Fragmentary Texts and Digital Collections of Fragmentary Authors
Monica Berti (Torino) and Marco Büchler (Leipzig)
Digital Classicist and Institute of Classical Studies Seminar 2010
Friday July 30th at 16:30, in room STB9, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU
The term fragment is applicable to a wide range of ancient evidence, which includes archaeological ruins, epigraphical and papyrological documents, and many other pieces of the material record. By “fragmentary texts” we mean not only material remains of ancient writings, but also quotations of lost texts preserved through other texts. A huge number of quotations of lost texts has been gathered in print collections, enabling scholars to reconstruct lost works and depict the personality of fragmentary authors.
Information technologies and hypertextual models permit the expression of every element of print conventions, thus building a cyberinfrastructure for new digital collections of ancient sources. Representing textual fragments first involves focusing on the complex relation between the fragment and its source of transmission, given that a quotation is only a shadow of the original text. Consequently, encoding fragments is ultimately the result of interpreting them, and this involves developing a language for representing every element of their textual features, thus creating meta-information through an accurate and elaborate semantic markup. Editing fragments signifies producing meta-editions that are different from printed ones, because they consist not only of isolated quotations but also of pointers to the original contexts from which the fragments have been extracted.
Moreover, the automatic and unsupervised detection of fragmentary authors is one of the most challenging tasks in the field of Natural Language Processing. Even if computational models developed from the knowledge and skills of classicists – based on observations in texts – can be trained faster, the overall quality will be not comparable to the level of classicists in the next years. For this reason we separate the field of collecting fragmentary authors into 4 working areas to support the work of classicists:
- Associations between author and work names: This kind of an association graph supports tasks such finding all authors that have written works with the same or similar names.
- Extraction of fragments of an author: Based on different patterns, text fragments are aligned to a fragmentary author whenever this author or his work is mentioned in the text.
- Finding new quotations and parallel texts: Given such extracted fragments, additional quotations and parallel texts are determined.
- Expansion of the fragments’ set: The use of all the extracted fragments, their quotations and their parallel texts, allows us to determine the semantic space or spaces of an author in order to find new possible fragment candidates of the same space.
During the Digital Classicist seminar two of these four working areas (whichever have made the best progress by the time of the presentation) will be explained in detail. From a more general view, it will be shown how the objective and quantitative methods of computer scientists can be combined with the qualitative in-depth working methodologies of classicists in this purely non-funding collaboration in order to bring benefits to both communities.
ALL WELCOME
The seminar will be followed by wine and refreshments.
Here is demo.fragmentarytexts.org, which is a site complementary to Fragmentary Texts and whose aim is to test tools and devise methods for representing fragments of lost authors and works.
We post the programme of the Digital Classicist 2010 summer seminars, which will be held at the Institute of Classical Studies, London.
One of the seminars (July 30) is on Fragmentary Texts and Digital Collections of Fragmentary Authors (Monica Berti & Marco Büchler)
Meetings are on Fridays at 16:30 in room STB9 (Stewart House)
Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU
*ALL WELCOME*
Seminars will be followed by refreshments
- Jun 4 Leif Isaksen (Southampton)
Reading Between the Lines: unearthing structure in Ptolemy’s Geography
- Jun 11 Hafed Walda (King’s College London) and Charles Lequesne (RPS Group)
Towards a National Inventory for Libyan Archaeology
- Jun 18 Timothy Hill (King’s College London)
After Prosopography? Data modelling, models of history, and new directions for a scholarly genre
- Jun 25 Matteo Romanello (King’s College London)
Towards a Tool for the Automatic Extraction of Canonical References
- Jul 2 Mona Hess (University College London)
3D Colour Imaging For Cultural Heritage Artefacts
- Jul 16 Annemarie La Pensée (National Conservation Centre) and Françoise Rutland (World Museum Liverpool)
Non-contact 3D laser scanning as a tool to aid identification and interpretation of archaeological artefacts: the case of a Middle Bronze Age Hittite Dice
- Jul 23 Mike Priddy (King’s College London)
On-demand Virtual Research Environments: a case study from the Humanities
- Jul 30 Monica Berti (Torino) and Marco Büchler (Leipzig)
Fragmentary Texts and Digital Collections of Fragmentary Authors
- Aug 6 Kathryn Piquette (University College London)
Material Mediates Meaning: Exploring the artefactuality of writing utilising qualitative data analysis software
- Aug 13 Linda Spinazzè (Venice)
Musisque Deoque. Developing new features: manuscripts tracing on the net
For more information on individual seminars and updates on the programme, see Digital Classicist 2010 summer seminar programme
Here is an interesting announcement appeared in the Brown Alumni Magazine (March/April 2010), which illustrates the reconstruction of a “modern” example of fragmentary text:
April 22, 2010 — Using digital images, scholars have discovered that fragments of paper at libraries at Brown and the University of Chicago are two halves of a single page on which the teenaged Abraham Lincoln copied out math problems. It’s one of the earliest examples of Lincoln’s thought and writing.
