Tag: Apophthegmata Patrum

Spring 2019 Corpora Release 2.7.0

We at Coptic Scriptorium are pleased to version 2.7.0 of our corpora.  The release includes several new documents:

  • several more sayings in the Coptic Apophthegmata Patrum (edited & annotated by Marina Ghaly)
  • additional fragments of Shenoute’s sermon Some Kinds of People Sift Dirt (edited & annotated by Christine Luckritz Marquis, editions provided by David Brakke)
  • Besa’s letter On Vigilance (edited and annotated by So Miyagawa and others)
  • several more fragments of the monastic canons of Apa Johannes (annotated by Elizabeth Platte and Caroline T. Schroeder, digital edition provided by Diliana Atanassova)

All documents have metadata for word segmentation, tagging, and parsing to indicate whether those annotations are machine annotations only (automatic), checked for accuracy by an expert in Coptic (checked), or closely reviewed for accuracy, usually as a result of manual parsing (gold).

You can search all corpora at https://corpling.uis.georgetown.edu/annis/scriptorium and download the data in 4 formats (relANNIS database files, PAULA XML files, TEI XML files, and SGML files in Tree-tagger format).

Our total annotated corpora are now at over 780,000 words; corpora that have human editors who reviewed the machine annotations amount to over 100,000 words.

Enjoy!

New corpora – release 2.4.0 is out!

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!

 

New Release of Corpora

We’re pleased to announce that we’ve released more texts in our corpora.

The Sayings of the Desert Fathers (Apophthegmata Patrum) corpus now contains 52 sayings/apophthegms (>7100 words).  We have edited previously published sayings for consistency in annotation, and we’ve released new sayings edited by Christine Luckritz Marquis, Elizabeth Platte, and our newest contributor, Dana Robinson.  Read or browse the Sayings online.  Click on the “Analytic” button to see read a saying in Coptic with a parallel English translation + part of speech tags for each Coptic word.

Or click on the “Norm” button (short for “normalized”) to read the Coptic.  Clicking on any Coptic word in the normalized visualization will take you to an online Coptic-English dictionary.  Hovering your cursor over a passage in the normalized visualization will show the English translation in a pop up window.

AP 96 Normalized view screenshot

AP 96 Normalized view screenshot

Shenoute’s I See Your Eagerness now has numerous new manuscript fragments published (over 16,000 words).  We also have edited previously published witnesses for consistency in annotation.  These documents were transcribed and collated from the manuscripts by David Brakke and annotated for digital publication by Rebecca Krawiec.  Now you can read Shenoute’s I See Your Eagerness in nearly its entirety in Coptic.  We provide several paths for you to explore this text:

  1. Read the text from start to end, beginning with the first manuscript fragment. Click “NEXT” to keep reading.
    MONB.GL fragment D diplomatic visualization

    MONB.GL fragment D diplomatic visualization

    (No English translation is provided, but in the “Note” metadata field below the Coptic, you can find page numbers for David Brakke’s and Andrew Crislip’s translation in their book, Discourses of Shenoute.)  “Next” and “Previous” buttons will take you through the path we consider optimal for reading the text. This path wanders through various manuscript witnesses, following the path with the fewest lacunae. Want to see parallel witnesses? Check out the “Witness” metadata field below the text.

    MONB.GL 29-30 metadata screenshot

    MONB.GL 29-30 metadata screenshot

  2. Read through all surviving pages in one codex/manuscript witness by filtering for a particular codex. Click through the documents in that codex.  For example, if you want to read through all the fragments of codex MONB.GL, go to data.copticscriptorium.org, and use the menu to filter by Corpus for the shenoute.eagerness corpus, and then filter by manuscript name for the MONB.GL codex.   Click through the documents in that codex.
  3. Perform a search/query in our ANNIS database.   For example, search for all occurrences of “wicked” (ⲡⲟⲛⲏⲣⲟⲛ) in the corpus.  Or, search for occurrences of “wicked” controlling for duplicate hits in parallel manuscript witnesses.  See our guide to queries in ANNIS  for more tips.

