Coptic SCRIPTORIUM Blog

Latest Release of Coptic Corpora

We are pleased to announce the release of version 6.2.0 of the Coptic Scriptorium data! Our corpora now total 2,375,875 words. This release provides significant new annotated data in both the Bohairic and Sahidic Dialects:

New parts of works in Bohairic, including:
- The Life of Shenoute, Parts 2 & 3 (part 1 was released in September)
- The Lausiac History, Parts 2 & 3 (part 1 was released in September)
New corpora
- The Gospel of Thomas, edited from the manuscript by Paul Dilley
- The Sahidic book of Jonah (with manual edits and corrections to NLP annotations by Stephan Claassen; the automatically processed Jonah is in the Coptic OT corpus)
New documents in the following existing corpora:
- Apophthegmata Patrum
- Shenoute’s work known as Acephalous Work 22
More Arabic and English translations for documents previously published

We are grateful to our collaborators and contributors who have made this release possible, particularly Caroline T. Schroeder, Amir Zeldes, Nicholas Wagner, and Paul Dilley as well as Nina Speranskaja, Rebecca Krawiec, Christine Luckritz Marquis, Stephan Claassen, Philippe Zaher, and Safaa Mahfouz. We also want to thank Hany Takla and the St. Shenouda the Archimandrite Coptic Society for their collaborations and support. Additionally, we thank our donors for contributions that made much of the work on this release possible. Please consider supporting Coptic Scriptorium as we navigate the new funding environment in the USA.

As with all our releases, the raw machine-readable data for all corpora—including morphological and syntactic annotations, as well as named entity recognition—are available in our GitHub repository. Data can be downloaded in a variety of popular formats to suit your research needs.

You can read and browse entire documents in an online portal. Our corpora are also linked in entries on the Coptic Dictionary Online.

For searching, including advanced linguistic queries, you can explore the data using our ANNIS server. To help you get started, check out our tutorial with query tips and a convenient cheat sheet. Currently, the Arabic translations are only available in ANNIS, as well.

Continuing Our Work Without the NEH

April 21, 2025 / ctschroeder / 0 Comments

Since 2014, Coptic Scriptorium has benefitted from funding from the United States government through the National Endowment for the Humanities. Our natural language processing tools, digitized and annotated corpora, and other resources were only possible with this funding. A joint grant from the NEH and the German DFG supported the collaborations that produced the Coptic Dictionary Online. Our work is used by academic researchers at all levels, by industry researchers, and by the general public, including many members of the Coptic community.

On April 2, our contract with the U.S. government for our latest NEH grant was abruptly cancelled. The University of Oklahoma received the letter on NEH letterhead, albeit through irregular channels, with a contact email address that is not an official governmental email. Cutting off the approximately $100,000 remaining was deemed an “urgent priority for the administration.” (The entire budget of the NEH is .01% of the federal budget.) Many other research projects have also been canceled. This article in Pasts Imperfect celebrates the NEH and describes projects on antiquity that have been canceled. The Association for Computers and the Humanities created a database documenting all canceled NEH grants. In addition, soon after the cancellations most of the employees at the NEH were put on administrative leave leading to permanent dismissal.

Since this announcement, we have received an outpouring of support. Everyone on the project deeply appreciates all of this good will. We also express our solidarity with the NEH employees. They are the kindest and most professional people with whom one could ever hope to work. We also call attention to the great work of the Institute for Museum and Library Services, which has been gutted, as well.

We are committed to keeping Coptic Scriptorium resources available to everyone, open-source and open access as always.

Nonetheless, our ability to to do so, and to improve and expand these resources, is now severely curtailed.

We are asking for your help to keep the project growing and to ensure its long-term availability. We recognize that the crises on our planet are numerous, with many much more severe than this one. If you have the capacity for a donation, we welcome your support. (Several people have asked about volunteering, and we may follow-up on this when the academic semester winds down–thank you!)

