Search

The paper presents the work on the Telamon and the Tituli projects which aim at creating online databases respectively of Greek and Latin epigraphic heritage from Bulgaria. The AIAX front-end service for the indexing and visualisation of EpiDoc XML files is described, as well as collaborations with different Bulgarian museums.

This poster proposal presents a project whose results are the linguistic annotation of ancient Greek bibliographic references with a focus on Named Entity Recognition related to author names and work titles, in order to produce new dynamic text-based tools that are not available in existing indices and catalogs.

Slides for Horizons in Text Editing: Possibilities and Limitations, Expectations and Challenges, LECTIO Round Table, Leuven, June 29, 2023, DFG Project number 434173983

Slides for the International Conference Sourcing the Classics. Textual Transmission and Reading Practice in Antiquity, Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge, June 22-24, 2023, DFG Project number 434173983

Slides of the workshop: Giornata di studi Digital Humanities. Teoria e Prassi, Università degli Studi di Roma Tor Vergata, June 16, 2023, DFG Project number 434173983

Slides for the Digital History Tagung 2023 Conference, held in Berlin on May 24-26, 2023, DFG Projektnummer 434173983

Slides of the seminar for the First Workshop of the Master Degree in Language Technologies and Digital Humanities, Università degli Studi di Torino, May 11, 2023, DFG Projektnummer 434173983

Slides of the Kolloquium "Phänomenologie der Digital Humanities" (Wintersemester 2022/2023), Freie Universität Berlin, February 22, 2023, DFG Projektnummer 434173983

Slides for the Ringvorlesung WS 2022/23 "Innovation, Nachhaltigkeit, Antike? Klassikstudien im digitalen Zeitalter". Universität Regensburg - December 14, 2022, DFG Projektnummer 434173983

Keynote slides for the Conference Computing the Past: Computational approaches to the dynamics of cultures and societies, organised by the CCS-Lab at the University of West Bohemia, Pilsen/Plzeň, Czech Republic, October 6-8, 2022, DFG Project 434173983

Cette étude est une analyse des traductions françaises de l’Odyssée de la Renaissance à nos jours. Elle participe à la constitution de l’histoire des traductions grâce à un nouvel outil numérique, qui permet de réévaluer la transmission d’un texte fondateur de la culture occidentale., This study analyzes French translations of the Odyssey from the Renaissance to the present day. It contributes to the history of translations thanks to a new digital tool, which makes it possible to reassess the transmission of a founding text of Western culture.

Introduction to the LiLa - Linking Latin project in the context of the DICES (1) Workshop of the community DICES: Digital Initiative for Classics: Epic Speeches.

To facilitate corpus searches by classicists as well as to reduce data sparsity when training models, we focus on the automatic lemmatization of ancient Greek inscriptions, which have not received as much attention in this sense as literary text data has. We show that existing lemmatizers for ancient Greek, trained on literary data, are not performant on epigraphic data, due to major language differences between the two types of texts. We thus train the first inscription-specific lemmatizer achieving above 80% accuracy, and make both the models and the lemmatized data available to the community. We also provide a detailed error analysis highlighting peculiarities of inscriptions which again highlights the importance of a lemmatizer dedicated to inscriptions.

To facilitate corpus searches by classicists as well as to reduce data sparsity when training models, we focus on the automatic lemmatization of ancient Greek inscriptions, which have not received as much attention in this sense as literary text data has. We show that existing lemmatizers for ancient Greek, trained on literary data, are not performant on epigraphic data, due to major language differences between the two types of texts. We thus train the first inscription-specific lemmatizer achieving above 80% accuracy, and make both the models and the lemmatized data available to the community. We also provide a detailed error analysis highlighting peculiarities of inscriptions which again highlights the importance of a lemmatizer dedicated to inscriptions.

To facilitate corpus searches by classicists as well as to reduce data sparsity when training models, we focus on the automatic lemmatization of ancient Greek inscriptions, which have not received as much attention in this sense as literary text data has. We show that existing lemmatizers for ancient Greek, trained on literary data, are not performant on epigraphic data, due to major language differences between the two types of texts. We thus train the first inscription-specific lemmatizer achieving above 80% accuracy, and make both the models and the lemmatized data available to the community. We also provide a detailed error analysis highlighting peculiarities of inscriptions which again highlights the importance of a lemmatizer dedicated to inscriptions.

