Coptic SCRIPTORIUM Blog

Tag: Schroeder (page 1 of 2)

Latest Release of Coptic Corpora

December 12, 2025 / / 0 Comments

We are pleased to announce the release of version 6.2.0 of the Coptic Scriptorium data! Our corpora now total 2,375,875 words. This release provides significant new annotated data in both the Bohairic and Sahidic Dialects:

  1. New parts of works in Bohairic, including:
    • The Life of Shenoute, Parts 2 & 3 (part 1 was released in September)
    • The Lausiac History, Parts 2 & 3 (part 1 was released in September)
  2. New corpora
    • The Gospel of Thomas, edited from the manuscript by Paul Dilley
    • The Sahidic book of Jonah (with manual edits and corrections to NLP annotations by Stephan Claassen; the automatically processed Jonah is in the Coptic OT corpus)
  3. New documents in the following existing corpora:
    • Apophthegmata Patrum
    • Shenoute’s work known as Acephalous Work 22
  4. More Arabic and English translations for documents previously published

We are grateful to our collaborators and contributors who have made this release possible, particularly Caroline T. Schroeder, Amir Zeldes, Nicholas Wagner, and Paul Dilley as well as Nina Speranskaja, Rebecca Krawiec, Christine Luckritz Marquis, Stephan Claassen, Philippe Zaher, and Safaa Mahfouz. We also want to thank Hany Takla and the St. Shenouda the Archimandrite Coptic Society for their collaborations and support. Additionally, we thank our donors for contributions that made much of the work on this release possible. Please consider supporting Coptic Scriptorium as we navigate the new funding environment in the USA.

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.

You can read and browse entire documents in an online portal. Our corpora are also linked in entries on the Coptic Dictionary Online.

For searching, including 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. Currently, the Arabic translations are only available in ANNIS, as well.

title powerpoint slide

Title slide to "Learning and Teaching Coptic" (Schroeder, St Shenouda-UCLA Conference, 2023)

Learning and Teaching Coptic with Coptic Scriptorium’s Resources

July 15, 2023 / / 0 Comments

Today I had the pleasure of giving a presentation at the annual St. Shenouda Society-UCLA Conference of Coptic Studies. My talk illustrates various ways the Coptic Scriptorium project’s texts and tools can help Coptic language learners become more proficient in Coptic. Whether you are a student in a course, an instructor, or someone wanting to learn or improve your knowledge of Coptic, there are many resources online to help you. I’ve posted the slides here for everyone to access, and they go through how to use advanced features of the online Dictionary, basic natural language processing tools to decipher confusing or complicated grammar, and ways to read digitized text to improve reading skills.

I hope it’s useful!

StShenoudaSoc-2023-publicDownload

Hiring for a part-time summer position!

May 2, 2023 / / 0 Comments

We are hiring for a summer part time position! The full description is below, but the highlights are:

  • must know Coptic
  • 10-20 hours per week
  • remote work
  • supervised by Prof. Caroline T. Schroeder at the University of Oklahoma
  • position begins May 15 or as soon thereafter as the hiring paperwork etc. can be completed
  • send a letter, CV, and names/contact info for 2 references to WGS@ou.edu

In addition, because of the nature of the position, we can only hire someone who is in the US and eligible to work in the US.

We will begin reviewing applications May 8.

This is perfect for a grad student, recent PhD, or part-time academic looking for some extra income over the summer

Busy this summer but wish you could apply? We will be hiring for one or two more positions to start in August or September. Watch this space!

OU-Digital-Humanities-Specialist-Job-Ad-Summer-2023Download

On the Road Summer 2019

July 27, 2019 / / 0 Comments

Coptic Scriptorium is busy this summer conference season.

I had the privilege of teaching one of the Sunoikisis Digital Classicist summer session earlier in July.

UCLA-St Shenouda Society image

The UCLA-St Shenouda Society conference participants, 2019

I also presented some research on girls and girlhood using the Coptic Scriptorium Corpora and the Online Coptic Dictionary at the annual UCLA-St. Shenouda Society Coptic Studies Conference.  This year was the 20th anniversary conference, and the theme was Shenoute and the White Monastery.

C. Schroeder presenting at ACH 2019; photo courtesy Melissa Dollman via Twitter

C. Schroeder presenting at ACH 2019; photo courtesy Melissa Dollman via Twitter

This week,  the American Digital Humanities organization, the Association for Computational Humanities, held a conference in Pittsburgh.  There I talked about colonialism, Coptic manuscripts, and resisting continuing colonialist tendencies in digitizing these manuscripts.

