Coptic SCRIPTORIUM Blog

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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.

New Corpora Release 5.0.0

May 30, 2024 / / 0 Comments

We are pleased to announce release 5.0.0 of Coptic Scriptorium! Our data now includes over 1,288,229 tokens of searchable, linguistically analyzed Coptic data from dozens of ancient Coptic works.

This release also marks the introduction of Bohairic Coptic data to our corpus holdings: the repository now contains Bohairic Bible materials, covering Mark 1-16 and 1 Cor. 1-16, with manually reviewed segmentation for the entire corpus, and manual tagging and treebanking for chapters 1-5 in each book. Segmentation and tagging were reviewed in collaboration with Nicholas Wagner, and treebanking was done in collaboration with Nina Speranskaja. As a result of this work, we are in the process of compiling new NLP tools and guidelines specifically for Bohairic.

In addition, the release includes corrections and updates to existing corpora as well as the addition of several new Sahidic works and documents:

A. Sections of five works by Shenoute of Atripe:

B. New documents were added to existing works:

C. Newly added translation spans for Pistis Sophia, aligned by Randy Komforty

These join the newly treebanked and tagged Bohairic data, which can be found here:

We are very grateful to all of our collaborators and contributors, without whom this project could not function. We welcome Nicholas Wagner to the team and warmly thank Randy Komforty for his work on Pistis Sophia, and Nina Sepranskaja for her treebanking work.

As with all our 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 (currently only for Sahidic), in this GitHub repository, in a variety of popular formats: https://github.com/CopticScriptorium/corpora

You can also search for complex linguistic annotations in the data using our ANNIS server – please see our tutorial here to get started with some query tips and a helpful cheat sheet: https://copticscriptorium.org/ANNIS_tutorial

New Corpora Release 4.5.0 

October 24, 2023 / / 0 Comments
Image of a search in ANNIS
Searching for “people” in Shenoute’s God Who Alone is True

We are pleased to announce release 4.5.0 of Coptic Scriptorium! Our data now includes over 1,278,500 tokens of searchable, linguistically analyzed Coptic data from dozens of ancient Coptic works (an increase of over 11,500 tokens from the previous release). 

This release corrects a large number of consistency errors identified in our existing data, and also adds some new documents:

We are very grateful to all of our collaborators and contributors, without whom this project could not function. We welcome Christine Ayad, Lydia Bremer-McCollum, Adeline Harrington, and Nina Speranskaja.

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:

https://github.com/copticscriptorium/corpora

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:

https://copticscriptorium.org/ANNIS_tutorial

We hope this release will be useful and look forward to the next one as always!

Online Coptic Scriptorium Reading Group

October 4, 2023 / / 1 Comment

Description: 

The online Coptic Scriptorium Reading Group consists of a series of short term reading units focused on a particular Coptic text or corpus. The group will focus on reading, analyzing, and translating a set of Coptic texts found in the digital corpus of the Coptic Scriptorium project. We will also practice reading out loud. In addition, the reading units will introduce and demonstrate a variety of Coptic focused digital humanities tools. These include especially the Coptic Online Dictionary and tools for linguistic and corpus analysis. Participants will leave with stronger Coptic reading facility, grammar review, and an introduction to a range of open-access digital humanities tools for studying Coptic. 

Audience:

This group is perfect for Coptologists, historians, linguists, heritage learners, and hobbyists alike. All are welcome! The reading group and text/corpus sequence are designed for introductory and lower-intermediate level reading ability (1-2 semesters of instruction or a roughly equivalent amount of self-directed learning). In other words, some previous grammar training and knowledge of the alphabet will be presumed.

Email organizer (lcbm@ou.edu) if you would like to join or if you have questions about your fit for the group! Zoom link will be shared with the email list.

Schedule: 

Meet via Zoom for 1 hour 3x per week. 

Time:  10:00am EST | 9:00am CST | 7:00am PST

           4:00pm CEST | 3:00pm BST | 5:00pm EEST | 11:00pm JST 

Note: Attendance at all sessions within a series is not required. Moreover, the series can be taken sequentially, but it is not assumed or required. Feel free to drop-in as your schedule and interest allow! 