Introductory presentation of the LiLa Knowledge Base for the 4th Summer Datathon on Linguistic Linked Open Data (SD-LLOD-22)

The paper presents a new database collecting artifacts mentioned in ancient Greek comedy (LGgK). The first part of the paper explains the choice of Greek comedy as primary source of information on artifacts. The second part shows the project's technical basis and the data processing, as well as how to use the database. Lastly, future developments are outlined., FuturoClassico FCl, N. 7 (2021)

Slides for the workshop Digital Humanities in pratica. Il ruolo delle tecnologie digitali nello studio, nella ricostruzione e nella preservazione del mondo antico, Collegio Ghislieri, Pavia, February 25-26, 2022

Together with critical editions and translations, commentaries are one of the main genres of publication in literary and textual scholarship, and have a century-long tradition. Yet, the exploitation of thousands of digitized historical commentaries was hitherto hindered by the poor quality of Optical Character Recognition (OCR), especially on commentaries to Greek texts. In this paper, we evaluate the performances of two pipelines suitable for the OCR of historical classical commentaries. Our results show that Kraken + Ciaconna reaches a substantially lower character error rate (CER) than Tesseract/OCR-D on commentary sections with high density of polytonic Greek text (average CER 7% vs. 13%), while Tesseract/OCR-D is slightly more accurate than Kraken + Ciaconna on text sections written predominantly in Latin script (average CER 8.2% vs. 8.4%). As part of this paper, we also release GT4HistComment, a small dataset with OCR ground truth for 19th classical commentaries and Pogretra, a large collection of training data and pre-trained models for a wide variety of ancient Greek typefaces.

Dans cet article, nous présentons le travail d'édition numérique collaborative de l'Anthologie grecque entrepris par la Chaire de recherche du Canada sur les écritures numériques. Nous revenons notamment sur les problématiques de recherche à l'origine de la démarche, les étapes et réflexions théoriques et techniques qui ont rythmé l'évolution de la recherche ainsi que ses récents développements. À partir de l'analyse de cette expérience, nous essayons de comprendre comment émergent les conditions théoriques, épistémologiques et méthodologiques qui structurent un projet de recherche. La thèse que nous souhaitons défendre ici est que loin d’être le fruit d’un·e seul·e chercheur·e, la pensée est le fruit d’un ensemble complexe de conjonctures médiatrices qui comprennent un ensemble de forces hétérogènes dont émergent ensuite des personnes, des techniques, des textes, des plateformes, des méthodes, des collectifs., In this article, we present the collaborative digital edition of the Greek Anthology undertaken by the Canada Research Chair in Digital Textualities. In particular, we look back at the research issues that led to the project, the theoretical and technical stages and reflections that have marked the evolution of the research, and its recent developments. From the analysis of this experience, we try to understand how the theoretical, epistemological and methodological conditions that structure a research project emerge. The thesis we wish to defend here is that far from being the fruit of a single researcher, thought is the fruit of a complex set of mediating conjunctures that include a set of heterogeneous forces from which people, techniques, texts, platforms, methods, and collectives then emerge.

Today, most efforts to compile and share documents related to the Ancient World have technology as an ally. In both digital mapping and the inclusion of epigraphic, numismatic and iconographic documents on open access platforms, digital technology is essential for scientific work on Antiquity. This article, which seeks to address this question, is divided into two parts: a theoretical one, aimed at understanding how the Digital Classics area underlines one of the great current additions to the Humanities, which is digital technology; and another methodological one, in which the methods with their selections and choices that allow the creation of a map of the network are presented. As a case study, we present the problem of the network of connections built from the contact between Augusto and the magistri uici and the production of everyday religious actions and interactions, as well as the partial results of the reconstruction of the map developed by Digital Augustan Rome to reach our goal of demarcating a network over it. Atualmente, a maior parte dos esforços para compilar e compartilhar documentos relacionados ao Mundo Antigo tem a tecnologia como aliada. Tanto na criação de mapas digitais quanto na inclusão de documentos epigráficos, numismáticos e iconográficos em plataformas de livre acesso, a tecnologia digital é essencial à realização dos trabalhos científicos sobre a Antiguidade. O presente artigo, que busca abordar essa questão, divide-se em duas partes: uma teórica, voltada a compreender de que forma a área Digital Classics sublinha uma das grandes adições atuais às Ciências Humanas, que é a tecnologia digital; e outra, de cunho metodológico, na qual apresentam-se os métodos com suas seleções e escolhas, que possibilitam a criação de um mapa da rede. Como estudo de caso, apresentamos a problemática da rede de conexões construída a partir do contato entre Augusto e os magistri uici e a produção das ações e interações religiosas cotidianas, bem como os resultados parciais da reconstituição do mapa elaborado pelo Digital Augustan Rome, para alcançar nosso objetivo de demarcar uma rede sobre ele.

