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.
Amir Zeldes and Luke Gessler have spent much of the past summer improving Coptic Scriptorium’s Natural Language Processing tools, and are now happy to announce the release of Coptic-NLP V3.0.0. You can read more about what we’ve been doing and the impact on performance in our three part blog post (part 1, part 2, part 3). Some of the new improvements include:
You can download the latest version of the tools here:
https://github.com/CopticScriptorium/coptic-nlp/
Or use our web interface, which has been updated with the latest version:
https://corpling.uis.georgetown.edu/coptic-nlp/
We appreciate your feedback and comments, and hope to release more data processed with these tools very soon!
Rebecca Krawiec, Elizabeth Platte, Amir Zeldes, Caroline T. Schroeder at Georgetown University, 2018
This fall, Coptic Scriptorium team members have presented their work in a number of environments.
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
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 visualizations of occurrences of proper names in some of Coptic Scriptorium’s corpora
We have a great announcement today. Along with our German research partners as part of the KELLIA project, we are releasing an online Coptic lexicon linked to our corpora.
For over three years, the Berlin-Brandenberg Academy of Sciences has been working on a digital lexicon for Coptic. Frank Feder began the work. Frank Feder began creating it, encoding definitions for Coptic lemmas in three languages: English, French, and German. The final entries were completed by Maxim Kupreyev at the academy and Julien Delhez in Göttingen. The base lexicon file is encoded in TEI-XML. This summer Amir Zeldes and his student, Emma Manning, created a web interface. We will release the source code soon as part of the KELLIA project.
It may still need some refinements and updates, but we think it is a useful achievement that will help anyone interested in Coptic.
Entries have definitions in French, German, and English.
You can use the lexicon as a standalone website. For the pilot launch, it’s on the Georgetown server, but make no mistake, this is major research outcome for the BBAW.
We’ve also linked the dictionary to our texts in Coptic SCRIPTORIUM. You can click on the ANNIS icon in the dictionary entry to search all corpora in Coptic SCRIPTORIUM for that word.
The link also goes in the other direction. In the normalized visualization of our texts, you can click on a word and get taken to the entry for that word’s lemma in the dictionary. You can do this in the normalized visualization in our web application for reading and accessing texts (pictured below), or in the normalized visualization embedded in the ANNIS tool.
Of course there will be refinements and developments to come. We would love to hear your feedback on what works, what could work better, and where you find glitches.
On a more personal note, when Amir and I first came up with the idea for the project, we dreamed of creating a Perseus Digital Library for Coptic. This dictionary is a huge step forward. And honestly, I myself had almost nothing to do with this piece of the project. It’s an example of the importance and power of collaboration.
Much of the Coptic SCRIPTORIUM team is in Claremont this week for the Congress of the International Association of Coptic Studies.
We started out with a pre-conference, 2-day workshop with our KELLIA partners from Germany, where we worked on sharing data and technologies across digital Coptic projects. Look here soon for an announcement about a really cool fruit of our labors.
Thursday there are two panels, and Friday there are two workshops.
Thursday 2-4 pm Coptic Digital Studies (Burkle 16)
David Brakke chair
Prof. Dr. Caroline Schroeder, Coptic SCRIPTORIUM: A Digital Platform for Research in Coptic Language and Literature
Dr. Christine Luckritz Marquis, Reimagining the Apopthegmata Patrum in a Digital Culture
Prof. Amir Zeldes, A Quantitative Approach to Syntactic Alternations in Sahidic
Dr. Rebecca Krawiec, Charting Rhetorical Choices in Shenoute: Abraham our Father and I See Your Eagerness as case-studies
Thursday 4:30-6:30 Coptic Digital Humanities (Burkle 16)
Caroline T. Schroeder, Chair
Dr. Paul Dilley, Coptic Scriptorium beyond the Manuscript: Towards a Distant Reading of Coptic Texts
Mr. So Miyagawa and Dr. Marco Büchler, Computational Analysis of Text Reuse in Shenoute and Besa
Mr. Uwe Sikora, Text Encoding – Opportunities and Challenges
Ms. Eliese-Sophia Lincke, Optical Character Recogition (OCR) for Coptic. Testing Automated Digitization of Texts with OCRopy
Friday 11-12:30 Workshop on Coptic Fonts & Coptic Bible (AA)
Christian Askeland, Frank Feder
Friday 4:30-6 Digital Tools for Beginners (Workshop on Coptic SCRIPTORIUM)
Caroline T. Schroeder, Amir Zeldes, Rebecca S. Krawiec
Amir Zeldes and Caroline T. Schroeder have recently published an article in Digital Humanities Quarterly about the need for digital tools and a digitized corpus for Coptic, and research questions that drive Coptic SCRIPTORIUM.
“Raiders of the Lost Corpus” is freely available on the DHQ website as part of a special issue on Digital Methods and Classical Studies edited by Neil Coffee and Neil W. Bernstein. Schroeder presented an earlier version of this paper at the Digital Classics conference at the University at Buffalo in 2013.
This winter we’ve released a new document we’ve been working on for a while. It’s a born digital publication, in the sense that this document to our knowledge has never been published previously. The edition and annotations here were produced by Elizabeth Platte (Reed College) and Rebecca S. Krawiec (Canisius College) directly from digital photographs of the manuscript for digital publication.
Read the manuscript transcription or the normalized text, or query it in our database.
It’s a section of one of Shenoute’s texts for monks in volume three of his monastic Canons. This 14-page (seven-folio) fragment now resides in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris and originally derives from the White Monastery codex known by the siglum MONB.YB. We’ve released text and annotations for pages 307-320, which equate to the BN call number Ms Copte 130/2 ff. 51-57. Digital photos are now available online at Gallica.
We’ve transcribed the text from images of the manuscript and then annotated it for manuscript information. We’ve also broken the text down into the Coptic phrases known as “bound groups,” words, and morphs. Then we’ve annotated it all for part of speech, loan words (Greek, Latin, etc.), and lemmas.
By “we” I mean primarily Platte and Krawiec . Schroeder and Zeldes provided editorial review, as per our policy of having every published digital document reviewed by at least one editor.
As far as we know, this fragment has never been published; nor has any translation ever been published. We don’t have a translation yet, either.
As the first born-digital edition, this document is an experiment for us. Everything else we’ve worked with has been published in an edition, and sometimes even has an English translation that another scholar has published. Even though we digitize from the original manuscript, previous editions and translations make the transcription, annotation, and editing process much easier. This document is an unknown quantity.
This means we expect to have errors and welcome feedback on the document.
We also have no translation as of yet. Our goal is to translate the document and then edit the transcription and annotations again as we work. We hope to publish an essay on how the digital annotation process affected the creation of an edition.
In the meantime, use it to practice your Coptic. Let us know if you find errors. We’ll credit you.
Coptic SCRIPTORIUM provides Coptic texts for reading, analysis, and complex searches. For a full list of our text corpora, please click here. We have also added answers to who and what some people and terms mean on our main site. A video tutorial given by Amir Zeldes and Caroline T. Schroeder is also available on how to search our database using the tool ANNIS.
(Originally posted in December of 2014 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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