Earlier today, the Coptic Scriptorium project hosted an online workshop/webinar on searching text and annotations in our database (ANNIS). The video is now on YouTube. The cheat-sheet with an online tutorial that Dr. Zeldes shows in this video is on our website.
If you watch the video, we’d also appreciate your feedback in this brief survey.
We thank the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Oklahoma, and Georgetown University for supporting the project and this workshop.
Coptic Scriptorium is hiring one more staff member, starting in September 2023. This position runs through at least August 2024 and can be renewed potentially up through July 2026. It is part-time (on average 15 hours/week). Full details in the ad attached!
Thank you to the National Endowment for the Humanities (Preservation and Access Division) and the University of Oklahoma Office of the Vice Provost for Research and Partnerships for the funding and support for this position!!
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.
Two pillars in the fields of Digital Humanities, cultural heritage, and the manuscripts of the Eastern Mediterranean world received honors this month, and we at Coptic Scriptorium wish to congratulate them both.
Tito Orlandi at DH2019, photo by Fabio Ciotti via Twitter
Dr. Tito Orlandi was awarded the Busa Prize for lifetime achievement by the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations at the annual Digital Humanities Conference in Utrecht. This honor is bestowed only every three years and thus is quite a distinguished award. Tito’s work in text encoding, developing stable identifiers for manuscripts, digital lexica, and digitization has been foundational for Coptic Studies. He founded the Corpus dei Manoscritti Copti Letterari
(CMCL) project.
Columba Stewart, OSB, D.Phil, from the HMML site
Dr. Columba Stewart, Director of the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library at St. John’s University, has been named the Jefferson Lecturer by the National Endowment for the Humanities for 2019. Other luminaries who have received this honor include Toni Morrison, John Updike, and others. Columba’s scholarship on early monasticism—especially Evagrius and Cassian—is well-known, widely respected, and oft-cited. He is being honored by the NEH in particular for his work at HMML to collaborate with communities in the Middle East to photograph and preserve manuscripts manuscripts from both Christian and Muslim communities and traditions that are endangered for various political, cultural, and geographic reasons.
On a personal note, Tito has been a supportive colleague long before Coptic Scriptorium existed. At my first Congress of the International Association of Coptic Studies in Leiden in 2000, Tito chaired the session in which I gave my paper. I will never forget when my slides first went up on the screen with one of my photographs of the White Monastery Church, he warmly remarked how happy it made him to see the White Monastery. This sounds like a small thing, but for a grad student at this international conference for the first time, it was a reassuring way to start my paper. When we began Coptic Scriptorium, Tito shared with us his digital lexica, which allowed us to shave at least a year off of our labors. Conversations with Tito over the years have enriched our work.
Likewise, Columba has been a kind and generous colleague and mentor since we first met in 1999 at the Oxford Patristics Conference. Columba’s research on early monasticism has inspired me for a long time, and his work at HMML and the vHMML online reading room is a model for public-facing cultural heritage preservation and collaborations between American scholars and heritage communities in the Middle East. Columba’s work is sometimes framed as saving manuscripts from ISIS, but Columba himself talks about the American role in the loss of cultural heritage in the Middle East and is, in my opinion, open about the geopolitical and colonialist power dynamics at work. As I said more informally to some friends on social media, Columba is 100% the real deal.
Additionally, for those of us who work on Christianity in the ancient Eastern Mediterranean and the languages and manuscripts of these communities, these two awards cast a warm glow over the whole field. Thank you Columba and Tito for your work, and thank you to the ADHO and the NEH for honoring them and by extension their areas of work.
A warm, sincere congratulations to you both!
We have concluded our round of “startup” funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities Office of Digital Humanities. Our White Paper documents our activities and our outcomes for the period, including the following grant products:
CHECK IT OUT! We heartily thank the NEH ODH for its support, as well as the NEH Preservation and Access division for their concurrent grant. We also thank all of our participants, contributors, and collaborators, who are numerous and are outlined in the White Paper.
White Paper for NEH ODH Startup Grant
See also our White Paper for the P&A grant submitted in August.
