Raiders of the Lost CorpusCaroline T SchroederUniversity of the Pacificcarrie@carrieschroeder.com
Caroline T. Schroeder is Professor of Religious Studies at the University
of the Pacific, where she was also Director of the Humanities Center
from 2012 to 2014. Her research concerns asceticism and monasticism in
early Christianity, with a particular focus on Egypt. She is the author
of
Monastic Bodies: Discipline and Salvation in
Shenoute of Atripe (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007)
and co-editor of the forthcoming Melania: Early
Christianity through the Life of One Family (University of
California Press, 2016). She blogs at www.earlymonasticism.org and maintains a website at www.carrieschroeder.com. In addition to her Digital
Humanities research, she is writing a monograph on children in early
Egyptian monasteries. She also serves on the advisory board for the
Journal of Early Christian Studies, is a member of the Sheffield
Institute for Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies, and is a former member
of the board of directors for the North American Patristics Society.
Amir ZeldesGeorgetown Universityamir.zeldes@georgetown.edu
Amir Zeldes is Assistant Professor of Computational Linguistics at
Georgetown University, specializing in Corpus Linguistics. His main area
of interest is the syntax-semantics interface, where meaning and
knowledge about the world are mapped onto our choice of words and
syntactic structures in language-specific ways. He is also involved in
the development of tools for corpus search, annotation and
visualization, and has worked on standards for textual data in
Linguistics and the Digital Humanities, especially for the Coptic
language of Hellenistic Egypt.
Alliance of Digital Humanities OrganizationsAssociation for Computers and the Humanities00024701027 June 2016article
This is the source
DHQ classification scheme; full list available at http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/taxonomy.xmlKeywords supplied by author; no controlled vocabularycorpus linguisticsdigital historydigital philologyEgyptCopticdigital standardsreligious studiesClassicsCreated file
Coptic represents the last phase of the Egyptian language and is pivotal for a
wide range of disciplines, such as linguistics, biblical studies, the history of
Christianity, Egyptology, and ancient history. It was also essential for
cracking the code of the Egyptian hieroglyphs. Although digital
humanities has been hailed as distinctly interdisciplinary, enabling new forms
of knowledge by combining multiple forms of disciplinary investigation,
technical obtacles exist for creating a resource useful to both linguists and
historians, for example. The nature of the language (outside of the
Indo-European family) also requires its own approach. This paper will present
some of the challenges -- both digital and material -- in creating an online,
open source platform with a database and tools for digital research in Coptic.
It will also propose standards and methodologies to move forward through those
challenges. This paper should be of interest not only to scholars in Coptic but
also others working on what are traditionally considered more marginal
language groups in the pre-modern world, and researchers working with corpora
that have been removed from their original ancient or medieval repositories and
fragmented or dispersed.
A presentation of the challenges of creating an online platform for digital
research in Coptic.
The dry desert of Egypt has preserved for centuries the parchment and papyri that
provide us with a glimpse into the economy, literature, religion, and daily life of
ancient Egyptians. During the Roman period of Egyptian history, many texts were
written in the Coptic language. Coptic is the last phase of the ancient Egyptian
language family and is derived ultimately from the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs of
the pharaonic era.
Digital and computational methods hold promise for research in the many disciplines
that use Coptic literature as primary sources: biblical studies, church history,
Egyptology, linguistics, to name a few. Yet few digital resources exist to enable
such research. This essay outlines the challenges to developing a digital corpus of
Coptic texts for interdisciplinary research — challenges that are both material
(arising from the history and politics of the physical corpus itself) and
theoretical (arising from recent efforts to digitize the corpus). We also sketch out
some solutions and possibilities, which we are developing in our project Coptic
SCRIPTORIUM.
Digital Humanities has defined itself as a field that can enable research on a new
scale, whether distant reading of large text corpora, aggregation of large visual
media collections, or enabling discovery in future querying and algorithmic research
. Critical Digital Humanities scholars remind us that
digitization initiatives sometimes replicate the Western canon rather than expand
it, and that digitization is not in and of itself a more equitable mode of
scholarship existing outside of politics . Digital tools and corpora for Coptic language and
literature, we argue, can expand humanistic research not merely in terms of scale
but also scope, especially in ancient studies and literature. Large English, Greek,
and Latin corpora — as well as the tools to create, curate, and query them — have
been foundational for work in the Digital Humanities. Computational studies on the
documents from late antique Egypt can facilitate academic inquiry across traditional
disciplines as well as transform our canon of Digital Classics and Digital
Humanities scholarship.
Part I: Shenoute of Atripe and the Scriptorium of Doom
Of the several dialects of Coptic that developed in late antiquity, the Sahidic
dialect is considered the early classical dialect. Much of the surviving Coptic
literature in Sahidic comes from one important late antique repository: the
White Monastery in Egypt. One of the most important Egyptian monasteries of the
fourth through 12th centuries, it is also known as
the Monastery of Shenoute, named after the monk who was the father, or abbot, of
the community from the 380s until his death in 465. During Shenoute’s life, the
large basilica (the community’s church building) was constructed; over the
centuries it was damaged, restored, and changed, but the basic design and
construction are from Shenoute’s tenure in the fifth century.