Slides of myinvited talk at the "Digital Humanities and Neo-Latin Studies" Conference, 15th April 2021, University of Bonn, Germany.

Slides prepared for the presentation at the online conferenceScienze dell’Antichità e Digital Humanities:buone pratiche, frontiere teoriche e prospettive di ricerca, held on March 10, 2021 atUniversità degli Studi di Roma Tre

International audience

Digital editions in Classics have emerged as allies in breaking down barriers and facing challenges in teaching classical languages and cultures. The aim of this article is to highlight some specific features of digital editions in Classics, as possible genre elements in their digital production and reading, assuming they are a way of contributing to the mobilization of classical language learning and teacher training in the field. First, we describe the essential components in the process of a new digital edition of the Greek text of Oedipus Tyrannus, by Sophocles, prepared at Furman University for an undergraduate course. After that, we point out in what way digital edition annotations, in translation alignments, treebanking and geoannotations, as learning experiences, are potential development tools. As edições digitais na área de clássicas têm surgido como aliadas no rompimento de barreiras e no enfrentamento de desafios no ensino das línguas e culturas clássicas. O objetivo deste artigo é destacar algumas características específicas de edições digitais das Letras Clássicas, como possíveis elementos de gênero na sua produção e sua leitura digitais, supondo serem uma forma de contribuir para a mobilização da aprendizagem das línguas clássicas e a formação docente na área. Descrevemos, de um lado, os componentes essenciais no processo de uma edição digital nova do texto grego do Édipo Rei, de Sófocles, preparado na Universidade Furman, para um curso de graduação. De outro, apontamos de que modo as anotações de edições digitais, em alinhamentos, treebanking e geoanotações, na qualidade de experiências de aprendizagem, são potenciais instrumentos de desenvolvimento.

Pre-print of a chapter to appear in an edited volume of proceedings.

The talk introduces into the Digital Humanities and shows how the Classics might benefit from the knowledge and methods of the DH. The second part deals with the issue "vocabulary acquisition" and a newly developed digital tool (Machina Callida) that uses NLP to create corpus-based vocabulary exercises in Latin classes., Funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), project number 316618374

Ancient Greek studies, and Classics in general, is a perfect field of investigation in Digital Humanities. Indeed, DH approaches could become a means of building models for complex realities, analyzing them with computational methods and sharing the results with a broader public. Ancient texts have a complex tradition, which includes many witnesses (texts that handed down other texts) and different typologies of supports (papyri, manuscripts, and epigraphs). These texts are the basis of all European Literatures and it is crucial to spread their knowledge, in a reliable and easy way. Our project on ancient Greek fragmentary poetry (DEA - Digital Edition of Archilochus: New models and tools for authoring, editing and indexing an ancient Greek fragmentary author), growing out of the existing experience, tries to define a TEI-based digital critical edition combined with NLP techniques and semantic web technologies. Our goal is to provide a complete and reliable tool for scholars, suitable for critical studies in Classics, and a user-friendly environment also for non-specialist users. The project represents one of the attempts within the context of CLARIN-IT to contribute to the wider impact of CLARIN on the specific Italian community interested in Digital Classics. It is intended to improve services in fostering new knowledge in SSH digital research and sustaining the existing one.

