Coptic SCRIPTORIUM Blog

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Coptic Scriptorium wins DHAG grant from the NEH

August 8, 2018 / Amir Zeldes / 0 Comments

We are very pleased to report that the National Endowment for the Humanities just announced their approval of a new Stage III Digital Humanities Advancement Grant continuing their long-standing support of our work in Coptic Scriptorium. The new grant is titled:

A Linked Digital Environment for Coptic Studies: Integrating Heterogeneous Data with Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing

The focus of the grant, which is set to run from fall 2018 for three years, is developing more robust tools which can deliver high accuracy analyses with less manual intervention in the face of more heterogeneous data, including Coptic materials from OCR, spelling variation across editions and varying scholarly conventions. This will allow us to grow the collection of corpora made available over the project’s tools in the coming months and years. Additional areas of work include improving our work on Linked Open Data standards connecting the project to other initiatives in the field, and pioneering methods for automatic Named Entity Recognition in Coptic, among other things!

Please stay tuned for more updates on the new project – in the meantime we thank the NEH for their trust in us, our project members, contributors and advisory board for all their work, and the Digital Coptic community for your support!

Presenters and attendees of the 19th annual UCLA-St. Shenouda Society Coptic Studies Conference

Coptic SCRIPTORIUM at the UCLA-St Shenouda Coptic Studies Conference

Coptic SCRIPTORIUM’s Carrie Schroeder presented a paper on our project’s latest work at the nineteenth annual UCLA-St. Shenouda Society Coptic Studies Conference. As usual, the conference showcased papers from a diverse set of presenters, with scholarship on early monasticism all the way to modern Coptic architecture. We thank Hany Takla, President of the Society and longtime friend of the project, for the opportunity to attend.

Presenters and attendees of the 19th annual UCLA-St. Shenouda Society Coptic Studies Conference

German PI Dr. Prof. Heike Behlmer and US PI Caroline T. Schroeder at Schroeder's recent visit to the Coptic Old Testament Project at the University and the Goettingen Academy.

Coptic Scriptorium’s summer adventures

July 20, 2018 / ctschroeder / 0 Comments

This has been a summer of writing, annotating, and conferencing!

German PI Dr. Prof. Heike Behlmer and US PI Caroline T. Schroeder at Schroeder’s recent visit to the Coptic Old Testament Project at the University and the Goettingen Academy.

We are winding up our collaborative grant with our German partners (Coptic Old Testament Project, the Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae, the DDGLC, and the INTF). Our German and US PI’s met in Göttingen, Germany, earlier this summer. We’re working on writing our final reports and exchanging data and technologies. We’re hoping to publish more annotated texts later this year.

We also have had a series of conference papers, including a paper on one of our collaboration’s proudest achievements, the online Coptic Dictionary. Here are some of the lectures and conference presentations this summer:

Miyagawa, So and Zeldes, Amir (2018) “A Semantic Map of the Coptic Complementizer če Based on Corpus Analysis: Grammaticalization and Areal Typology in Africa,” International Workshop on Semantic maps: Where do we stand and where are we going? Liège, Belgium. June.

Schroeder, Caroline T. (2018) “A Homily is a Homily is a Homily is a Corpus: Digital Approaches to Shenoute,” The Transmission of Early Christian Homilies from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages Conference, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main. June.

Schroeder, Caroline T. (2018) “Coptic Studies in the Digital Age,” Department of Ancient History, Macquarie University. July.

Schroeder, Caroline T. (2018) “Coptic Studies in a Digital Age,” UCLA-St. Shenouda Foundation Coptic Studies Conference, Los Angeles. July.

Feder, Frank,Maxim Kupreyev, Emma Manning, Caroline T. Schroeder, Amir Zeldes. “A Linked Coptic Dictionary Online”. Proceedings of LaTeCH 2018 – The 11th SIGHUM Workshop at COLING2018. Santa Fe, NM. August. [paper online]

As always, thanks to all our contributors, collaborators, and board members for their insight and labor.

