language through standardized examinations (e.g., the US-based National Latin exam, the German Graecum and Latinum) to the various PhD level examinations (e.g., US PhD programs in Greek and Latin commonly have combined reading lists of between 500,000 and 1,000,000 words of Greek and Latin). Where the city of Arpino holds the Certamen Ciceronianum Arpinas, a multinational competition for students from various nations — each of whom can compete in their own national language — we can create an on-going contest, where students from around the world and from widely disparate backgrounds can meet to compare their skills and compete to shed light upon Greco-Roman culture. Machine Actionable Models of Language Competence can be configured for various purposes and pedagogical perspectives. The Competence Models also provide mechanisms for evaluation of competence across national languages — examinations on morphology and syntax provide a powerful measure of competence and can be effectively localized in various national languages — whether the student speaks Arabic or Croatian, English or Lithuanian. The Distributed Review Module provides an environment for assessment of language competence as well as for advanced publications.
D. Localized Learning Materials include grammars, lexica, and translations in a national language. Localized Learning Materials need to be able to be shared across, and customized for, many different languages. Within Europe alone, Greek and Latin, for example, are taught in more than thirty different national languages.[2] We need not only to maintain learning materials in dozens of languages but also to provide learning materials in languages where Greek and Latin are not part of formal academic curricula. To accomplish this we must represent as much information about the language in machine actionable form that can be efficiently represented in many languages. We also need to provide an architecture that supports customization for particular languages, especially the creation of aligned translations that contain from the start links between the source text and the modern language translation.
E. Dynamic Syllabi can be analyzed to track the linguistic phenomena that students have encountered (e.g., vocabulary, grammar) and the content that they have covered. As students pursue different dynamic syllabi at different times, they can track their overall background and necessary background information needed to pursue subsequent courses. Instructors in structured classes can generate personalized background readings and examinations that reflect both what students brought with them to, and what they covered in, the class. The e-Portfolio Module uses Dynamic Syllabi to accomplish these goals.
F. Personalized E-learning Tools analyze individual behaviors of particular learners and provide personalized analyses and suggestions, reflecting the strengths and learning styles of particular students. Personalized e-learning tools allow learners not only to track their progress towards target proficiencies and but also to personalize the target proficiencies as well: students of Homer will have different targets than those of the New Testament or of Plato, while students aspiring to fluent comprehension will have different needs than intellectual historians who wish to explore word usage or linguists interested in syntactic phenomena. The goal is to provide as much feedback as possible, as quickly as possible, and as closely adapted to the needs and interests of each learner as possible.
3. The Scaife Digital Library (SDL)
The Scaife Digital Library (SDL) commemorates Ross Scaife (March 31, 1960 – March 15, 2008) who did pioneering work for the study of Greco-Roman culture in a digital age, who was committed to collaborative scholarship and who was a champion of open data. The SDL is designed as a service, as an experiment, and as a space for research. An increasing amount of Ancient Greek, Latin, Classical Arabic and other sources are available under appropriate open licenses. The SDL builds upon the services and collections listed above. The SDL provides a mechanism by which to compare these services and collections with those available elsewhere, allowing research at the Humboldt Chair to explore new methods while making its own work more visible.
As a service, the SDL will aggregate as much content in these languages as possible, converting, where necessary and feasible, into interoperable formats. The goal of this service is to provide a single space to represent all published Ancient Greek, Latin, and Classical Arabic. In this context, publication entails release under an open license. Proprietary collections are neither public nor published.
As an experiment, the SDL will track how many sources in how many historical languages and of how many types it can identify and integrate and then track this data over time. This experiment attempts to measure both our ability to find materials and the change in what is available. It is our hope that the growth in available resources in languages beyond Greek, Latin, and Arabic will greatly outstrip the ability of the SDL to aggregate and analyze them.
As a research space, the SDL collects not only metadata but also source materials into a single environment. Within this space researchers can explore customized collections (e.g., all available versions and translations of the Odes of Horace or the aligned corpus of Classical Arabic translations and Greek sources) or simply analyze all available Greek. While the SDL may collect as widely as possible from open collections representing cultures from around the world, the SDL intends to provide the most comprehensive possible coverage and services for students of Ancient Greek, Latin, and Classical Arabic.
[1] Augustus Boeck, “Oratio nataliciis Friderici Guilelmi III.” (1822): “Itaque ubi, quae et qualis philologia meo iudicio sit, quaeritis, simplicissima ratione respondeo, si non latiore, quae in ipso vocabulo inest, potestate accipitur, sed ut solet ad antiquas litteras refertur, universae antiquitatis cognitionem historicam et philosophicam.”