For nearly a century the two halves have been stored 1,000 miles apart in Brown’s John Hay Library and at the University of Chicago. This spring Daniel Stowell, editor of the Papers of Abraham Lincoln, a project of the Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Illinois, finally connected them together. Since 2006, Stowell and his colleagues have been criss crossing the United States scanning Lincoln documents—more than 57,000 so far. Because Brown has one of the largest Lincoln collections, they scanned 1,117 documents at the Hay, Stowell says.
While cataloguing the digitized images, Stowell noticed that both Brown and Chicago owned fragments of pages on which Lincoln had written math problems, and when Stowell matched the two scans he found that they lined up exactly along the tear. The top half of the numeral 18 was on the Brown half, and the lower half was on the Chicago scrap. He also found that on the back of the fragments the abbreviation £ was bisected perfectly.
The reunited page gives a clearer sense of what Lincoln was doing: teaching himself arithmetic by copying problems from The Schoolmaster’s Assistant, a popular textbook first published in 1740 in London. Lincoln received perhaps a year of formal education and educated himself zealously, says Holly Snyder, curator of U.S. history in the John Hay: “It says something about the drive to learn.”
Here is a new publication of a collection of 10 fragments of papyri that probably belong to historical works on Alexander the Great. The book is edited by Luisa Prandi in the series Corpus dei papiri storici greci e latini, and it is published by Fabrizio Serra Editore:
From the webpage of Libraweb:
Il volume pubblica l’edizione critica (con descrizione, testo originale, traduzione e commento) di dieci frammenti papiracei, di carattere narrativo, per i quali gli Editori hanno ipotizzato la provenienza da opere storiche riguardanti la persona e le vicende di Alessandro Magno. Si tratta di papiri di carattere letterario, databili tutti, tranne uno, tra il II secolo a.C. e il II secolo d.C. (per il PLaur IV 138 la data proposta è il IV secolo d.C.). I papiri contengono riferimenti sicuri ad Alessandro e/o a personaggi a lui legati e sono suscettibili di considerazioni storiche, per quanto riguarda il contenuto, e storiografiche, per quanto riguarda il genere o l’impostazione.
La traduzione, condotta con prudenza, perché la necessità di rispettare un testo greco frammentario, senza farvi aderire indebitamente impressioni personali, limita la capacità di rendere concetti e descrizioni, non va mai considerata disgiunta dal commento, all’interno del quale l’autrice ha valorizzato con maggiore libertà tutti gli spunti del testo e proposto una comprensione globale del senso. L’opera è chiusa da un capitolo finale che contiene un tentativo di bilancio del materiale esaminato e anche un ulteriore sviluppo di alcune questioni e discussioni, di cui si offrono comunque gli estremi nelle singole schede, questioni complesse o ampie che meglio si prestano ad essere riconsiderate ed inserite in una prospettiva di carattere generale sull’Alessandrografia.
