We are making some updates to the document application at data.copticscriptorium.org tonight (13 December 2016) approximately 7:30-8:30 pm Pacific time/10:30-11:30 Eastern time. The service may be down.
You can still query and access our corpora in the ANNIS database at https://corpling.uis.georgetown.edu/annis/scriptorium . That service will not be affected. Thanks!
We at Coptic SCRIPTORIUM have been fortunate to have received three grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities for our work. We cannot thank the NEH enough for its support. So much of what we have done over the past 2+ years could not have happened without this funding.
We just completed a White Paper paper for a Foundations grant from the Humanities Collections and Reference Resources program in the Division of Preservation and Access. The grant, “Coptic SCRIPTORIUM: Digitizing a Corpus for Interdisciplinary Research in Ancient Egyptian,” ran from May 2104 until now.
Our White Paper documents our work and especially the standards and practices we developed for digitizing a pilot Coptic corpus.
If you want to know more about what truly interdisciplinary DH work looks like, check it out. We try to break down the complexities of creating a digital corpus for research in linguistics, history, religious studies, biblical studies, manuscript studies. We’ve got data models, workflows, digitization standards, transcription guidelines, and more all laid out for you here.
There is so much more to do; this is a only start. Thanks to everyone who has had faith in our work.
We have a great announcement today. Along with our German research partners as part of the KELLIA project, we are releasing an online Coptic lexicon linked to our corpora.
For over three years, the Berlin-Brandenberg Academy of Sciences has been working on a digital lexicon for Coptic. Frank Feder began the work. Frank Feder began creating it, encoding definitions for Coptic lemmas in three languages: English, French, and German. The final entries were completed by Maxim Kupreyev at the academy and Julien Delhez in Göttingen. The base lexicon file is encoded in TEI-XML. This summer Amir Zeldes and his student, Emma Manning, created a web interface. We will release the source code soon as part of the KELLIA project.
It may still need some refinements and updates, but we think it is a useful achievement that will help anyone interested in Coptic.
Entries have definitions in French, German, and English.
You can use the lexicon as a standalone website. For the pilot launch, it’s on the Georgetown server, but make no mistake, this is major research outcome for the BBAW.
We’ve also linked the dictionary to our texts in Coptic SCRIPTORIUM. You can click on the ANNIS icon in the dictionary entry to search all corpora in Coptic SCRIPTORIUM for that word.
The link also goes in the other direction. In the normalized visualization of our texts, you can click on a word and get taken to the entry for that word’s lemma in the dictionary. You can do this in the normalized visualization in our web application for reading and accessing texts (pictured below), or in the normalized visualization embedded in the ANNIS tool.
Of course there will be refinements and developments to come. We would love to hear your feedback on what works, what could work better, and where you find glitches.
On a more personal note, when Amir and I first came up with the idea for the project, we dreamed of creating a Perseus Digital Library for Coptic. This dictionary is a huge step forward. And honestly, I myself had almost nothing to do with this piece of the project. It’s an example of the importance and power of collaboration.
Much of the Coptic SCRIPTORIUM team is in Claremont this week for the Congress of the International Association of Coptic Studies.
We started out with a pre-conference, 2-day workshop with our KELLIA partners from Germany, where we worked on sharing data and technologies across digital Coptic projects. Look here soon for an announcement about a really cool fruit of our labors.
Thursday there are two panels, and Friday there are two workshops.
Thursday 2-4 pm Coptic Digital Studies (Burkle 16)
David Brakke chair
Prof. Dr. Caroline Schroeder, Coptic SCRIPTORIUM: A Digital Platform for Research in Coptic Language and Literature
Dr. Christine Luckritz Marquis, Reimagining the Apopthegmata Patrum in a Digital Culture
Prof. Amir Zeldes, A Quantitative Approach to Syntactic Alternations in Sahidic
Dr. Rebecca Krawiec, Charting Rhetorical Choices in Shenoute: Abraham our Father and I See Your Eagerness as case-studies
Thursday 4:30-6:30 Coptic Digital Humanities (Burkle 16)
Caroline T. Schroeder, Chair
Dr. Paul Dilley, Coptic Scriptorium beyond the Manuscript: Towards a Distant Reading of Coptic Texts
Mr. So Miyagawa and Dr. Marco Büchler, Computational Analysis of Text Reuse in Shenoute and Besa
Mr. Uwe Sikora, Text Encoding – Opportunities and Challenges
Ms. Eliese-Sophia Lincke, Optical Character Recogition (OCR) for Coptic. Testing Automated Digitization of Texts with OCRopy
Friday 11-12:30 Workshop on Coptic Fonts & Coptic Bible (AA)
Christian Askeland, Frank Feder
Friday 4:30-6 Digital Tools for Beginners (Workshop on Coptic SCRIPTORIUM)
Caroline T. Schroeder, Amir Zeldes, Rebecca S. Krawiec
Amir Zeldes and Caroline T. Schroeder have recently published an article in Digital Humanities Quarterly about the need for digital tools and a digitized corpus for Coptic, and research questions that drive Coptic SCRIPTORIUM.
“Raiders of the Lost Corpus” is freely available on the DHQ website as part of a special issue on Digital Methods and Classical Studies edited by Neil Coffee and Neil W. Bernstein. Schroeder presented an earlier version of this paper at the Digital Classics conference at the University at Buffalo in 2013.
We’ve updated and re-released our fully machine-annotated New Testament corpus. sahidica.nt V2.1.0 contains the Sahidica NT text from Warren Wells Sahidica online NT, with the following features:
Please keep in mind that this fully machine-annotated corpus is more accurate than previous versions but will nonetheless contain more errors than a corpus manually corrected by a human.