We at Coptic SCRIPTORIUM have been fortunate to have received three grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities for our work. We cannot thank the NEH enough for its support. So much of what we have done over the past 2+ years could not have happened without this funding.
We just completed a White Paper paper for a Foundations grant from the Humanities Collections and Reference Resources program in the Division of Preservation and Access. The grant, “Coptic SCRIPTORIUM: Digitizing a Corpus for Interdisciplinary Research in Ancient Egyptian,” ran from May 2104 until now.
Our White Paper documents our work and especially the standards and practices we developed for digitizing a pilot Coptic corpus.
If you want to know more about what truly interdisciplinary DH work looks like, check it out. We try to break down the complexities of creating a digital corpus for research in linguistics, history, religious studies, biblical studies, manuscript studies. We’ve got data models, workflows, digitization standards, transcription guidelines, and more all laid out for you here.
There is so much more to do; this is a only start. Thanks to everyone who has had faith in our work.
The Coptic SCRIPTORIUM team would like to wish the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), a happy 50th anniversary! We would like to thank the NEH for supporting Coptic SCRIPTORIUM. Cheers to the NEH!
The University of the Pacific seeks to hire a creative and collaborative Digital Humanities Specialist (DHS) to develop and manage strategies and infrastructure for curating digital and pre-digital content and data; provide computer programming support for projects; and author and/or co-author new digital humanities resources or scholarship. This is a full-time 20-24 month pilot staff position. The DHS will work half-time contributing to the University Library’s archival and digital initiatives and half-time on an interdisciplinary NEH-funded Digital Humanities research project, KELLIA. The DHS will report to Prof. Caroline T. Schroeder in the Department of Religious Studies and Michael Wurtz, the Head of Special Collections.
[Apply for this position at the University of the Pacific website]
KELLIA (Koptische/Coptic Electronic Language and Literature International Alliance) is an international DH project funded by the NEH and the DFG (Germany) to develop international standards and promote digital scholarship in the language and literature of ancient Egypt. Researchers at the University of the Pacific, Georgetown University, Goettingen University, and Muenster University will be collaborating on digital methods in textual studies, linguistics, history, and manuscript studies.
The William Knox Holt Memorial Library on the Stockton campus serves a diverse community of liberal arts and professional faculty. The Holt-Atherton Special Collections is home to several important American cultural heritage collections: the multimedia archives of jazz legend Dave Brubeck; primary source documents from World War II Japanese-American Internment Camps; the papers of renowned naturalist and conservationist John Muir; and the papers and video archive of former San Francisco Mayor George R. Moscone.
The Digital Humanities Specialist may perform some but not all of the following duities and/or may be assigned additional duties:
Education/Work Experience/Certifications:
Required skills/knowledge and expertise
Preferred skills/knowledge and expertise
APPLICATION:
To apply for this position visit https://pacific.peopleadmin.com/postings/5822 and submit:
Review of applications will begin on September 1.
Questions about the position may be directed to cschroeder@pacific.edu and mwurtz@pacific.edu. For questions about the online application process, please consult the online help system.
This position is funded by the University of the Pacific Library and the National Endowment for the Humanities (through the joint NEH-DFG bilateral Digital Humanities grant program).
On March 12-13 we hosted the Digital Coptic 2 Symposium and Workshop at Georgetown University, March 12-13, 2015. The full program is online. Day 1 featured presentations from scholars working in Coptic and/or Digital Humanities from around the world. Day 2 provided tutorials on Coptic SCRIPTORIUM along with discussions about future research. Watch the many videos of the presentations on our DC 2 YouTube channel along with reading the twitter backchannel at #copticdh.
(Oringally posted in March 2015 at http://copticscriptorium.org/)
We gave a brief presentation about Coptic SCRIPTORIUM at the NEH Office of Digital Humanities Project Directors’ meeting in September. We’re at the 9:38 time marker. Video is from the NEHgov channel on youtube.
Unless otherwise indicated, Coptic SCRIPTORIUM website and content
is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Coptic SCRIPTORIUM is supported by
the National Endowment for the Humanities Office of Digital Humanities and Division of Preservation and Access,
the University of the Pacific, Georgetown University, and Canisius College.
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