Meanwhile we’ve also been working on digitizing and annotating more texts, which we hope to release in the fall.

Happy summer everyone!

Spring 2019 Corpora Release 2.7.0

June 11, 2019 / / 0 Comments

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!

Rebecca Krawiec, Elizabeth Platte, Amir Zeldes, Caroline T. Schroeder at Georgetown University, 2018

Rebecca Krawiec, Elizabeth Platte, Amir Zeldes, Caroline T. Schroeder at Georgetown University, 2018

Recent presentations by Coptic Scriptorium team members (post 1 of 2)!

December 8, 2018 / / 0 Comments

This fall, Coptic Scriptorium team members have presented their work in a number of environments.

Research Talk, Georgetown University Linguistics Speaker Series

In September, as part of the Georgetown University Department of Linguistics Friday Speaker Series, the project presented a summary of our latest work and our goals for the new NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant we received. “A Linked Digital Environment for Coptic Studies”.  Caroline T. Schroeder provided an overview of the project. Amir Zeldes presented the technology required to machine-process Coptic text in order to produce an annotated, digital corpus and linked online lexicon. Rebecca Krawiec discussed the research potential of an annotated digital corpus for research in early monasticism. Elizabeth Platte introduced the concept of linked data and demonstrated our linked geographic data features. (Christine Luckritz Marquis was scheduled present research on space and place in monastic literature but was unfortunately sidelined by a hurricane.)

Rebecca Krawiec, Elizabeth Platte, Amir Zeldes, Caroline T. Schroeder at Georgetown University, 2018

Rebecca Krawiec, Elizabeth Platte, Amir Zeldes, Caroline T. Schroeder at Georgetown University, 2018

Material of Christian Apocrypha Conference

In December, Caroline T. Schroeder gave a paper at the Material of Christian Apocrypha Conference hosted at the University of Virginia, under the auspices of the North American Society for the Study of Christian Apocryphal Literature.  Dr. Schroeder’s paper, “The Materiality of Digital Apocryphal Studies,” addressed the role of digital humanities in studying the colonial history of manuscripts, people and places in early Christian literature, and public humanities.  It was part of a panel on Christian Apocrypha and the Digital Humanities, which also included papers by James Walters (Rochester College) on “The Digital Syriac Corpus: A New Resource for the Study of Syriac Texts” and  Brandon Hawk (Rhode Island College) on “The Medieval Social Network of the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew”.  Datasets used in the presentation are available at Dr. Schroeder’s GitHub site.

Caroline T. Schroeder presenting about the manuscripts digitized by Coptic Scriptorium

Caroline T. Schroeder presenting about the manuscripts digitized by Coptic Scriptorium

Caroline T. Schroeder presenting visualizations of occurrences of proper names in some of Coptic Scriptorium's corpora

Caroline T. Schroeder presenting visualizations of occurrences of proper names in some of Coptic Scriptorium’s corpora

2018 UCLA-St Shenouda conference

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

Coptic SCRIPTORIUM at the UCLA-St Shenouda Coptic Studies Conference

August 2, 2018 / / 0 Comments

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.

2018 UCLA-St Shenouda conference

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.

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 / / 0 Comments

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

German PI Dr. Prof. Heike Behlmer and US PI Caroline T. Schroeder.

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.

Coptic SCRIPTORIUM at ISAW Conference

April 20, 2018 / / 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.

New Tutorials & Recent Workshop Wrap-up

June 8, 2017 / / 0 Comments

Coptic Scriptorium team members Caroline T. Schroeder and Rebecca Krawiec recently led a workshop on Digital Corpora and Digital Editions at the North American Patristics Society annual meeting.   We created detailed tutorials useful to both beginners and more advanced users on our GitHub site.  These tutorials cover:

  • an introduction to digital editions and corpora
  • working with the online Coptic Dictionary
  • simple and complex searching Coptic literature in our database ANNIS
  • creating a digital corpus with Epidoc TEI-XML annotations and natural language processing

We invite everyone to use these tutorials on their own.  They’re designed for for self-paced work.

We were pleased to participate in the pre-conference Digital Humanities workshops that included another session on mapping led by Sarah Bond and Jennifer Barry.  We had attendees from four countries, who ranged in their careers from graduate students to senior professors.  Thanks to NAPS for hosting these workshops, and to the NEH and the DFG for making our work possible.

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