This paper describes a preliminary expansion and assessment of the Latin WordNet for the purposes of the LiLa: Linking Latin project. The objective of this study is to better understand the implications of expanding and evaluating the sense coverage of the Latin WordNet, with a view to identifying the most effective method for its refinement and inclusion in the LiLa Knowledge Base of Latin resources. Our test empirically demonstrates the inadequacy for Latin of a common semi-automated approach of expansion and informs potential lines of improvement for the resource.

TheLiLa: Linking Latinproject was recently awarded funding from the European Research Council to build a Knowledge Base of linguistic resources for Latin. LiLa responds to the growing need in the fields of Computational Linguistics, Humanities Computing and Classics to create an interoperable ecosystem of resources and Natural Language Processing tools for Latin. To this end, LiLa makes use of Linked Open Data practices and standards to connect words to distributed textual and lexical resources via unique identifiers. In so doing, it builds rich knowledge graphs, which can be used for research and teaching purposes alike. This paper details the architecture of the LiLa Knowledge Base and presents the solutions found to address the challenges raised by populating it with a first set of linguistic resources.

TheLiLa: Linking Latinproject was recently awarded funding from the European Research Council to build a Knowledge Base of linguistic resources for Latin. LiLa responds to the growing need in the fields of Computational Linguistics, Humanities Computing and Classics to create an interoperable ecosystem of resources and Natural Language Processing tools for Latin. To this end, LiLa makes use of Linked Open Data practices and standards to connect words to distributed textual and lexical resources via unique identifiers. In so doing, it builds rich knowledge graphs, which can be used for research and teaching purposes alike.

This paper discusses three key methodological aspects of a model for a planned digital critical edition of Priscian's Ars grammatica: 1. the glossae found in manuscripts and their relationship with the manuscript text; 2. the presence of Greek text and its importance for the recensio and the construction of a stemma codicum; 3. literary quotations from classical works. Such research is connected with the project of a new edition of the Ars, initiated by Michela Rosellini with her 2015 edition of the second part of the XVIII book of the work. 1. Glossae. Their inclusion in the edition poses specific modelling challenges, since they bear a complex relationship with Priscian's text: a glossa lives in a manuscript's page, so it refers to the text of that specific witness, not to the abstract text proposed by the editor, and as such it must be modelled in the edition. This can be achieved in the TEI XML encoding by linking each glossa to the manuscript it belongs to, and to the specific manuscript reading it comments upon. 2. Greek text. As Rosellini pointed out, while contamination is very common in Priscian's manuscripts, it is much less frequent for the Greek portions of the text, so the latter become key for the recensio. In the proposed edition model, Greek passages will be encoded on two layers, i.e. with both a normalized and a palaeographic transcription. As a consequence, not only "substantial" readings, but also "palaeographic" and "orthographic" variants will be recorded for those textual portions, thus providing scholars of Priscian's text with additional philological evidence. 3. Literary quotations. They will be marked with machine-readable and processable citations of their sources through the Canonical Text Services (CTS) protocol and the newly-developed Distributed Texts Services (DTS) specification., This item refers to a talk delivered at conference "Philology Then and Now: history, role and new directions" at the Danish Academy in Rome on July 16, 2019. I am going to publish another Zenodo item on the article that I derived from this talk.

TheLiLa: Linking Latinproject was recently awarded funding from the European Research Council to build a Knowledge Base of linguistic resources for Latin. LiLa responds to the growing need in the fields of Computational Linguistics, Humanities Computing and Classics to create an interoperable ecosystem of resources and Natural Language Processing tools for Latin. To this end, LiLa makes use of Linked Open Data practices and standards to connect words to distributed textual and lexical resources via unique identifiers. In so doing, it builds rich knowledge graphs, which can be used for research and teaching purposes alike. This paper details the architecture of the LiLa Knowledge Base and presents the solutions found to address the challenges raised by populating it with a first set of linguistic resources.

Invited talk. &nbsp

This paper presents and discusses the findings of a survey carried out to assess the use of digital resources and digital technologies with respect to work in ancient Greek scholarship, with the aim to identify the factors that are likely to constrain its use as well as to elicit needs and requirements of ancient Greek scholars in Italy. The survey is in line with the principles behind the user engagement strategy developed by CLARIN-ERIC and constitutes one of the national efforts undertaken by CLARIN-IT to contribute to the wider impact of CLARIN on Digital Classicists. The survey, as well as other surveys carried out in the sector in the last decade, points out that most of the available resources do not respond to users' requirements. This motivated us to develop a mock-up of a digital editor of Archilochus, which, mostly grounded on previous studies by Nicolosi, draws on the outcomes of the survey. The experiment includes a sample prototype to submit for evaluation by end-users. The final aim is to identify good practices and new models to enable new approaches to the study of classical texts and profile a new workbench for scholarly digital edition.