There are two ways you can donate:

A charitable contribution to Coptic Scriptorium via the University of Oklahoma.

The link will provide instructions to ensure your donation goes directly to Coptic Scriptorium.
You may also send a paper check to the Women’s and Gender Studies Department, The University of Oklahoma, 731 Elm Avenue, 101 Robertson Hall, Norman OK 73019. (Caroline Schroeder, one of the project’s founders, is a Professor in that department.)

A charitable contribution to the St. Shenouda Society, one of our research partners. Mention Coptic Scriptorium, and President of the Society Hany Takla will ensure your donation goes toward our work.

Our immediate financial priorities are: paying for our servers, with enough capacity to maintain a good user experience; continuing to employ our part-time post-doctoral researcher, who works on digitizing and annotating Coptic texts and building Bohairic Coptic natural language processing tools.

Donations of any amount are most welcome.
We will recognize all our donors on our website.
Supporters can adopt a server for a week at $30, and for a month at $120.
You can underwrite our researcher for a week at $600 and for a month at $2500

Thank you for your empathy and solidarity.

New Grant from the St Shenouda Society

February 27, 2025 / ctschroeder / 0 Comments

The Coptic Scriptorium team is deeply grateful to the St Shenouda the Archimandrite Coptic Society for its recent grant to our project. This generous gift was made possible by donations from many members of the Society. We especially thank Hany Takla, President of the Society, for his ongoing leadership and collaboration with our project.

The funds will go to digitizing and annotating more Bohairic Coptic literature. Team member Dr. Nicholas Wagner will be able to devote more hours to Boharic.

Thank you again to the St. Shenouda Society!

New Corpora Release 6.0.0

December 6, 2024 / Nick Wagner / 0 Comments

Searching for Greek loanwords in Bohairic Habakkuk

We are pleased to announce the release of version 6.0.0 of Coptic Scriptorium! Our corpus has been dramatically expanded in this release, now exceeding 2.2 million tokens of searchable, linguistically annotated Coptic texts. Among the highlights of this update is the exponential growth of our Bohairic corpus, now comprising approximately 750,000 words and featuring translated texts such as the Bohairic Bible (Old and New Testament), as well as original works such as the Life of Isaac. This milestone brings substantial enhancements to our collections, including modern editions processed with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology alongside both new and updated Coptic texts.

New OCR Material and Automatic Tagging

This release includes the addition of OCR-based editions. For the first time, fully automated tagging has been applied to a selection of OCR datasets:

Version 6.0.0 also includes several newly curated corpora, reflecting a diversity of dialects, genres, and textual traditions:

More selections now with parallel Arabic translations:
- Apophthegmata Patrum (AP)
Pseudo-Theophilus:
- On Repentance and Continence
Mercurius:
- Martyrdom
- Miracles Part 1 and Part 2
- Encomium
Additions to Shenoute of Atripe’s Acephalous Work 22 (A22):
- YB 83-96
Bohairic texts:
- Old Testament (automatic processing)
- New Testament (automatic processing)
- Life of Isaac (with manual corrections)
Bohairic Bible selection manually segmented and tagged:

Collaborative Efforts and Future Directions

We are grateful to our collaborators and contributors who have made this release possible, particularly Caroline T. Schroeder and Amir Zeldes, as well as Randy Komforty, Lydia Bremer-McCollum, Lawrence Rafferty, Nina Speranskaja, and Nicholas Wagner. We also want to thank the National Endowment for the Humanities for their ongoing support. The integration of OCR materials and the expansion of our Bohairic collection reflect ongoing efforts to enhance accessibility and analytical tools for Coptic studies. These advances also pave the way for further development of NLP tools for our users.

Accessing the Data

For advanced linguistic queries, you can explore the data using our ANNIS server. To help you get started, check out our tutorial with query tips and a convenient cheat sheet.