[2] http://www.eduhi.at/gegenstand/EuroClassica/?TITEL=EuroClassica+in+Europe&modul=europamap
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Tagged Digital Humanities Chair at Leipzig
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Possible Jobs in Digital Humanities at Leipzig [Please forward]
The Humboldt Chair of Digital Humanities and Department of Computer Science at the University of Leipzig is looking for candidates for two possible collaborating research groups, one focused on reinventing scholarly communication for Greek and Latin, as a case study for historical languages in general, with the other helping the University Library develop methods to manage and visualize billion of words and associated annotations of many kinds. Details of the funding are being finalized but positions will ideally start in May 2013 and with an initial one year contract that could be extended to a second year that could include one semester residence at a US university.
Candidates must have received their most recent degree after January 4, 2011. Current degree candidates may also be considered. We are building a team includes varied backgrounds, with team members having expertise in Greek and Latin, in software analysis and development, and in working with metadata models that are relatively well established (TEI XML, Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records, CIDOC CRM) and that are just beginning to be exploited (e.g., the full potential of the Europeana Data Model). Project members should be prepared to participate in all forms of intellectual life, including research, both within the humanities and the information sciences, and software development, supervising student researchers, delivering presentations before specialist and general audiences, writing, and participation in teaching activities.
Interested candidates should send a letter of interest, briefly describing how they could contribute to one of these teams, a CV, and the names of three references to dig-hum-jobs@e-humanities.net.
The work will have several complementary tracks:
- Open Greek and Latin: Classicists need comprehensive, open collections of Greek and Latin that anyone can download, modify, and then republish. The long term goal of the Open Greek and Latin Project is to represent the full surviving corpus of Greek and Latin sources, including transcriptions from every print source, this will include not only print books but also manuscripts, inscriptions, ostraca, papyri, vases, etc. and will cover the full range of Greek and Latin sources, from the Homeric Epics through post-classical Greek and Latin to the present. In the short run, we focus on providing comprehensive coverage for the c. 100 million words of Greek and Latin that survive through c. 600 CE and opportunistic coverage for the billions of words of surviving post-classical Greek and Latin. The Open Greek and Latin Project integrates the growing body of Greek and Latin available under a Creative Commons license while drawing upon vast collections of scanned editions and new Canadian-Italian research on generating and correcting Greek and Latin. Coverage will include TEI XML transcriptions of editions that are in the public domain and machine actionable RDF equivalents for traditional indices of places where a new edition differs from its most significant predecessor. The whole collection — including textual transcriptions, structural metadata, as well as linguistic and other machine actionable data — will be available in an RDF format developed to interoperate as closely as possible with the Europeana Data Model.
- Decentralized editing and annotation: The Open Greek and Latin corpora represent a foundation and starting point for further work. We need methods by which to support annotations of every kind, including not only corrections of OCR errors but also new translations (which are a kind of annotation), data driven studies of textual transmission, textual reuse and the general circulation of ideas across time, space, language and culture, prosopography, and morphological, syntactic, semantic and lexical analyses. We need to support a growing range of machine actionable annotations, each of which represents a nano-publication that may be accompanied by expository prose argumentation and/or additional machine actionable annotations. As students of Greek and Latin begin to confront the opportunities and challenges presented by global access to collections measured in billions — rather than millions — of words, we need to be able to manage contributions from student researchers and citizen scholars as well as from faculty and library professionals.
- Transnational systems for Greek, Latin, and other historical languages: Greek and Latin are fundamentally transnational languages — no nation has a unique claim to the intellectual and linguistic heritage of these languages, which together provide a major cultural foundation for what is now the European community. More than 20 organizations representing communities speaking Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, German, English, French, Italian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, and Swedish have representatives in the General Assembly of Euroclassica, a European federation of associations of teachers of classical languages and civilisation, while a European Curriculum Framework for Classical Languages (ECFRCL) is already under active development. Language learning based upon interacting with, and then contributing to, richly annotated corpora can provide rapid and plentiful feedback, allowing learners to engage immediately with primary sources while also enabling them to begin making substantive contributions to the field early and often. At the same time, many scholarly arguments include statements that can be represented in a machine actionable format that can be made available to many different language communities. In some cases (as in publications about prosopography or textual criticism) the conclusions of the argument can be represented as machine actionable annotations. Greek and Latin studies provide a particularly interesting space within which to develop methods by which speakers of many languages can collaborate in learning and research because these classical languages are not (unlike English or French) associated with modern hegemonic nations.
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Querying the Perseus Ancient Greek and Latin Treebank Data in ANNIS
We are pleased to announce the availability of the Perseus ANNIS Environment for searching the syntactical data in the Perseus Ancient Greek and Latin Treebanks.
ANNIS is an open source, versatile web browser-based search and visualization architecture for complex multilevel linguistic corpora with diverse types of annotation.
