A Collaborative Ecosystem for Digital Coptic Studies.

Scholarship on underresourced languages bring with them a variety of\nchallenges which make access to the full spectrum of source materials and their\nevaluation difficult. For Coptic in particular, large scale analyses and any\nkind of quantitative work become difficult due to the fragmentation of\nmanuscripts, the highly fusional nature of an incorporational morphology, and\nthe complications of dealing with influences from Hellenistic era Greek, among\nother concerns. Many of these challenges, however, can be addressed using\nDigital Humanities tools and standards. In this paper, we outline some of the\nlatest developments in Coptic Scriptorium, a DH project dedicated to bringing\nCoptic resources online in uniform, machine readable, and openly available\nformats. Collaborative web-based tools create online \u0027virtual departments\u0027 in\nwhich scholars dispersed sparsely across the globe can collaborate, and natural\nlanguage processing tools counterbalance the scarcity of trained editors by\nenabling machine processing of Coptic text to produce searchable, annotated\ncorpora.