For searches and queries using our ANNIS database to find specific terms, for this corpus we recommend searching the normalized words using regular expressions (to capture instances of the desired word that may still be embedded in a Coptic bound group, instances that our tokenizer may have missed):
Lemma searches are now also possible. You may wish to search for the lemma using regular expressions, as well, in order to find lemmas of some compound words. For example, the following search will find entries containing ⲥⲱⲧⲙ in the lemma:
The results include various forms of ⲥⲱⲧⲙ (including ⲥⲟⲧⲙ) lemmatized the lexical entry “ⲥⲱⲧⲙ“, compound words lemmatized to ⲥⲱⲧⲙ or to a lexical entry containing ⲥⲱⲧⲙ, and some bound groups containing the word form ⲥⲱⲧⲙ, which our tokenizer did not catch:
Frequency table of normalized words lemmatized to ⲥⲱⲧⲙ or a lemma form containing ⲥⲱⲧⲙ (May 2016 Sahidica corpus)
As you can see, most of the hits are accurate (e.g., ⲥⲟⲧⲙ, ⲁⲧⲥⲱⲧⲙ, ⲣⲁⲧⲥⲱⲧⲙ, ⲣⲉϥⲥⲱⲧⲙ); some of the Coptic bound groups did not tokenize properly (e.g., ⲉⲡⲥⲱⲧⲙ, ⲙⲁⲣⲟⲩⲥⲱⲧⲙ). We expect accuracy to increase as we incorporate more texts into our corpora that have been machine annotated and then manually edited.
You can also read these documents and see the linguistic analysis visualizations at data.copticscriptorium.org/urn:cts:copticLit:nt. The first documents you will see (Gospel of Mark, 1 Corinthians) are manually annotated. Scroll down for “New Testament,” which is the full, machine-annotated Sahidica New Testament. Click on “Chapter” to read each chapter as normalized Coptic (with English translation as a pop-up when you hover your cursor). Click on “Analytic” for the normalized Coptic, part of speech analysis, and English translation for each chapter. Please keep in mind the English translation provided is a free, open-access New Testament translation from the World English Bible; it is not a direct translation from the Coptic.
Note: we know that our server is slow generating the documents for this corpus. It may take several minutes to load; please be patient. For faster access, use ANNIS. Visualizations to read the chapters are available by clicking on the corpus and the icon for visualizations.
Accessing document visualizations of the Sahidica corpus via ANNIS
We hope this corpus is useful to researchers.
We’ve published another small fragment of Besa on Coptic SCRIPTORIUM. So Miyagawa has edited and translated the letter fragment known as On Lack of Food. Read it online or search the letters of Besa we have published.
We are pleased to announce the release of our newest versions of some of our natural language processing tools for Coptic which incorporate the lemma list of loanwords developed by the Database and Dictionary of Greek Loanwords in Coptic (DDGLC).
The DDGLC is part of the KELLIA partnership between American and German digital Coptic projects funded by the NEH Office of Digital Humanities and the DFG. The DDGLC, under the direction of Prof. Dr. Tonio Sebastian Richter, has been building a database of Greek loanwords in Coptic in order to facilitate the study of language contact, language borrowing, and multilingualism in Egypt.
We have integrated the Greek lemma list into our language of origin tagger, tokenizer and morphology analysis, and lemmatizer.
Our online natural language processing web service (which bundles together all of our NLP tools into one web application) also includes this new data from the DDGLC.
The Greek loanword list should greatly increase the accuracy of many of our tools. If you use them, please let us know how it goes!
We at Coptic SCRIPTORIUM are grateful for this partnership and the generosity of the DDGLC team.
This winter we’ve released a new document we’ve been working on for a while. It’s a born digital publication, in the sense that this document to our knowledge has never been published previously. The edition and annotations here were produced by Elizabeth Platte (Reed College) and Rebecca S. Krawiec (Canisius College) directly from digital photographs of the manuscript for digital publication.
Read the manuscript transcription or the normalized text, or query it in our database.
It’s a section of one of Shenoute’s texts for monks in volume three of his monastic Canons. This 14-page (seven-folio) fragment now resides in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris and originally derives from the White Monastery codex known by the siglum MONB.YB. We’ve released text and annotations for pages 307-320, which equate to the BN call number Ms Copte 130/2 ff. 51-57. Digital photos are now available online at Gallica.
We’ve transcribed the text from images of the manuscript and then annotated it for manuscript information. We’ve also broken the text down into the Coptic phrases known as “bound groups,” words, and morphs. Then we’ve annotated it all for part of speech, loan words (Greek, Latin, etc.), and lemmas.
By “we” I mean primarily Platte and Krawiec . Schroeder and Zeldes provided editorial review, as per our policy of having every published digital document reviewed by at least one editor.
As far as we know, this fragment has never been published; nor has any translation ever been published. We don’t have a translation yet, either.
As the first born-digital edition, this document is an experiment for us. Everything else we’ve worked with has been published in an edition, and sometimes even has an English translation that another scholar has published. Even though we digitize from the original manuscript, previous editions and translations make the transcription, annotation, and editing process much easier. This document is an unknown quantity.
This means we expect to have errors and welcome feedback on the document.
We also have no translation as of yet. Our goal is to translate the document and then edit the transcription and annotations again as we work. We hope to publish an essay on how the digital annotation process affected the creation of an edition.
In the meantime, use it to practice your Coptic. Let us know if you find errors. We’ll credit you.
Unless otherwise indicated, Coptic SCRIPTORIUM website and content
is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Coptic SCRIPTORIUM is supported by
the National Endowment for the Humanities Office of Digital Humanities and Division of Preservation and Access,
the University of the Pacific, Georgetown University, and Canisius College.
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