The Perseus Ancient Greek Dependency Treebank includes the entirety of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey; Sophocles’ Ajax, Antigone, Electra, Oedipus Tyrannus and Trachinae; Plato’s Euthyphro; and all of the works of Hesiod and Aeschylus – a total of 354,529 words. The Perseus Latin Dependency Treebank includes 53,143 words from eight authors, including Caesar, Cicero, Jerome, Ovid, Petronius, Propertius, Sallust and Vergil.
Tagged Ancient Greek, ANNIS, Latin, Treebanks
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Marie-Claire Beaulieu Named Associate Editor of the Perseus Digital Library
We are pleased to announce that Marie-Claire Beaulieu, Assistant Professor of Classics, has been named Associate Editor of the Perseus Digital Library.
Hired in 2010, Professor Beaulieu has research interests in Greek religion and myth, epigraphy, and medieval Latin. Upon her arrival at Tufts, Professor Beaulieu immediately used digital technology to give undergraduates and MA students opportunities to make contributions and to conduct research, thus advancing intellectual culture where learning and research are intermeshed and reinforce each other. The thirteen undergraduate and graduate students—plus one community auditor—enrolled in her “Medieval Latin” class in Winter 2011 deciphered, translated, and annotated rare Latin manuscripts and early printed book leaves from “The Tisch Library Miscellany.” Their work was published online on the Tisch Library Miscellany page and has made a significant contribution to scholarship in the field by providing a valuable resource for professors, librarians, and scholars at Tufts and around the world, who can now access translations and annotations for their teaching and research.
Her work with the Tisch Library led her to receive both an internal Tufts award and an NEH Startup Grant to generalize the infrastructure needed to support—and manage over time—the increasingly varied and complex contributions of students at Tufts and elsewhere. These contributions include editorial work, translations, commentaries, and annotations. In addition, Prof. Beaulieu is working on ways to enhance the teaching of Greek mythology and religion with the use of digital technology.
Perseus staff and collaborators enthusiastically welcome her aboard!
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Suggestions for new Greek, Latin texts? English translations?
[Please repost!]
We are preparing for a new set of texts to be entered by the data entry firm with which we work (http://www.digitaldividedata.org/). The next order will be sent in mid December but a more substantial order will be placed early in 2013.
What would you like to see added to the Perseus Digital Library, both for use within the Perseus site and for download as TEI XML under a Creative Commons license? Note that we only enter materials that are in the public domain and that can be freely redistributed for re-use by others.
Some possibilities — but please suggest other things that you find important!
* Scholia of Greek and Latin authors.
* Collections of fragmentary authors
* Sources from later antiquity (esp. Christian sources)
* More English translations
Please think about (1) individual authors and texts and (2) what you would want to see if we could do something big.
If you have individual suggestions, please write gcrane2008@gmail.com. A public discussion via the Digital Classicist would probably be the best.
Let us know what you want!
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Annotation Service Beta
Announcing the beta availability of the Tufts Syntactic Annotation service. This service provides RESTful and Service Layer APIs for requesting (a) syntactic annotations from supported annotation repositories and (b) templates for creation of syntactic annotations of passages and texts. The beta instance at http://sosol.perseus.tufts.edu/bsp/annotationservice is currently configured to provide access to the Alpheios repository of the Perseus Ancient Greek and Latin treebank annotations. These annotations can be identified and retrieved by CTS urn. The service can also retrieve text for which to create annotation templates from any CTS-API compliant repository, and can be configured to access other annotation and text repositories. The Syntactic Annotation service leverages the Salt-n-Pepper Framework for converting between annotation formats. The current release supports the Perseus import format and Perseus and PAULA export formats.
Currently available instances of the Bamboo Services Platform are unsecured, are operated with no explicit SLA, and should be considered stateless: that is, data may be wiped from persistent stores at any time.
Funding for the development of this service was provided by Tufts University, Project Bamboo and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Morphology Service Beta
Announcing the beta availability of service-based access to the morphological engines used by Perseus for Latin and Greek (Morpheus) and Arabic (Buckwalter). This service leverages a standard Morphology Service API and is made available on an instance of the Bamboo Services Platform at http://services.perseids.org/bsp/morphologyservice/analysis/word
Examples:
The Morphological Analysis Service responds to requests for morphological analysis of texts, submits them to the appropriate morphology engine for processing and returns the results in XML adhering to a standard morphology schema. The Service supports retrieval of texts for analysis from remote repositories as well as user-supplied chunks of text. URL based and CTS repositories are supported. Where retrieval from a CTS enabled repository is requested CTS URNs are supported as document identifiers. Where retrieval from a URL based repository is requested, URIs are supported as document identifiers.
Currently available instances of the Bamboo Services Platform are insecure, are operated with no explicit SLA, and should be considered stateless: that is, data may be wiped from persistent stores at any time.
A secure instance of the BSP for which data will be preserved on future upgrades is anticipated in Fall 2012.
Funding for the development of this service was provided by Tufts University, Project Bamboo and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
note: updated links LMC
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