We describe a domain-specific knowledge base aimed at supporting the extraction of bibliographic references in the domain of Classics. In particular, we deal with references to canonical works of the Greek and Latin literature by providing a model that represents key aspects of this domain such as names and abbreviations of authors, the canonical structure of classical works, and links to related web resources. Finally, we show how the availability of linked data in the emerging Graph of Ancient World Data has helped bootstrapping the creation of our knowledge base.

Within the context of an interdisciplinary research project studying allusion in first century Latin epic, we examine some of the shortcomings of current digital methods for detecting poetic allusions through text reuse. We discuss the role that textual features above and beyond word identity often play in signalling intertextual connections to human readers, in particular, narratological structures and typical scenes. We suggest that such features can be captured by performing clustering and/or classification on word frequencies in paragraph-sized chunks of text, and propose a possible pipeline for fusing similarity measurements based on these thematic features with existing metrics produced by the intertext search tool Tesserae. While work testing the stability of the proposed features is ongoing, we report some promising initial results based on k-means clustering, and describe plans for future work.

“Tra cielo e mare” è un romanzo d’amore e d’avventura che non fa trasparire di essere stato scritto più di cento anni fa. I temi sono sempre attuali e trattati con uno stile semplice, ma non banale, che coinvolge il lettore nella narrazione, senza lasciare spazio ai tempi morti.

Contrary perhaps to expectation, Classical studies is at the vanguard of the latest technological developments for using digital tools and computational techniques in research. This article outlines its pioneering adoption of digital tools and methods, and investigates how the digital medium is helping to transform the study of Greek and Latin literature. It discusses the processes and consequences of digitization, explaining how technologies like multispectral imaging are increasing the textual corpus, while examining how annotation, engagement, and reuse are changing the way we think about \" the text \". It also considers how the digital turn is reinvigorating textual analysis, by exploring the broader ecosystem, within which the digital text can now be studied, and which provides enriched contexts for understanding that are constantly shifting and expanding. Classical literature in the digital age has the potential to both challenge dominant modes of thinking about antiquity and disrupt traditional ways of doing research.

Recogito is an open source tool for the semi-automatic annotation of place references in maps and texts. It was developed as part of the Pelagios 3 research project, which aims to build up a comprehensive directory of places referred to in early maps and geographic writing predating the year 1492. Pelagios 3 focuses specifically on sources from the Classical Latin, Greek and Byzantine periods; on Mappae Mundi and narrative texts from the European Medieval period; on Late Medieval Portolans; and on maps and texts from the early Islamic and early Chinese traditions. Since the start of the project in September 2013, the team has harvested more than 120,000 toponyms, manually verifying almost 60,000 of them. Furthermore , the team held two public annotation workshops supported through the Open Humanities Awards 2014. In these workshops, a mixed audience of students and academics of different backgrounds used Recogito to add several thousand contributions on each workshop day. A number of benefits arise out of this work: on the one hand, the digital identification of places – and the names used for them – makes the documents' contents amenable to information retrieval technology, i.e. documents become more easily search-and discoverable to users than through conventional metadata-based search alone. On the other hand, the documents are opened up to new forms of re-use. For example, it becomes possible to \" map \" and compare the narrative of texts, and the contents of maps with modern day tools like Web maps and GIS; or to analyze and contrast documents' geographic properties, toponymy and spatial relationships. Seen in a wider context, we argue that initiatives such as ours contribute to the growing ecosystem of the \" Graph of Humanities Data \" that is gathering pace in the Digital Humanities (linking data about people, places, events, canonical references, etc.), which has the potential to open up new avenues for computational and quantitative research in a variety of fields including History, Geography, Archaeology, Classics, Genealogy and Modern Languages .

Review of a miscellaneous volume on the application of digital methods and tools to research in Classics.