Sommario: Bibliografia. Introduzione. 1. F PBritLibr 3o85v; 2. F PHamb IV 130; 3. F POxy IV 679; 4. F POxy LVI 3823v; 5. F PCairo 49653; 6. F PLond v 1815 (PLitLond 115); 7. F POxy LVI 3824; 8. F PBerol 21258v; 9. F POxy XV 1798; 10. F Plaur IV 138. I papiri e le storie di Alessandro Magno: per un bilancio.
Digital Research in the Study of Classical Antiquity, edited by Gabriel Bodard (King’s College, London, UK) and Simon Mahony (University College London, UK), Ashgate 2010, ISBN 978-0-7546-7773-4 £ 55.00
This book explores the challenges and opportunities presented to Classical scholarship by digital practice and resources. Drawing on the expertise of a community of scholars who use innovative methods and technologies, it shows that traditionally rigorous scholarship is as central to digital research as it is to mainstream Classical Studies. The chapters in this edited collection cover many subjects, including text and data markup, data management, network analysis, pedagogical theory and the Social and Semantic Web, illustrating the range of methods that enrich the many facets of the study of the ancient world. This volume exemplifies the collaborative and interdisciplinary nature that is at the heart of Classical Studies.
Contents: Introduction, Simon Mahony and Gabriel Bodard; Part I Archaeology and Geography: Silchester Roman town: developing virtual research practice 1997–2008, Michael G. Fulford, Emma J. O’Riordan, Amanda Clarke and Michael Rains; Diversity and reuse of digital resources for ancient Mediterranean material culture, Sebastian Heath; Space as an artefact: a perspective on ‘neogeography’ from the digital humanities, Stuart Dunn. Part II Text and Language: Contextual epigraphy and XML: digital publication and its application to the study of inscribed funerary monuments, Charlotte Tupman; A virtual research environment for the study of documents and manuscripts, Alan K. Bowman, Charles V. Crowther, Ruth Kirkham and John Pybus. One era’s nonsense, another’s norm: diachronic study of Greek and the computer, Notis Toufexis. Part III Infrastructure and Disciplinary Issues: Digital infrastructure and the Homer multitext project, Neel Smith; Ktêma es aiei: digital permanence from an ancient perspective, Hugh A. Cayless; Creating a generative learning object (GLO): working in an ‘ill-structured’ environment and getting students to think, Eleanor O’Kell, Dejan Ljubojevic and Cary MacMahon; The digital classicist: disciplinary focus and interdisciplinary vision, Melissa Terras; Bibliography; Index.
About the Editors: Dr Gabriel Bodard is Research Associate at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, KCL and Simon Mahony is at the University College London, UK
Extracts from the book:
From Domenico Fiormonte:
We are happy to announce the publication of our new book: L’umanista digitale, by Teresa Numerico, Domenico Fiormonte and Francesca Tomasi (Il Mulino, Bologna, 2010).
This work follows the collective Informatica per le discipline umanistiche (ed. by Teresa Numerico and Arturo Vespignani, 2004), a small best-seller in our field, as it was widely used in many humanities computing courses across Italy. In the last six years so many things have changed, so we decided to write a completely different book, and organized it around the idea of an essential “digital trivium”. Not just an introduction to DH, but a critical reflection on current tools (Google, among others) and practices.
Accordingly, the volume is divided in three main sections: Writing & producing content (Scrivere e produrre, by D. Fiormonte); Representation and preservation (Rappresentare e conservare, by F. Tomasi); Searching and organizing (Cercare e organizzare, by T. Numerico). The book was conceived from a genuinely interdisciplinary perspective, as we all work in different fields: Teresa is a philosopher of science and CS historian, Francesca is a computer scientist and digital archivist, and Domenico is a linguist and new media student. Perhaps the most challenging output of this collaboration is the first chapter on the “humanistic roots” of computer science, written by T. Numerico, but discussed among us at length. Teresa, who has been working for years on this topic, describes an epistemological turn: from the computer as “computing machine” to idea of “interface” and communicative
tool, explaining how this idea derived from people and scholars who had a humanistic approach to knowledge.
