The Coptic Scriptorium team is honored to have been awarded an NEH Preservation and Access/Humanities Collections and Reference Resources Implementation Grant in the amount of $349,887. This award will fund a 3-year project Expanding Coptic Digital Online Collections. You can read the press release and list of awarded grants on the NEH site. This initiative will enable Coptic Scriptorium to improve the user experience, to expand our digital database of richly annotated texts in the Sahidic dialect, and to develop natural language tools and searchable, annotated, digitized corpora for additional dialects, including Bohairic. Caroline T. Schroeder (University of Oklahoma) is PI, and Amir Zeldes (Georgetown University) is co-PI. The team also includes Rebecca Krawiec (Canisius College), Christine Luckritz Marquis (Union Presbyterian Seminary), and Hany Takla (St. Shenouda Society), as well as a diverse advisory board. We thank our whole team past and present for the work that led to this stage, and we are grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities for their ongoing support.
Searching for Greek words in Shenoute’s So Concerning the Little Place
We are pleased to announce release 4.4.0 of Coptic Scriptorium! Our data now includes over 1,267,000 tokens of searchable, linguistically analyzed Coptic data from dozens of ancient Coptic works (an increase of almost 100,000 tokens from the previous release). We are very grateful to all of our collaborators and contributors, without whom this project could not function.
This release corrects a large number of consistency errors identified in our existing data, and also adds some new documents:
We would like to thank the Marcion Project for making the underlying digitized text of Pistis Sophia available, and all of the annotators for their hard work. Tamara Siuda, Rebecca Krawiec, Philippe Zaher, and Lance Martin contributed, in addition to Amir and Carrie. As our current DHAG grant ends, we would like to give special thanks to Lance, who has been working as our DH specialist on the project since 2019, for doing an amazing job of keeping track of all the data and the various tasks he’s been in charge of over the past three years!
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:
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:
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.
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.
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:
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:
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.
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:
More Apophthegmata Patrum (work by Christine Luckritz Marquis, So Miyagawa, Caroline T. Schroeder and Amir Zeldes)
Further material from Shenoute’s works:
God Says Through Those Who Are His (including parallel witnesses and new material, data courtesy of David Brakke, annotations by Rebecca Krawiec, Lance Martin, Dana Robinson, Caroline T. Schroeder)
Acephalous Work 22 (data courtesy of David Brakke, annotations by Elizabeth Davidson, Rebecca Krawiec, Elizabeth Platte, Caroline T. Schroeder, Amir Zeldes)
More syntactically annotated gold treebanked data in the Coptic Treebank
Completely re-annotated Old Testament corpus, based on the base text courtesy of the Digital Edition of the Coptic Old Testament (CoptOT) project – with improved segmentation and parsing, now complete with semi-automatic entity recognition and linking to Wikipedia entries for people and places
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!
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:
Life of John the Kalybites, parts 1 and 2 (annotations by Lance Martin, Tamara, Siuda, and Caroline T. Schroeder)
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:
Apa Johannes Canons (Diliana Atanassova, Caroline T. Schroeder, Lance Martin, and Amir Zeldes)
Apophthegmata Patrum (Marina Ghaly, Christine Luckritz Marquis, Caroline T. Schroeder)
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!