Fall/Winter 2023 Dates: 

  Sequence A:

    October 23rd, 25th, 27th, 30th, 1st, 3rd (6 hours total)

      Reading Material: Apothegmata Patrum Selections

  Sequence B: 

    November 6th, 8th, 10th, 13th, 15th, 17th (6 hours total)

      Reading Material: Ruth Selections

  Sequence C: 

    December 4th, 6th, 8th, 11th, 13th, 15th, 18th, 20th (8 hours total)

      Reading Material: Apothegmata Patrum Selections

  2024 Schedule TBD 

Note: Time and weekly meeting frequency of sequence B and C are subject to change based on group feedback. 

Group Organizer: 

Dr. Lydia Bremer-McCollum (she/hers) holds ten+ years of experience reading and translating Coptic. She has taught introductory and intermediate courses at Harvard and Princeton Universities. As part of the NEH funded Coptic Scriptorium project, she aims to create an online Coptic reading community focused on reading and utilizing the rich set of open-access tools. Feel free to contact her with any questions at lcbm@ou.edu 

Coptic Scriptorium Awarded an NEH Grant to Expand Corpora and Add More Dialects

April 19, 2023 / / 0 Comments

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.

New Corpora Release 4.2.0

September 30, 2021 / / 0 Comments
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:

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!

Winter 2021 Corpora Release 4.1.0

April 2, 2021 / / 0 Comments
Amulet to protect place and animals. O. Crum ST 18 (KYP T344), side-by-side with its rendition on Coptic Scriptorium. Image source.

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:

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:

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!

Comprehensive Coptic Lexicon v1.2

October 1, 2020 / / 0 Comments

The “Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae” project (“Strukturen und Transformationen des Wortschatzes der ägyptischen Sprache”, BBAW), the “Database and Dictionary of Greek Loanwords in Coptic” (DDGLC, Freie Universität Berlin), and “Coptic Scriptorium: Digital Research in Coptic Language and Literature” are pleased to announce the latest release of the “Comprehensive Coptic Lexicon”: Version 1.2. The raw data can be downloaded from: 

  • D. Burns, F. Feder, K. John, M. Kupreyev, et al. 2020-07-24. Comprehensive Coptic Lexicon: Including Loanwords from Ancient Greek, Berlin: Freie Universität Berlin, http://dx.doi.org/10.17169/refubium-27566

The processed data has been published by the 

The major new features include: 

  • Standardized use of parentheses “( )” in word forms.
  • Optimizated data structure (e.g., <sense/> element now contains a unique ID, facilitating the ongoing work on linking CCL to the databases of semantic relations such as Coptic WordNet).
  • Correction of orthographic, grammatical and semantic information of the existing entries and addition of new entries.
  • Linking to Perseus Greek morphology tool via the Greek head words. DDGLC lemma IDs are now displayed in the entry view of Coptic Dictionary Online.
  • Improved usability of the section of Greek loanwords due to exclusion or change of a number of  senses.
  • Link to attestation search for nouns filtered by entity-type (e.g., search for ⲟⲩⲟⲛ standing for a person, an animal, or an inanimate object) in Coptic Scriptorium.
  • Phrase network visualization of most common word sequences containing nouns, verbs and prepositions.

For the full description of the Version 1.2 please refer to the the “Release Notes”: https://refubium.fu-berlin.de/bitstream/handle/fub188/27813/Comprehensive_Coptic_Lexicon_v1.2_Release_Notes.pdf?sequence=5&isAllowed=y 


The Comprehensive Coptic Lexicon V 1.2 now contains 11263 entries and 31847 forms of Egyptian-Coptic and Greek-Coptic datasets. TLA, DDGLC and Coptic Scriptorium invite you to take a look at the new data and would welcome your feedback.

Summer 2020 Corpora Release 4.0.0

August 31, 2020 / / 0 Comments
Place name index on data.copticscriptorium.org

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:

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
  • Search and visualization:
    • Search by entity type and named entity in ANNIS
    • New configurable analytic visualization which displays nested entity types, highlights named entities and links them to Wikipedia
  • Natural Language Processing
    • Automatic entity recognition is now available (work by Amir Zeldes, Lance Martin and Sichang Tu)
    • 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!

Digital Coptic 3 – program online!

June 25, 2020 / / 1 Comment

The program for the third edition of Digital Coptic is now online. Check out the workshop website for the list of projects, talks and presenters.

Please join us for the workshop on July 12 and 13 – participants will receive a Zoom link and password for interactive presentations and discussion, and the workshop will also be cast to YouTube for larger audiences and offline viewing after the workshop. We look forward to hearing all the talks!

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