This article discusses the challenges addressed in the digital scholarly encoding of the fragmentary texts of the languages of Ancient Italy according to the TEI/EpiDoc Guidelines in XML format. It describes the solutions and customisations that have been adopted for dealing with the peculiarities of our epigraphical documentation and with the formalisation of epigraphical information deemed interesting for data retrieval in a historical linguistic perspective. The making of a digital corpus consisting of new critical editions of selected inscriptions is a work carried out in the context of the project “Languages and Cultures of Ancient Italy. Historical Linguistics and Digital Models”, which aims to investigate the languages of Ancient Italy by combining the traditional methods, proper to historical linguistics, with methods and technology proper to the digital humanities and computational lexicography. More specifically, the purpose of the project is to create a set of interrelated digital language resources which comprise: (1) a digital corpus of texts editions; (2) a computational lexicon compliant with the Web Semantic requirements; (3) a relevant bibliographic reference dataset encoded according to the FRBRoo/LRMoo specifications. Additionally, selected textual data and scientific interpretations will be encoded using CIDOC CRM and its extensions, namely CRMtex and CRMinf. The present contribution thus tackles one of the main aspects of the project, and proposes significant innovations in the encoding of critical editions for epigraphic texts of fragmentary languages, which will hopefully foster future interoperability and integration with other external datasets, a paramount concern of the project.
Book of Abstracts from the Digital Humanities Conference 2023, held from 10th to 14th July in Graz, Austria
<p><span style="text-align: justify;">EAGLE (Electronic Archive of Greek and Latin Epigrahy) was born in 2003 as a federation of four epigraphic digital archives (Epigraphic Database Bari-EDB, Epigraphische Datenbank Heidelberg-EDH, Epigraphic Database Roma-EDR, and Hispania Epigraphica Online). In 2013 it became a more complex and comprehensive European project, co-funded by the European Commission for 36 months, in the framework of the ICT-PSP program, whose aim is to aggregate epigraphic contents provided by different databases (see the complete list on the website www.eagle-network.eu) and make them searchable through a single portal. These contents, harmonized and "disambiguated" in order to give a permanent identifier to records coming from different archives but related to a single object, are then provided to Europeana, the portal of European cultural heritage, to make them accessible not only to scholars, but also to the broad public (that's why the acronym is now expanded Europeana network of Ancient Greek and Latin Epigraphy).</span><br></p>
This chapter examines the status of the digital study of premodern spatial documents understood as expressions of local knowledge systems. It investigates the tension between the prevalently Cartesian perception of the world underlying modern efforts of mapping and spatial analysis, and the contrasting multiplicity of premodern spatial epistemologies, which reveal deep, multi-layered forms of representation. The first part summarizes the dynamics in the development of spatial knowledge and offers a gallery of examples showing the complexity of premodern spatial descriptions. The second part evaluates current trends in Digital Humanities and examines the ways in which this complexity is (or is not) addressed. The conclusion emphasizes the main issues that still affect the study of premodern spatial perception and proposes some recommendations.
What are the implications of digital representation on intellectual property and ownership of cultural heritage? Are aspirations to preservation and accessibility in the digital space reconcilable with cultural sensitivities, colonized history, and cultural appropriation?This volume brings together different perspectives from academics and practitioners of Cultural Heritage, to address current debates in the digitization and other computational study of cultural artifacts. From the tension between the materiality of cultural heritage objects and the intangible character of digital models, we explore larger issues in intellectual property, collection management, pedagogical practice, inclusion and accessibility, and the role of digital methods in decolonization and restitution debates.The contributions include perspectives from a wide range of disciplines, addressing these questions within the study of the material culture of Africa, Europe, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas.
This contribution presents a novel approach to the development and evaluation of transformer-based models for Named Entity Recognition and Classification in Ancient Greek texts. We trained two models with annotated datasets by consolidating potentially ambiguous entity types under a harmonized set of classes. Then, we tested their performance with out-of-domain texts, reproducing a real-world use case. Both models performed very well under these conditions, with the multilingual model being slightly superior on the monolingual one. In the conclusion, we emphasize current limitations due to the scarcity of high-quality annotated corpora and to the lack of cohesive annotation strategies for ancient languages.
This paper presents the structure of the LiLa Knowledge Base, i.e. a collection of multifarious linguistic resources for Latin described with the same vocabulary of knowledge description and interlinked according to the principles of the so-called Linked Data paradigm. Following its highly lexically based nature, the core of the LiLa Knowledge Base consists of a large collection of Latin lemmas, serving as the backbone to achieve interoperability between the resources, by linking all those entries in lexical resources and tokens in corpora that point to the same lemma. After detailing the architecture supporting LiLa, the paper particularly focusses on how we approach the challenges raised by harmonizing different strategies of lemmatization that can be found in linguistic resources for Latin. As an example of the process to connect a linguistic resource to LiLa, the inclusion in the Knowledge Base of a dependency treebank is described and evaluated.