How do protestant ideas emerge in ancient texts? In the past decades several thousands printed books have been scanned. More ancient textual data is available from other sources. Theologians and philologists can use these digitized texts to extract semantic information using computational methods. For example, texts can be analyzed to find instances of non-verbatim text reuse or to automatically examine changes in a word’s or phrase’s meaning.
The emerging field of Digital Humanities enables humanist scholars to combine qualitative and quantitative approaches to their research questions. Recent developments in natural language processing help researchers to wrangle big textual corpora and perform multiple computational analyses on them. By combining classical philology and computer science, researchers at the University of Leipzig produce systematic knowledge about two millenia of human cultural development.
There are well-established standards for textual annotations and a huge number of annotated historical texts is available. However – it is still challenging to to make those corpora easily findable. Standardisation takes place on the level of the data model but not on the level of organisational structure so far.
GeRDI will provide a searchable index of ancient Greek and Latin texts that will make it easy to build workflows using this data. We expect this to evolve into canonical text services and repositories for other researchers in the digital humanities.
Community Fact Sheet
Research Community: Digital Humanities Chair at the University of Leipzig
Research Discipline: Humanities, Linguistics, Literature and Cultural Studies
Research Field: Image and Text Analysis, Philology
Research Data: Ancient Works in Greek, Latin and Persian
Contact:
Prof. Dr. Gregory Ralph Crane, Alexander von Humboldt Professor of Digital Humanities
Dr. Thomas Koentges, Assistant Professor, Digital Humanities
University of Leipzig