Fragmentary Texts » Digital Classicist seminars

EpiDoc and TEI-XML training workshop – Università Mediterranea di Reggio Calabria

Monica Berti — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 14:24:50 +0000

EpiDoc and TEI-XML training workshop
Dipartimento di Scienze Storiche, Giuridiche, Economiche e Sociali dell’Università Mediterranea di Reggio Calabria – BILG Project
June 4-7, 2012

The Department of Scienze Storiche, Giuridiche, Economiche e Sociali of University Mediterranea of Reggio Calabria and the Department Diritto dell’Organizzazione Pubblica, Economia e Società of University Magna Graecia of Catanzaro, within BILG (Inscriptiones Graecae et Latinae Bruttiorum) project, is organising an intensive training workshop of EpiDoc, with Monica Berti (Tufts University – Università di Roma Tor Vergata), Lou Burnard (TEI Editor) and Marion Lamè (Università di Bologna). This workshop is an introduction to the use of TEI and of EpiDoc, XML schema for the encoding and publication of literary texts and inscriptions, papyri and other documentary classical texts respectively. Participants will study the use of EpiDoc markup to record the distinctions expressed by the Leiden Conventions and traditional critical editions, and some of the issues in translating between EpiDoc and the major epigraphic and papyrological databases.

The course is targeted at scholars of historical and ancient texts, epigraphic and papyrologic ones (from advanced graduate students to professors), that are interested and want to learn some of the hands-on technical aspects in the markup, encoding, and exploitation of digital editions. The course will give a practical introduction to the Text Encoding Initiative, an introduction to EpiDoc markup and editing tools, and the text transformations with XSLT.

For more details about EpiDoc and TEI /XML, see at http://epidoc.sf.net and http://www.tei-c.org. Knowledge of Greek and/or Latin, the Leiden Conventions, the distinctions expressed by them and the kinds of data that need to be recorded by epigraphic scholars and ancient historians are of course essential. The course will be held in English with Italian tutors. No particular computer skills and technical expertise are required, even if the possession of an interest for computer know-how is preferable.

The workshop is free of charge and open to all, but spaces are limited (not more than 20 people) and registration as soon as possible is essential. To enrol in the training, please contact daria.spampinato@cnr.it or stefania.romeo@unirc.it with a brief statement of qualifications and interests.

Monica Berti & Marco Büchler on Fragmentary Texts (Digital Classicist Seminar, London – July 30th, 2010)

Monica Berti — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 09:56:57 +0000

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.

Digital Classicist 2010 Seminars

Monica Berti — Mon, 24 May 2010 13:43:05 +0000

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

Get a pdf copy of the poster of the programme