You also can download the entire corpus in TEI XML, PAULA XML, and relANNIS formats  from our GitHub site.

New feature + texts in our corpora: Apophthegmata, I See Your Eagerness

We are very excited to release new versions of two of our corpora in time for the Coptic Congress.  And keep reading to learn about a new feature on our website.

As usually, we provide a diplomatic transcription of the texts’ manuscripts, normalized text for ease of reading, and an analytic visualization with the normalized text and part of speech tags in our web application.  Plus you’ll see buttons to search the corpora in our database or download our digital files.

Apophthegmata Patrum

The Apophthegmata Patrum now contains 36 published Sayings.  New ones include

This release also marks the first contributions of our newest editor, Dr. Dana Lampe.  Dana earned her Ph.D. at the Catholic University of America is beginning a postdoc at Creighton in the fall.

I See Your Eagerness

We also are releasing a huge new chunk of Shenoute’s sermon, I See Your Eagerness.  These texts were transcribed and collated primarily by David Brakke (with some by Stephen Emmel).  We thank David for his  generous donation of his transcriptions to the project!  Senior Editor Rebecca Krawiec has digitized and annotated these transcriptions.

Please begin your read of I See Your Eagerness with the fragment from codex MONB.GL 9-10.   Or you can search it in our search & visualization tool ANNIS.

We now have over 9000 words of this text digitized and annotated!

New: “Next” & “Previous” Buttons on Document visualizations

We’ve got a new feature in our web application:  the “next” and “previous” buttons near the top of the text.

“Next” is the next document for this work; if there is a lacuna, you’ll be taken to the next extant witness we’ve digitized.  If there are multiple, parallel witnesses, you’ll be taken to the witness we’ve identified as the best or clearest witness (typically based on the amount of lacunae).

The same is true for the “Previous” button.

If you want to review the parallel witness(es), check out the metadatum field for each document called “witness.”  If a parallel witness exists, it will be listed; if we have digitized the witness, the URN for the witness will be listed.  You can enter the URN in the box at the top of our website to retrieve the document.

Coptic Treebank Released

Yesterday we published the first public version of the Coptic Universal Dependency Treebank. This resource is the first syntactically annotated corpus of Coptic, containing complete analyses of each sentence in over 4,300 words of Coptic excerpts from Shenoute, the New Testament and the Apophthegmata Patrum.

To get an idea of the kind of analysis that Treebank data gives use, compare the following examples of an English and a Coptic dependency syntax tree. In the English tree below, the subject and object of the verb ‘depend’ on the verb for their grammatical function – the nominal subject (nsubj) is “I”, and the direct object (dobj) is “cat”.

cat_mat

We can quickly find out what’s going on in a sentence or ‘who did what to whom’ by looking at the arrows emanating from each word. The same holds for this Coptic example, which uses the same Universal Dependencies annotation schema, allowing us to compare English and Coptic syntax.

He gave them to the poor

He gave them to the poor

Treebanks are an essential component for linguistic research, but they also enable a variety of Natural Language Processing technologies to be used on a language. Beyond automatically parsing text to make some more analyzed data, we can use syntax trees for information extraction and entity recognition. For example, the first tree below shows us that “the Presbyter of Scetis” is a coherent entity (a subgraph, headed by a noun); the incorrect analysis following it would suggest Scetis is not part of the same unit as the Presbyter, meaning we could be dealing with a different person.

One time, the Presbyter of Scetis went...

One time, the Presbyter of Scetis went…

One time, the Presbyter went from Scetis... (incorrect!)

One time, the Presbyter went from Scetis… (incorrect!)

To find out more about this resource, check out the new Coptic Treebank webpage. And to read where the Presbyter of Scetis went, go to this URN: urn:cts:copticLit:ap.19.monbeg.

Fall 2014 Release Notes

A new release of material has been added to http://www.copticscriptorium.org:  more Sayings from the Coptic Apophthegmata Patrum, chapters 1 of Corinthians and additional chapters of the Gospel of Mark. Other release notes can be found here.

(Originally posted in Fall 2014 on http://www.copticscriptorium.org.)