New paper about the Coptic Dictionary Online

July 12, 2018 / Amir Zeldes / 0 Comments

A new paper about the Coptic Dictionary Online will be presented at this year’s ACL SIGHUM workshop on Language Technology for Cultural Heritage. This work is a collaboration between the Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, and Coptic Scriptorium.

The paper presents the structure and underlying principles of the dictionary and its Web interface, and also gives a quantitative analysis of the dictionary’s coverage of Coptic lexical material in corpus data. You can check out the pre-print here:

Feder, Frank, Kupreyev, Maxim, Manning, Emma, Schroeder, Caroline T. and Zeldes, Amir (2018) “A Linked Coptic Dictionary Online”. Proceedings of LaTeCH 2018 – The 11th SIGHUM Workshop at COLING2018. Santa Fe, NM.

[paper]

Automatically parsed OT and NT corpora

May 31, 2018 / Amir Zeldes / 0 Comments

We are pleased to announce that a new version of the automatically annotated New Testament and Old Testament corpora is now available online in Coptic Scriptorium!

The new version has substantially better automatic segmentation accuracy, and, for the first time, automatic syntactic parses for each verse. For more information on the syntax annotations, please see our previous post here:

https://blog.copticscriptorium.org/2018/05/07/coptic-treebank-2-2-moving-us-to-better-parsing/

Here are some example queries to get you started:

Search the Old Testament for Greek words: lang=”Greek”
Search both corpora for the morpheme “ⲙⲛⲧ”: morph=”ⲙⲛⲧ”
Find complement clauses of regular verbs in the New Testament: pos=”V” ->dep func=”ccomp”
Search 1 and 2 Corinthians for verse translations containing “brother”: translation=/.*brother.*/ & meta::title=/.*Corinthians.*/
Find cases of “ⲙⲉⲛ” indirectly followed by “ⲇⲉ” in both corpora: norm=”ⲙⲉⲛ” .* norm=”ⲇⲉ”

Thanks as always to the NEH and DFG for their support and to everyone who made the texts available, which come from the Sahidica version of the NT ((c) J. Warren Wells) and the OT text contributed by the CrossWire Bible Society SWORD Project, thanks to work by Christian Askeland, Matthias Schulz and Troy Griffitts.

Coptic Treebank 2.2 – moving us to better parsing!

May 7, 2018 / Amir Zeldes / 0 Comments

With the data release of Universal Dependencies 2.2, an update to the Coptic Treebank is now online! Thanks to work by Mitchell Abrams and Liz Davidson we’ve been able to add the first three chapters from 1 Corinthians and make numerous corrections. Another three chapters of 1 Corinthians and a portion of the Martyrdom of Victor the General are coming soon. You can see how we’ve been annotating and the documentation of our guidelines here:

http://universaldependencies.org/cop/

Thanks to the new data, automatic parsing has become somewhat more reliable, allowing us to add automatic parses to the most recent release. The results are better than before, but note we still only expect around 90% accuracy. To illustrate where the computer can’t do what humans can, here are two examples of a verb governing a subordinate verb in a clause marked by Ϫⲉ ‘that’. The subordinate verb usually has one of two labels:

ccomp if it’s a complement clause (I said that…)
advcl if it’s an adverbial clause, such as a causal clause (Ϫⲉ meaning ‘because’).

One of these examples was done by a human who got things right, the other contains a parser error – see if you can spot which is which!

More annotated texts: April 2018 release (v. 2.5.0)

April 27, 2018 / ctschroeder / 0 Comments

The Coptic Scriptorium team is pleased to announce the latest release of annotated Coptic corpora.

This release contains new text data contributed by Alin Suciu and Diliana Atanassova as part of the KELLIA project, as well as transcriptions and annotations from various Coptic SCRIPTORIUM project participants. New data in this release includes excerpts from:

The Canons of Apa Johannes (2,024 words)
Pseudo-Theophilus On the Cross and The Thief (4,543 words)
additional Apophthegmata Patrum, bringing the total released to 75 apophthegms (9,413 words)

All texts are also linked word-by-word to the Coptic Dictionary Online (https://corpling.uis.georgetown.edu/coptic-dictionary/).

