Computer-Assisted Processing of Intertextuality in Ancient Languages
📝 Abstract
The production of digital critical editions of texts using TEI is now a widely-adopted procedure within digital humanities. The work described in this paper extends this approach to the publication of gnomologia (anthologies of wise sayings), which formed a widespread literary genre in many cultures of the medieval Mediterranean. These texts are challenging because they were rarely copied straightforwardly; rather, sayings were selected, reorganised, modified or re-attributed between manuscripts, resulting in a highly interconnected corpus for which a standard approach to digital publication is insufficient. Focusing on Greek and Arabic collections, we address this challenge using semantic web techniques to create an ecosystem of texts, relationships and annotations, and consider a new model - organic, collaborative, interconnected, and open-ended - of what constitutes an edition. This semantic web-based approach allows scholars to add their own materials and annotations to the network of information and to explore the conceptual networks that arise from these interconnected sayings.
💡 Analysis
The production of digital critical editions of texts using TEI is now a widely-adopted procedure within digital humanities. The work described in this paper extends this approach to the publication of gnomologia (anthologies of wise sayings), which formed a widespread literary genre in many cultures of the medieval Mediterranean. These texts are challenging because they were rarely copied straightforwardly; rather, sayings were selected, reorganised, modified or re-attributed between manuscripts, resulting in a highly interconnected corpus for which a standard approach to digital publication is insufficient. Focusing on Greek and Arabic collections, we address this challenge using semantic web techniques to create an ecosystem of texts, relationships and annotations, and consider a new model - organic, collaborative, interconnected, and open-ended - of what constitutes an edition. This semantic web-based approach allows scholars to add their own materials and annotations to the network of information and to explore the conceptual networks that arise from these interconnected sayings.
📄 Content
1 Journal of Data Mining and Digital Humanities http://jdmdh.episciences.org ISSN 2416-5999, an open-access journal
Computer-Assisted Processing of Intertextuality in Ancient Languages Mark Hedges1*, Anna Jordanous2, K. Faith Lawrence1, Charlotte Roueché1, Charlotte Tupman3 1 King’s College London, UK 2 University of Kent, UK 3 University of Exeter, UK *Corresponding author: Mark Hedges mark.hedges@kcl.ac.uk
Abstract The production of digital critical editions of texts using TEI is now a widely-adopted procedure within digital humanities. The work described in this paper extends this approach to the publication of gnomologia (anthologies of wise sayings), which formed a widespread literary genre in many cultures of the medieval Mediterranean. These texts are challenging because they were rarely copied straightforwardly; rather, sayings were selected, reorganised, modified or re-attributed between manuscripts, resulting in a highly interconnected corpus for which a standard approach to digital publication is insufficient. Focusing on Greek and Arabic collections, we address this challenge using semantic web techniques to create an ecosystem of texts, relationships and annotations, and consider a new model – organic, collaborative, interconnected, and open-ended – of what constitutes an edition. This semantic web-based approach allows scholars to add their own materials and annotations to the network of information and to explore the conceptual networks that arise from these interconnected sayings.
keywords linked data; semantic web; digital edition; manuscripts; ontology; RDF; TEI; gnomologia; anthologies
INTRODUCTION The TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) XML format has been widely adopted as the standard encoding for marking up textual data with semantic content [Mylonas & Renear, 1999; Pierazzo, 2011; Sperberg-McQueen, 1991]. The adoption of this standard in principle facilitates interoperability between different resources, enabling them to be used in combination for new research, and this publication strategy has been embraced widely in the digital humanities community.i Lack of communication and failure to share research can still result in consolidation rather than expansion of information, the so-called ‘digital silo’ [Nichols, 2009; Zorich, 2008], but sometimes we also need to be able to do more with our texts than TEI currently allows.
We are therefore extending the TEI model through our work on editing medieval gnomologia. It has long been realised that philosophical, moral and scientific ideas have travelled, both within and beyond their own cultures, not only through the transmission of complete texts, but in collections of citations and summaries. These collections survive in abundant medieval manuscripts, which are not very rewarding to publish, and it is not easy to illustrate such processes within the confines of print. The Sharing Ancient Wisdoms project (SAWS), funded by HERA from 2010 to 2013, aimed to analyse some of the collections known as gnomologia: collections of wise sayings containing moral or social advice, or expressing philosophical ideas. ii Such collections of extracts from earlier works were rarely
2 Journal of Data Mining and Digital Humanities http://jdmdh.episciences.org ISSN 2416-5999, an open-access journal straightforward copies; sayings were selected from other manuscripts, reorganised, and modified or reattributed. They also crossed linguistic barriers, e.g. from Greek into Arabic, again rarely in straightforward translation; changes often reflected a change of social context, especially between different cultural traditions. In later centuries, collections were translated from Arabic into western European languages.iii In all languages, such collections also informed the writing of continuous texts, of a kind that are more readily perceived as literary. The project aimed to examine such texts, publishing several gnomologia in Greek, Arabic and Latin, as well as a number of continuous texts that used gnomologia as sources. These complex traditions themselves call into question the simple concept of citation: many examples of familiar passages may come not from full copies of the original text, but through a chain of texts, which may extend over centuries. Moreover, the compilation of collections, which to the modern reader appears a second order activity, required a creative process; each collection was shaped in some way, and this must be taken into account if we are seeking to understand the preoccupations and concerns of particular periods. While we could not hope to present more than a fraction of this rich and abundant material, we aimed to develop tools and protocols for doing so, in order to reveal, and analyse, some of the transitions between texts.
In this paper we describe a methodology and framework for publishing gnomological manuscripts that addresses and exploits their high
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