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New links for tools and services

After our recent server outage, we’ve been re-installing our tools and software. Some of our services are now available at new URLs.

The ANNIS database is now at https://annis.copticscriptorium.org/annis/scriptorium

Our Sahidic Coptic natural language processing tools are at https://tools.copticscriptorium.org/coptic-nlp

Our GitDox annotation tool is at https://tools.copticscriptorium.org/gitdox/scriptorium

The Coptic Dictionary online is still at https://coptic-dictionary.org, and our tool for browsing and reading texts is still at https://data.copticscriptorium.org

Thanks for your patience!

Coptic Scriptorium services are back online!

Thank you to Amir and the staff at Georgetown University. Most of our public applications, such as the ANNIS database and the Coptic Dictionary Online, are back in service.

Coptic Dictionary and ANNIS database down

We are sorry to report that the server that hosts the Coptic Dictionary Online and Coptic Scriptorium’s ANNIS database are down. (Likewise some of the NLP tools and internal tools like GitDox are down.)

We are working on fixing the problem, but for now we do not have a timeline for when they will be up and running.

In the meantime reading and browsing texts at http://data.copticscriptorium.org still work.

Thank you for your patience! We will let you know when the systems are up again.

New Corpora Release 4.3.0

The opening lines of Pistis Sophia

It is our pleasure to announce release 4.3.0 of Coptic Scriptorium corpora, which currently cover over 1,175,000 tokens of searchable, linguistically analyzed Coptic data from dozens of ancient Coptic works. New in this release:

Corrections and additional annotations:

  • Pilot work adding partial Arabic translations (work by Philippe Zaher)
  • Improvements and error corrections to a variety of works (including Because of You Too O Prince of Evil, Dormition of John, Book of Ruth and Homilies of Proclus)

The newly released material encompasses over 57,000 tokens of semi-automatically annotated data. We would like to give special thanks to the Marcion Project for making much of the underlying digitized text available, and the annotators whose hard work has made this release possible. 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

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

Example of research using the online Coptic Dictionary: standalone G Thomas transcription

Martijn Linssen, an independent researcher, has been working on the Gospel of Thomas for some time and recently published a stand-alone “interactive Coptic-English translation” of the Gospel of Thomas on his Academia.edu site. The Coptic is linked to entries in the online Coptic Dictionary! We invite you to check it out!

We are always excited to see what kind of work people are doing with our project. Please get in touch if you’ve been using the dictionary or any of Coptic Scriptorium’s tools, corpora, annotations, etc., in your work!

The online dictionary is part of the KELLIA collaboration between Coptic Scriptorium (Georgetown University and the University of Oklahoma), the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy, the Goettingen Academy, the Free University in Berlin, and Goettingen University.

New Corpora Release 4.2.0

Automatic linguistic analysis and Entity Linking from I Samuel 25

It is our pleasure to announce the latest data release from Coptic Scriptorium, version 4.2.0. This release contains both new Coptic material and additions to older datasets, as well as expanding our entity annotations and named-entity linking to all of our data, including the semi-automatically annotated Old Testament. The also means automatic updates to all of our interfaces, such as the recently added example usage functionality in the Coptic Dictionary Online, which is linked to the corpora.

The new material, including more digitized data courtesy of the Marcion project, as well as manually digitized and corrected OCR data from out of print editions includes:

With this new release, the semi-automatically annotated data (excluding automatically processed Bible materials) in the project covers close to 300,000 words of Sahidic Coptic annotated for entities.

This release represents a tremendous amount of work over the past few months by the Coptic Scriptorium team. We would also like to thank individual contributors (which you can always find in the ‘annotation’ metadata for each document), and specifically So Miyagawa for help with Coptic OCR models, as well as the Marcion and CoptOT project for sharing their data with us, and the National Endowment for the Humanities for supporting us. We are continuing to work on more data, links to other resources and new kinds of annotations and tools. Please let us know if you have any feedback!

Winter 2021 Corpora Release 4.1.0

Amulet to protect place and animals. O. Crum ST 18 (KYP T344), side-by-side with its rendition on Coptic Scriptorium. Image source.

We are pleased to announce the latest release of data from Coptic Scriptorium, version 4.1.0. The new release adds new Coptic texts and annotation additions, underscored by the application of named and non-named entity annotation to our New Testament corpus.

In total, we released approximately 40,000 tokens of manually edited text in 17 documents from new works, as well as adding material to already existing works. The new material, including more digitized data courtesy of the Marcion project, the Kyprianos Magical Text Database, and other scholars, includes:

We are especially excited to announce the first release of several magical papyri and an ostracon on the Coptic Scriptorium platform in collaboration with the Kyprianos team at the University of Würzburg:

  • Magical Texts (Korshi Dosoo, Edward O. D. Love, Markéta Preininger, Lance Martin, Caroline T. Schroeder, and Amir Zeldes)

Expansions and Improvements of existing corpora:

We have extended our semi-automatic entity annotation coverage to encompass our New Testament material (over 248,000 tokens). Entity annotations, like our other annotations, were added to these specific corpora automatically and include:

  • The classification of all non-pronominal references to people, places and other entities into 10 entity categories
  • Entity linking:
    • Linking of all named entities which have corresponding Wikipedia articles to their respective Wikipedia entries, including geo-location information where available

This addition complements the existing named and non-named entity annotations of our entire collections of Coptic corpora.