All corpora now also contain syntactic annotations derived from our tree-banking project. These annotations can be searched using the “func” annotation and visualized as treebanks.

Use our data by:

Browsing the Apa Johannes texts on our site in a format linked to the online dictionary
Search for mentions of “the cross” in Pseudo-Theophilus
Reading the Apophthegmata Patrum in aligned translation
Search for first-person subjects that are also proper names in the Apophthegmata Patrum
Download the data files from our GitHub site in multiple formats

We would like to thank the annotators and translators, without whose work the corpora would not be online. We thank the NEH and DFG for the necessary funding.

Coptic SCRIPTORIUM at ISAW Conference

April 20, 2018 / ctschroeder / 0 Comments

Coptic SCRIPTORIUM’s Caroline T. Schroeder will be giving the keynote at the “Future Philologies” Conference at Institute for the Study of the Ancient World today in New York City. We’re looking forward to conversations with colleagues old and new.

Geographic data now available via Pelagios

February 21, 2018 / Elizabeth Platte / 0 Comments

Coptic SCRIPTORIUM has partnered with Pelagios Commons to make geographic data drawn from published Coptic SCRIPTORIUM texts available via Pelagios’ Peripleo search engine and API. Each entry links a geographic location, identified by its Pleiades resource number, to a query for that term in ANNIS, our search and visualization interface. Therefore, each geographic entity in our data appears only once in the Pelagios data set, regardless of how many times the entity appears in our published texts. Queries cover corpora published as of April 2017 (release 2.3.1), including more recently published documents in those corpora, but do not include corpora new to our most recent release. The list of geographic entities included in this dataset dates to April 2017, and does not include locations unique to more recent publications.

The Coptic SCRIPTORIUM data set as it appears in Peripleo

Find the full Coptic SCRIPTORIUM dataset on Peripleo at: http://peripleo.pelagios.org/ui#selected= http%3A%2F%2Fcorpling.uis.georgetown.edu%2Fannis%2Fscriptoriummy-dataset

Turtle files prepared for this partnership are publicly available on GitHub: https://github.com/CopticScriptorium/pelagios-dataset-summary.

New corpora – release 2.4.0 is out!

November 23, 2017 / Amir Zeldes / 0 Comments

We are pleased to announce release version 2.4.0 with new corpora, with tagged and lemmatized corpora available for reading and download at [1], and fully searchable at [2]:

[1] http://data.copticscriptorium.org/

[2] https://corpling.uis.georgetown.edu/annis/scriptorium

This release contains new data contributed by Alin Suciu, David Brakke and Diliana Atanassova, as well as out of copyright edition material contributed by the Marcion project. New data in this release includes excerpts from:

The Martyrdom of Saint Victor the General (2033 tokens)
The Canons of Apa Johannes (438 tokens)
Pseudo-Theophilus On the Cross and The Thief (2814 tokens)
Shenoute, Some Kinds of People Sift Dirt (888 tokens)
11 additional Apophthegmata Patrum, bringing the total released to 63 apophthegms (7077 tokens)

All texts are also linked to the Coptic Dictionary Online (https://corpling.uis.georgetown.edu/coptic-dictionary/), which has been updated with frequency information including these texts. We would like to thank the annotators and translators of these data sets, several of whom are new to the project, without whose work the corpora would not be online:

Alexander Turtureanu, Alin Suciu, Amir Zeldes, Caroline T. Schroeder, Christine Luckritz Marquis, Dana Robinson, David Brakke, David Sriboonreuang, Diliana Atanassova, Elizabeth Davidson, Elizabeth Platte, Gianna Zipp, J. Gregory Given, Janet Timbie, Jennifer Quigley, Laura Slaughter, Lauren McDermott, Marina Ghaly, Mitchell Abrams, Paul Lufter, Rebecca Krawiec, Saskia Franck and Tobias Paul

We hope everyone will find this release useful and look forward to releasing more data in the coming year!