Classics@20: Digital Text Analysis of Greek and Latin sources; Methods, Tools, Perspectives

Citation: Chronopoulos, Stelios, Felix K. Maier, and Anna Novokhatko, eds. 2022. “Digital Text Analysis of Greek and Latin sources; Methods, Tools, Perspectives.” Special issue, Classics@ 21. https://classics-at.chs.harvard.edu/volume/classics20-digital-text-analysis-of-greek-and-latin-sources/.

Edited by Stelios Chronopoulos, Felix K. Maier, and Anna Novokhatko

The digital study of the ancient Greek and Roman era is characterized by a specific context. Antiquity offers fewer sources and perhaps less text material than later times, but these sources have—to a large extent—already been digitized. Since the 1980s a huge amount of Greek and Latin text collections are digitally available in several databases. The combination of these factors has pushed classicists to investigate new data-driven methods of enquiry. …

The seductive charm of digital technologies and the associated attraction of getting “impartial,” “objective” scientific results, produced by a data-driven, mechanical process, has not made scholars blind to the ramifications that come with the overwhelming speed of constantly renewed and ever-developing techniques. The relevance of this issue becomes more and more urgent as an awareness of how Digital Classics can and does creatively change established traditional methods becomes more evident with every year that passes. ….

Our volume takes into account these methodological discussions while heading in a different direction: It presents recent developments in the field of “computational” Classics, that is, the digital analysis of Greek and Latin texts. These approaches enable scholars to do the traditional philological work such as debating and contextualising word meanings and text passages, searching for certain patterns within a text corpus, while using more powerful, reliable, perhaps transparent and certainly flexible search and analytic tools and visualisation techniques than those previous generations of digital-affine scholars had at their disposal.

– From the Introduction

Felix K. Maier and Anna Novokhatko, Introduction: Digital Methods of Analysing and Reconstructing Ancient Greek and Latin Texts.

R. Ast, “Can the Digital Humanities Make Us Better Humanists? A Case Study in Papyrology.”

Lou Burnard, “What is TEI conformance, and why should you care?”

Nicola Reggiani, “The digital edition of ancient sources as a further step in the textual transmission.”

A. Keersmaekers and M. Depauw, “Bringing Together Linguistics and Social History in Automated Text Analysis of Greek Papyri.”

Yves Ouvrard and Philippe Verkerk, “Collatinus & Eulexis: Latin & Greek Dictionaries in the Digital Ages.”

Margherita Fantoli, “Statistics and linguistics: Can we tell something more about Pliny the Elder?”

Dominique Longrée, “Lexicology and Statistical Analysis With Hyperbase-Latin Web Edition: The Specific Collocations Method Applied to Some Latin Semantic Fields.”

Francesco Mambrini, “The Syntax of the Heroes? A Treebank-Based Approach to the Language of the Sophoclean Characters.”

Marja Vierros and Polina Yordanova, “Querying Syntactic Constructions in Ancient Greek Parsed Corpora: A Case Study on the Genitive Absolute in Literature and Documentary Papyri.”

Melody Wauke, Charles Schufreider, and Neel Smith, “Recovering the history of Iliadic scholia: Architecture and initial results from the Homer Multitext project.”