Interesting to the DH community would be also the Appendix: The international scenario of digital humanities, a concise summary of geo-political trends, research scenarios and projects in our field. The prospect provided here is deliberately international, but also attentive to the specific cultural needs of each national DH community.
Finally, registered readers can access the publisher’s online environment AulaWeb, where they can find more material, i.e. unpublished chapters, tests, slides, and tutorials.
So, you’ll say, another Italian HC/DH book that nobody outside Italy will ever read? Maybe. Or may be you can help us to translate bit & pieces, summarise, and abridge paragraphs and chapters, and post them in your blog and web sites. We can send you the italian text and help you to translate anything you’re interested in. Especially the introduction Storia dell’interazione tra tecnologia e sapere umanistico is something quite new in our field: we don’t remember many publications, except perhaps Willard ‘s “Humanities Computing”, reflecting on how important has been our theoretical and practical contribution to the birth of Informatics and Computer Science. If you need more info, or want a review copy of the volume, please contact the publisher at universita@mulino.it, or feel free to write us:
Here is the publication of the fragments of the works of Xenophon, edited in the series “Corpus dei papiri storici greci e latini”:
From the webpage of Libraweb:
Il presente lavoro comprende l’edizione critica degli undici papiri che conservano passi frammentari delle opere senofontee di carattere storiografico. Di essi, sette contengono passi degli Hellenica e quattro brani dell’Anabasis. Tutti i papiri tranne uno (databile al IV secolo d.C.) appartengono ad un periodo compreso tra il I e il III secolo d.C. Essi, per il modo in cui sono redatti, riescono a fornire numerose indicazioni riguardo all’estensore del testo, al committente, al lettore e all’ambito di circolazione della copia cui il frammento appartiene. Unendo tali dati all’analisi paleografica e testuale, l’autrice traccia un quadro complessivo del contributo dei papiri ai modi ed alle forme della diffusione del testo di Senofonte come storico nell’Egitto romano e bizantino, ricostruendo, sulla base dell’analisi dei manoscritti esaminati, gli apporti dei papiri delle opere storiche di Senofonte alla storia del libro antico, alla storia della scrittura ed alla ricostruzione del testo senofonteo. I frammenti presi in esame sono ordinati in base alla posizione nel testo tràdito dalla paradosi medievale del brano in essi conservato. L’edizione del testo contiene ciò che è attualmente leggibile nel singolo frammento e le integrazioni, per lo più dovute ai precedenti editori, che sono sembrate opportune. Il testo è preceduto da una descrizione bibliologica e paleografica del frammento e seguìto da un apparato paleografico, da un apparato critico e da un apparato dei codici. Nell’apparato paleografico sono segnalati i fenomeni grafici (segni di lettura, punteggiatura, accenti etc.) ed ortografici (fenomeni di iotacismo, geminazione, semplificazione etc.). L’apparato critico rende conto di letture ed integrazioni degli editori precedenti. L’apparato dei codici mette a confronto il testo del papiro con quello tramandato dai testimoni medievali, evidenziando discordanze e concordanze.
Sommario: Natascia Pellé, Premessa; Premessa al testo; Abbreviazioni bibliografiche; Riviste; Sigle papirologiche; Abbreviazioni; Segni critici. Introduzione: Papiri e ricezione di Senofonte storico nell’Egitto romano e bizantino. La tradizione manoscritta degli Hellenica. Sigla. I papiri degli Hellenica. 1F PVindob inv. G 257 + 24568 + 29781; 2F Pprinc III 112; 3F POxy I 28; 4F PLaur inv. PL III /273 H; 5F Pyale II 100; 6F PSI XI 1197 + PSI XVII Congr. 8 + POxy II 226; 7F PMich inv. 6650 + PKoln VII 305. La tradizione manoscritta dell’Anabasis; Sigla. I papiri dell’Anabasis; 1F PSI XI 1196 + PSI XV 1485; 2F POxy III 463; 3F POxy IX 1181; 4F PBerol inv. 11904. Indice dei termini greci presenti nei papiri. Tavole.