We invite you to explore this latest release and we look forward to your feedback!

grey and white database interface with Coptic text

New Webinar Video on Searching Our Database Now Online

July 16, 2024 / ctschroeder / 0 Comments

Earlier today, the Coptic Scriptorium project hosted an online workshop/webinar on searching text and annotations in our database (ANNIS). The video is now on YouTube. The cheat-sheet with an online tutorial that Dr. Zeldes shows in this video is on our website.

Webinar/online workshop on how to search the Coptic Scriptorium database (ANNIS)

If you watch the video, we’d also appreciate your feedback in this brief survey.

We thank the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Oklahoma, and Georgetown University for supporting the project and this workshop.

New Corpora Release 5.0.0

May 30, 2024 / Lydia Bremer-McCollum / 0 Comments

We are pleased to announce release 5.0.0 of Coptic Scriptorium! Our data now includes over 1,288,229 tokens of searchable, linguistically analyzed Coptic data from dozens of ancient Coptic works.

This release also marks the introduction of Bohairic Coptic data to our corpus holdings: the repository now contains Bohairic Bible materials, covering Mark 1-16 and 1 Cor. 1-16, with manually reviewed segmentation for the entire corpus, and manual tagging and treebanking for chapters 1-5 in each book. Segmentation and tagging were reviewed in collaboration with Nicholas Wagner, and treebanking was done in collaboration with Nina Speranskaja. As a result of this work, we are in the process of compiling new NLP tools and guidelines specifically for Bohairic.

In addition, the release includes corrections and updates to existing corpora as well as the addition of several new Sahidic works and documents:

A. Sections of five works by Shenoute of Atripe:

B. New documents were added to existing works:

C. Newly added translation spans for Pistis Sophia, aligned by Randy Komforty

These join the newly treebanked and tagged Bohairic data, which can be found here:

We are very grateful to all of our collaborators and contributors, without whom this project could not function. We welcome Nicholas Wagner to the team and warmly thank Randy Komforty for his work on Pistis Sophia, and Nina Sepranskaja for her treebanking work.

As with all our releases, raw machine readable data for all corpora can be found, including morphological and syntactic analysis, as well as named entity recognition and entity linking (currently only for Sahidic), in this GitHub repository, in a variety of popular formats: https://github.com/CopticScriptorium/corpora

You can also search for complex linguistic annotations in the data using our ANNIS server – please see our tutorial here to get started with some query tips and a helpful cheat sheet: https://copticscriptorium.org/ANNIS_tutorial

New Corpora Release 4.5.0

October 24, 2023 / Lydia Bremer-McCollum / 0 Comments

Image of a search in ANNIS — Searching for “people” in Shenoute’s *God Who Alone is True*

We are pleased to announce release 4.5.0 of Coptic Scriptorium! Our data now includes over 1,278,500 tokens of searchable, linguistically analyzed Coptic data from dozens of ancient Coptic works (an increase of over 11,500 tokens from the previous release).

This release corrects a large number of consistency errors identified in our existing data, and also adds some new documents:

Revisions to five works of Besa:
Sections of three works by Shenoute of Atripe:
New documents were added to existing works:
- Acephalous Work 22
- Apophthegmata Patrum
Newly treebanked data with syntactic gold standard annotations for 1 Corinthians 7

We are very grateful to all of our collaborators and contributors, without whom this project could not function. We welcome Christine Ayad, Lydia Bremer-McCollum, Adeline Harrington, and Nina Speranskaja.

As with all releases, raw machine readable data for all corpora can be found, including morphological and syntactic analysis, as well as named entity recognition and entity linking, on our GitHub repository, in a variety of popular formats:

https://github.com/copticscriptorium/corpora

You can also search for complex linguistic annotations in the data using our ANNIS server – please see our new tutorial here to get started with some query tips and a helpful cheat sheet:

https://copticscriptorium.org/ANNIS_tutorial

We hope this release will be useful and look forward to the next one as always!