We would also like to thank individual contributors (which you can always find in the ‘annotation’ metadata for each document), each of whom put in a colossal amount of work, and the Marcion and Kyprianos projects who shared their data with us, as well as the National Endowment for the Humanities for supporting us. We are continuing to create more data and tools. Please let us know if you have any feedback!

Comprehensive Coptic Lexicon v1.2

The “Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae” project (“Strukturen und Transformationen des Wortschatzes der ägyptischen Sprache”, BBAW), the “Database and Dictionary of Greek Loanwords in Coptic” (DDGLC, Freie Universität Berlin), and “Coptic Scriptorium: Digital Research in Coptic Language and Literature” are pleased to announce the latest release of the “Comprehensive Coptic Lexicon”: Version 1.2. The raw data can be downloaded from: 

  • D. Burns, F. Feder, K. John, M. Kupreyev, et al. 2020-07-24. Comprehensive Coptic Lexicon: Including Loanwords from Ancient Greek, Berlin: Freie Universität Berlin, http://dx.doi.org/10.17169/refubium-27566

The processed data has been published by the 

The major new features include: 

  • Standardized use of parentheses “( )” in word forms.
  • Optimizated data structure (e.g., <sense/> element now contains a unique ID, facilitating the ongoing work on linking CCL to the databases of semantic relations such as Coptic WordNet).
  • Correction of orthographic, grammatical and semantic information of the existing entries and addition of new entries.
  • Linking to Perseus Greek morphology tool via the Greek head words. DDGLC lemma IDs are now displayed in the entry view of Coptic Dictionary Online.
  • Improved usability of the section of Greek loanwords due to exclusion or change of a number of  senses.
  • Link to attestation search for nouns filtered by entity-type (e.g., search for ⲟⲩⲟⲛ standing for a person, an animal, or an inanimate object) in Coptic Scriptorium.
  • Phrase network visualization of most common word sequences containing nouns, verbs and prepositions.

For the full description of the Version 1.2 please refer to the the “Release Notes”: https://refubium.fu-berlin.de/bitstream/handle/fub188/27813/Comprehensive_Coptic_Lexicon_v1.2_Release_Notes.pdf?sequence=5&isAllowed=y 


The Comprehensive Coptic Lexicon V 1.2 now contains 11263 entries and 31847 forms of Egyptian-Coptic and Greek-Coptic datasets. TLA, DDGLC and Coptic Scriptorium invite you to take a look at the new data and would welcome your feedback.

Summer 2020 Corpora Release 4.0.0

Place name index on data.copticscriptorium.org

It is our great pleasure to announce the latest release of data from Coptic Scriptorium, version 4.0.0. This release contains both new Coptic material and extensive additions to our suite of tools and annotations, focusing on the addition of support for entity annotation and named-entity linking across our new and old datasets. The new material, including more digitized data courtesy of the Marcion project and other scholars, includes:

With this new release, the semi-automatically annotated data (excluding automatically processed Bible materials) in the project covers close to 260,000 words of Sahidic Coptic annotated for entities, including 50,000 words of gold-standard treebanked data with manual syntactic analyses.

In addition to new texts, new tools and analyses have been added to the project:

  • Complete entity annotation, classifying all non-pronominal references to people, places and other entities into 10 entity categories
  • Entity linking:
    • Linking of all named entities which have corresponding Wikipedia articles to their respective Wikipedia entries, including geo-location information where available
    • A browseable index of people and places mentioned in the texts, also linked to Wikipedia and Google Maps and including both real and fictional entities
  • Search and visualization:
    • Search by entity type and named entity in ANNIS
    • New configurable analytic visualization which displays nested entity types, highlights named entities and links them to Wikipedia
  • Natural Language Processing
    • Automatic entity recognition is now available (work by Amir Zeldes, Lance Martin and Sichang Tu)
    • A new neural parser adapted for Coptic with higher accuracy syntactic analyses, which are deployed in ANNIS (work by Luke Gessler)
The new configurable Analytic Visualization with toggleable entity types and links

This release represents a tremendous amount of work over the past few months by the entire Coptic Scriptorium team. We would also like to thank individual contributors (which you can always find in the ‘annotation’ metadata for each document) and the Marcion and PAThs projects who shared their data with us, and the National Endowment for the Humanities for supporting us. We are continuing to work on more data, links to other resources and new kinds of annotations and tools. Please let us know if you have any feedback!

Digital Coptic 3 – program online!

The program for the third edition of Digital Coptic is now online. Check out the workshop website for the list of projects, talks and presenters.

Please join us for the workshop on July 12 and 13 – participants will receive a Zoom link and password for interactive presentations and discussion, and the workshop will also be cast to YouTube for larger audiences and offline viewing after the workshop. We look forward to hearing all the talks!

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