This article is a short overview on the history and functionality of the MyCoRe project, which is currently developed by various German universities. The MyCoRe-based applications can be used for cataloging and presentation of digitalized objects like papyrus, manuscripts and antique books. MyCoRe is also able to produce different kinds of repository servers.
At the end of the 19th century, the orientalist Julius Euting traveled several times to the Middle East to investigate and to record pre-Islamic monuments, artifacts, and inscriptions. His journals and sketchbooks are preserved in the University Library of Tubingen where they recently were completely digitized. The aim of the presented project is to connect these texts with additional sources and data in a common interface. [1] This system is based on the web-framework Neatline, developed at the University of Virginia, which is able to manage and visualize heterogeneous data in a common interface. The system was extended with a functionality to store and display XML-encoded texts according to the recommendations of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). Furthermore, every entry in the journals is connected to a date or a time-span displayed in a timeline which could also be used to access the text. Beyond this, it is possible to upload or to link scientific articles to monuments, artifacts or archaeological sites mentioned by Euting. All geographical information in the diary can be directly connected to different maps provided within the system. [1] http://ecenter.uni-tuebingen.de:8012/neatline/fullscreen/start
The proposed paper documents Romans 1by1, a population database working on Roman-era inscriptions. The database architecture is built for accommodating all categories of people attested epigraphically. Besides the structure, we will present the difficulties faced and questions raised when expanding and diversifying the metadata, as well as the solutions we opted for and our motivation(s) in doing so. The last section of the presentation will focus on some applications of the database. The most obvious ones, which were the focus of our interest so far as well, refer to prosopographical reconstructions (linking people which have not been linked/identified as the same person throughout more inscriptions and reconstructing relatively fluent life courses) and network analyses.
This contribution concerns the perception of local cultural identities in Hellenistic Northern Etruria. I aim to answer the following question: how did the evolution of the economic and politic relationships between settlements condition the perception and the expression of the local identities? During the Romanization, the Region of my case study presents a complexity of patterns, as result of the interaction of local needs and backgrounds with the global process of institutional and economic unification of the Mediterranean following. The Social Network Analysis (SNA) has been chosen as methodology to approach this complexity. I propose some parameters to detect local identity markers, then I present an integrated method to relate their development to the evolution of the relational networks between the communities.
The paper argues that the (obviously fictional) quote attributed to the legendary Scythian sage Anacharsis in the work of the sceptic Sextus Empircus is more likely to be understood as some kind of ironical twist than as a substantial hint towards a specific philosophical background: At the time of Sextus, Anacharsis was best known as the proverbial wise man. As such, he denies the existence of a criterion of truth that is discussed in the respective passages. At the same time, the figure of the wise man itself is seen as a criterion of truth by several dogmatic philosophers Sextus is arguing against. This leads to a paradoxical situation in which the criterion denies the existence of the criterion explicitly, and, on a more structural level, even the wise man per se the existence of wise men in general. Several tools for the visualization of significant co-occurrences such as the eAQUA co-occurrence-analysis or the eXchange TagPies are used supportively to show that in the time of Sextus the connections between the figure of Anacharsis and the concept of sagacity are indeed much stronger than those between Anacharsis and any specific philosophical school.
This contribution tracks and analyzes the life cycle of the Book of the Dead as a digital project and a rather complex research resource. It gives an account of how the digital archive “Das altagyptische Totenbuch – Ein digitales Textzeugenarchiv” was constructed in the context of the digitization efforts of the Academy for Science of North Rhine-Westphalia. From the beginning, the design of the archive has factored in a life of the digital archive beyond its funding period and has sighted to create a sustainable information resource. The main issues to be discussed here are what experiences have been made with sustainability, use and reuse of the Book of the Dead archive since the official end of the project in December 2012, with a focus on conceptual, technical and organizational aspects. The lessons learned can be of interest for future undertakings in the creation of XML and web-based digital platforms in Digital Classics and beyond. In a nutshell, they are: (a) the importance of wary technological choices in an initial phase cannot be underestimated, (b) the application and presentation layers of a digital resource, if present, are an essential part of it, (c) a certain degree of commitment from the research community and funding bodies alike is indispensable for maintaining a web-based complex Digital Humanities resource.
Over the past decade, collaborative mapping projects have become widespread, allowing for and promoting voluntary participation in cartographic processes. A major factor in the increasing popularity of collaborative mapping in recent years has been the developments in digital cartographic media in general and internet mapping in particular. In this paper the aim is to discuss the possibilities of online collaborative mapping in archaeology. Following an overview of collaborative mapping and its current state in today‘s increasingly online and digital world, four potential modes are introduced through which collaborative mapping in archaeology can be carried out: psychogeography, local community involvement, an online archaeology map system and spatial narratives.
This paper deals with the Homeric Cimmerians, who were located at the end of the world, on the doorsteps to Hades. At the beginning of the work, it was necessary to build up a concept of research 1st to find the relevant sources and 2nd to distinguish the mythical Cimmerians from the historical. Tools from the project eAQUA and eXChange illustrate the selection of sources.
This article presents one digital approach to ancient numismatics. The proposed methodology maps geo-referenced quantities of coin finds within the platform of Google Earth – a free virtual globe available through the Internet. Especially for the uninitiated scholar, Google Earth efficiently visualizes both the spatial and chronological distribution of thousands of coins and provides an intuitive and interactive space for exploring regional and empire-wide patterns in their movement. While the practical applications of this methodology are many, this article focuses on an ongoing study of Antioch-on-the-Orontes in northern Syria and its regional evolution after Roman annexation. This project draws upon Google Earth as an invaluable first step in synthesizing the wealth of disparate coin data available for the city. After outlining the methodology to achieve such a visualization, this article highlights several promising patterns revealed by Google Earth in the dataset.