Online Coptic Scriptorium Reading Group

October 4, 2023 / Lydia Bremer-McCollum / 1 Comment

Description:

The online Coptic Scriptorium Reading Group consists of a series of short term reading units focused on a particular Coptic text or corpus. The group will focus on reading, analyzing, and translating a set of Coptic texts found in the digital corpus of the Coptic Scriptorium project. We will also practice reading out loud. In addition, the reading units will introduce and demonstrate a variety of Coptic focused digital humanities tools. These include especially the Coptic Online Dictionary and tools for linguistic and corpus analysis. Participants will leave with stronger Coptic reading facility, grammar review, and an introduction to a range of open-access digital humanities tools for studying Coptic.

Audience:

This group is perfect for Coptologists, historians, linguists, heritage learners, and hobbyists alike. All are welcome! The reading group and text/corpus sequence are designed for introductory and lower-intermediate level reading ability (1-2 semesters of instruction or a roughly equivalent amount of self-directed learning). In other words, some previous grammar training and knowledge of the alphabet will be presumed.

Email organizer (lcbm@ou.edu) if you would like to join or if you have questions about your fit for the group! Zoom link will be shared with the email list.

Schedule:

Meet via Zoom for 1 hour 3x per week.

Time: 10:00am EST | 9:00am CST | 7:00am PST

4:00pm CEST | 3:00pm BST | 5:00pm EEST | 11:00pm JST

Note: Attendance at all sessions within a series is not required. Moreover, the series can be taken sequentially, but it is not assumed or required. Feel free to drop-in as your schedule and interest allow!

Fall/Winter 2023 Dates:

Sequence A:

October 23rd, 25th, 27th, 30th, 1st, 3rd (6 hours total)

Reading Material: Apothegmata Patrum Selections

Sequence B:

November 6th, 8th, 10th, 13th, 15th, 17th (6 hours total)

Reading Material: Ruth Selections

Sequence C:

December 4th, 6th, 8th, 11th, 13th, 15th, 18th, 20th (8 hours total)

Reading Material: Apothegmata Patrum Selections

2024 Schedule TBD

Note: Time and weekly meeting frequency of sequence B and C are subject to change based on group feedback.

Group Organizer:

Dr. Lydia Bremer-McCollum (she/hers) holds ten+ years of experience reading and translating Coptic. She has taught introductory and intermediate courses at Harvard and Princeton Universities. As part of the NEH funded Coptic Scriptorium project, she aims to create an online Coptic reading community focused on reading and utilizing the rich set of open-access tools. Feel free to contact her with any questions at lcbm@ou.edu

Title slide to "Learning and Teaching Coptic" (Schroeder, St Shenouda-UCLA Conference, 2023)

Learning and Teaching Coptic with Coptic Scriptorium’s Resources

July 15, 2023 / ctschroeder / 0 Comments

Today I had the pleasure of giving a presentation at the annual St. Shenouda Society-UCLA Conference of Coptic Studies. My talk illustrates various ways the Coptic Scriptorium project’s texts and tools can help Coptic language learners become more proficient in Coptic. Whether you are a student in a course, an instructor, or someone wanting to learn or improve your knowledge of Coptic, there are many resources online to help you. I’ve posted the slides here for everyone to access, and they go through how to use advanced features of the online Dictionary, basic natural language processing tools to decipher confusing or complicated grammar, and ways to read digitized text to improve reading skills.

I hope it’s useful!

StShenoudaSoc-2023-public Download

Hiring a DH Specialist in Coptic Studies

June 21, 2023 / ctschroeder / 0 Comments

Coptic Scriptorium is hiring one more staff member, starting in September 2023. This position runs through at least August 2024 and can be renewed potentially up through July 2026. It is part-time (on average 15 hours/week). Full details in the ad attached!

Thank you to the National Endowment for the Humanities (Preservation and Access Division) and the University of Oklahoma Office of the Vice Provost for Research and Partnerships for the funding and support for this position!!

OU-Digital-Humanities-Specialist-Job-Ad-Fall-2023 Download