The Coptic Scriptorium team is deeply grateful to the St Shenouda the Archimandrite Coptic Society for its recent grant to our project. This generous gift was made possible by donations from many members of the Society. We especially thank Hany Takla, President of the Society, for his ongoing leadership and collaboration with our project.
The funds will go to digitizing and annotating more Bohairic Coptic literature. Team member Dr. Nicholas Wagner will be able to devote more hours to Boharic.
We are pleased to announce the release of version 6.0.0 of Coptic Scriptorium! Our corpus has been dramatically expanded in this release, now exceeding 2.2 million tokens of searchable, linguistically annotated Coptic texts. Among the highlights of this update is the exponential growth of our Bohairic corpus, now comprising approximately 750,000 words and featuring translated texts such as the Bohairic Bible (Old and New Testament), as well as original works such as the Life of Isaac. This milestone brings substantial enhancements to our collections, including modern editions processed with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology alongside both new and updated Coptic texts.
New OCR Material and Automatic Tagging
This release includes the addition of OCR-based editions. For the first time, fully automated tagging has been applied to a selection of OCR datasets:
We are grateful to our collaborators and contributors who have made this release possible, particularly Caroline T. Schroeder and Amir Zeldes, as well as Randy Komforty, Lydia Bremer-McCollum, Lawrence Rafferty, Nina Speranskaja, and Nicholas Wagner. We also want to thank the National Endowment for the Humanities for their ongoing support. The integration of OCR materials and the expansion of our Bohairic collection reflect ongoing efforts to enhance accessibility and analytical tools for Coptic studies. These advances also pave the way for further development of NLP tools for our users.
Accessing the Data
As with all our releases, the raw machine-readable data for all corpora—including morphological and syntactic annotations, as well as named entity recognition—are available in our GitHub repository. Data can be downloaded in a variety of popular formats to suit your research needs.
For advanced linguistic queries, you can explore the data using our ANNIS server. To help you get started, check out our tutorial with query tips and a convenient cheat sheet.
We invite you to explore this latest release and we look forward to your feedback!
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:
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:
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!
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:
John of Constantinople, on Penitence and Abstinence (annotations by Mitchell Abrams, Lance Martin and Amir Zeldes)
Pseudo-Chrysostom: (Elizabeth Davidson, Mitchell Abrams, Lance Martin, Amir Zeldes)
More Apophthegmata Patrum (Hayley Curtis, Elizabeth Davidson, Duncan Feiges, Elizabeth Platte, Caroline T. Schroeder, 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)
Some Kinds of People Sift Dirt (data courtesy of David Brakke, annotations by Christine Luckritz Marquis, Caroline T. Schroeder, Amir Zeldes)
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
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!
With the release of Version 2.6 of Universal Dependencies, our focus has shifted to handling Named and Non-Named Entity Recognition (NER/NNER) in Coptic data. As a result of intensive work by the Coptic Scriptorium team in the past few months, the development branch of the Treebank now contains complete entity spans and types for the entire data in the Treebank, which can be accessed here. Special thanks are due to Lance Martin, Liz Davidson and Mitchell Abrams for all their efforts!
What’s included?
All data from the Coptic treebank (78 documents, approx. 46,000 words)
All spans of text referring to a named or unnamed entity, such as “Emperor Diocletian”, “the old woman” or “his cell”.
Entity types, divided into the following 10 classes: (English examples are provided in brackets)
What do we plan to do with this?
Entity annotations are a gateway to exposing and linking semantic content information from collections of documents. Having such annotations for all of our Coptic data will allow search by entity types (and ultimately names), enable analysis and comparison of texts based on the quantity, proportion and dispersion of entity types, facilitate identification of textual reuse disregarding either the entities involved or the ways in which they are phrased, and much more.
Over the course of the summer, our next goals fall into three packages:
Natural Language Processing (NLP): Develop high-accuracy automatic entity recognition tools for Coptic based on this data, and make them freely available.
Corpora: Enrich all of our available data with automatic entity annotations, which can be corrected and improved iteratively in the future.
Entity linking: Leverage the inventory of named entities identified in the data to carry out named entity linking with resources such as Wikipedia and other DH project identifiers. This will allow users to find all mentions of a specific person or place, regardless of how they are referred to.
Since the tools and annotations are based only on Coptic textual input and subsequent automatic NLP, we envision including search and visualization of entity data for all of our corpora, including ones for which we do not have a translation. This means that data whose content could not be easily deciphered without extensive reading of the original Coptic text will become much more easily discoverable, by exploring entities in which researchers are interested.
The inclusion of the Coptic Treebank in the UD dataset means that many standard parsers and other NLP tools trained on all well attested UD languages now support Coptic out-of-the-box, including Stanford NLP’s Stanza and UFAL’s UDPipe. Feel free to try out these libraries for your data! For optimal performance on open domain Coptic text, we still recommend our custom tool-chain, Coptic-NLP, which is highly optimized to Coptic and uses additional resources beyond the treebank. Or try it out online:
It is our pleasure to announce a new data release, with a variety of new sources from our collaborators (including more digitized data courtesy of the Marcion and PAThs projects and other scholars). New in this release are:
Canons of Apa Johannes (5 new and revised documents, 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 using ANNIS and download the data in 4 formats (relANNIS database files, PAULA XML files, TEI XML files, and SGML files in Tree-tagger format): browse on GitHub. If you just want to read works, cite project data or browse metadata, you can use our updated repository browser, the Canonical Text Services browser and URN resolver:
The new material in this release includes some 78,000 tokens in 33 documents and represents a tremendous amount of work by our project members and collaborators. We would like to thank the individual contributors (which you can find in the ‘annotation’ metadata), 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, which we plan to make available in the summer. Please let us know if you have any feedback!