The eManual Alte Geschichte is a digital introduction to Ancient History and contains mostly Open Educational Resources. Users can learn about Ancient history by using podcasts, ancient sources in translation (and with comments), secondary literature, and other material (such as lists of Roman emperors). Under the direction of Werner Riess, a team of seven contributors created the contents and layout of the blog from November 2015 until June 2017. In a second phase of the project in 2018, the blog will be extended and re-launched in 2019.
To find receptions of Plato‘s work within the ancient Greek literature, automatic methods would be a useful assistance. Unfortunately, such methods are often knowledge-based and thus restricted to extensively annotated texts, which are not available to a sufficient extent for ancient Greek. In this article, we describe an approach that is based on the distributional hypotheses instead, to overcome the problem of missing annotations. This approach uses word2vec and the related Word Mover‘s Distance to determine phrases with similar meaning. Despite its experimental state, the method produces some meaningful results as shown in three examples.
In this paper, the authors show the application and use of automated text network analysis based on ancient corpora. The examples draw from Ancient Egyptian sources and the Indian Mahābhārata. Different text-based network generation algorithms like “Nubbi” or “Textplot” are presented in order to showcase alternative methodological approaches. Visualizations of the generated networks will help scholars to grasp complex social and semantic text structures and serve as a starting point for new research questions. All tools for applying the methods to ancient corpora are available as open source software.
In this paper, we shall present some reflections on issues that arise when scholars prepare new editions of fragmentarily preserved works from antiquity. Our focus will be on those fragments that are transmitted as quotations in other extant texts from antiquity. In such cases, the textual sequences considered as fragments have to be dealt with in a particular way, as they are the results of several selection processes that have not been taken into account adequately previously. A digital approach provides better means to represent this special form of fragments, so that the complexity of the transmission of these pieces of evidence can be understood more accurately.
The article deals with presentation forms of linguistic transformation processes from ancient Greek sources that were translated into classical Arabic from the 9th to 11th century AD. Various examples demonstrate how visualizations support the interpretation of corpus structures, lexical differentiation, grammatical transformation and translation processes for single lexemes in the database project Glossarium Graeco-Arabicum. The database contains about 100,000 manually collected word pairs (still growing) from 76 texts and their translations. The article discusses how the project utilizes Sankey diagrams, tree maps, balloon charts, data grids and classical coordinate systems to point out specific aspects of the data. Visualizations not only help beginners to understand the corpus structure, they also help editors and specialized users to identify specific phenomena. A well-documented interface design is crucial both for usability and interpretative work.
In 2016 and 2017, a series of conferences for European philologists was organized around the question, “What digital services, collections or curricula need to be developed so that a field of study can flourish in a digital society?” This paper argues for the need to cite graphs of data with machine-actionable canonical citation, independently of the data organized by a graph. It describes ongoing work to implement a “Canonical Graph Service” into the CITE/CTS framework used by the Homer Multitext (HMT). It describes citation of graphs, parts of graphs, and sub-graphs by URN, with some examples of how such URN citations might usefully be resolved. Finally, I discuss the limits of this approach, problems that will not be solved by a Canonical Graph Service. This approach may facilitate the creation of generic tools for documenting syntax across languages, integrating data from diverse projects, and opening new areas of research to scholars outside of quantitative fields.
In this paper, I present some results of my research done in the project eXChange. My main goal was to investigate to what extent and how the terminology of the Corpus Hippocraticum has been influenced by the language of the preceding (esp. lyric) literature. A common view in the linguistics concerned with languages for special purposes (the German ‘Fachsprachen’) holds that termini technici are often created by implementing a word from the common language into a technical context and narrowing its former meaning down to a specialized and strictly defined one. While this mechanism could be traced for several terms in the Corpus Hippocraticum, some terms could be found which denote special processes or methods and have been taken over into the medical context without a significant change of meaning. The question is raised if these terms can be regarded as termini technici even if their meaning has not been coined in a specialized context.
The following article is another contribution to the use of tag pies in the wide field of Digital Humanities. Wordclouds provide suitable means when summarizing and visualizing data to support the analysis of analytical tasks and examining of bigger collections of text. The specific use in the field of Classics will be illustrated by means of examining the corpus of the TLG (Thesaurus Linguae Graecae) with regard to the specific question about the connection of three ancient nations: Persians, Medes and Parthians. How are these nations described by the ancient authors and where are the differences and similarities between them? Hence it should be obvious which possibilities tag pies offer to help to work on specific scholarly tasks and where the limitations of this method lie.
Prosopographies disambiguate names appearing in sources by creating lists of persons, but the progress of scholarship now makes these lists difficult to maintain. In a digital context unique stable identifiers can be reshuffled ad libitum when searching and ordering information. Digital data increasingly brings together complementary research outputs: the Standards for Networking Ancient Prosopographies project takes on the challenge of creating an aggregated resource, adopting a Linked Open Data approach. In this paper we shall present three case studies highlighting the promise and problems of encoding unambiguous identities, titulature and other disambiguating information, and treating divine figures as person-data, respectively. Digital approaches are tools for research, assisting rather than replacing the historian, who remains central to the research endeavor.