This community is often called the White Monastery, because of the color of the
stone used to build the church. Some of the blocks used to construct the
basilica were taken from the nearby pagan temple of Repyt (Triphis). Shenoute is
the most famous and most important leader of this monastic community, propelling
it to a position as a political and cultural center in Upper Egypt.
This monastery’s scriptorium and library were arguably the most influential in
the region. Important copies of biblical books and monastic texts written or
translated into Coptic have survived . Shenoute received letters from the bishop of
Alexandria, which were translated into Coptic and circulated throughout the
area. Shenoute himself is our most important and probably most rhetorically
sophisticated Coptic author . And he is
particularly known for his stark, prophetic rhetoric in which he condemns
sinners, heretics, and others for their failures and predicts the coming of
God’s wrath upon them . The White Monastery, therefore, is one of our most
important repositories of Coptic literary manuscripts, and its corpus provides
important insights into the religious history of Christian Egypt.
For linguists and Egyptologists, Coptic’s significance lies in its position as
the last phase of the Egyptian language family. Egyptian evolved over thousands
of years from the third and fourth millennia BCE through the Byzantine era,
encompassing Old and Middle Egyptian hieroglyphs of the pharaonic periods as
well as Coptic. Because of this connection to ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs,
Egyptologists, including Jean-François Champollion, used their knowledge of
Coptic to translate the hieroglyphs after the discovery of the Rosetta Stone
(e.g., see ; ; ). Coptic is written primarily in the Greek
alphabet, with some modified Demotic characters. (Demotic is the Egyptian script
used increasingly during the Hellenistic period, and it preceded Coptic as a
written language in Egypt.) The language, therefore, could be loosely understood
by the non-specialist as a language of transliteration: Egyptian grammar and
vocabulary written primarily in the Greek alphabet (with some native Egyptian
letters-Demotic-included). Figure 3 is a transcription of the detail of the
Coptic manuscript in Figure 2. The letters rendered in red in Figure 4 derive
from the Demotic (Egyptian) alphabet. Some Greek (and to a lesser extent Latin)
vocabulary words were incorporated into the language, and after the Arab
conquest, some Arabic loanwords came into the language, as well. The Greek loan
word akathartos appears in blue in Figure 3. A
digital Coptic language corpus would be a resource for research by linguists and
Egyptologists alike.
Coptic is also important for Biblical studies, including extra-canonical texts.
Many biblical manuscripts survive in various Coptic dialects, including
important witnesses in Sahidic from the White Monastery. Shenoute of Atripe is
also one of our earliest Coptic authors to cite and quote the bible, providing
early evidence as to how the bible was used and interpreted in fourth and fifth
century Egypt. Some of our most important extra-canonical texts, including the
so-called Gnostic library from Nag Hammadi, survive in
Coptic. The Nag Hammadi corpus includes philosophical treatises but also a
number of extra-canonical Gospels, apocalypses, and other early Christian texts
that are fundamental to our understanding of Christian origins. The Gospel of
Thomas, shown in Figure 4, is one of the most famous of those texts.
Coptic literature documents the beginnings of the monastic movement, as well.
Egypt became one of the cradles of early Christian monasticism when in the
fourth century, men and women flocked to Egypt to become monks, and of course
Egyptian men and women themselves became monks. Perhaps the most famous of these
was Anthony the Great, who lived in a cave in the desert cliffs depicted in or
in the region of those depicted in Figure 5. Monastic settlements dotted the
Nile Valley from the fourth through eighth centuries.
Thus, Coptic literature is an important primary source for multiple academic
disciplines, and we haven't even addressed social and economic history.
Countless documentary papyri and ostraca survive, some of which are beginning to
be digitized by scholars at http://papyri.info. Ostraca are pot sherds on which people wrote
letters, receipts, and other documents. We have thousands upon thousands of
Coptic ostraca, many of which are undocumented and unpublished, with more being
discovered all the time.
The White Monastery is arguably the most important ancient repository for Coptic
texts in the Sahidic dialect and more generally for understanding early
Christian monasticism. The community remained a literary powerhouse through at
least the twelfth century, accumulating, transcribing, and storing a wide
variety of texts. Documents from Byzantine Egypt mention people sending requests
and even visiting this monastery’s library to obtain copies of various
documents. It contains the largest, earliest collection of contemporaneous,
non-hagiographical texts documenting a coenobitic monastery. We have letters,
monastic rules, treatises and discourses from Shenoute and at least his next two
successors, comprising a corpus larger than that of any other fourth or fifth
century monastery. These documents date to a period earlier than the Benedictine
material in Italy and Europe, and they comprise a less-hagiographical (and thus
more historical) source than more well-known documents about Egypt’s
desert fathers and desert mothers,
such as saints lives about famous monks, or the
Sayings of
the Desert Fathers. When the monastery’s library was discovered
in modernity, its documents transformed the study of the Coptic language and
informed our understanding of the entire Egyptian language family .
Part II: Coptic Egypt and the Last Crusade
In the 18th and 19th centuries, when Europe colonized Egypt and Africa, Europe
discovered the White Monastery library. By this time, the monastery was barely
populated, and Arabic had taken over as the popular language of Egypt. Even the
Coptic liturgies and bibles were in Arabic, not Coptic. The Coptic manuscripts,
once part of the most important library in the region, were no longer legible to
the Egyptian people, and they were dispersed to libraries, museums, and private
collections elsewhere, primarily Europe.
The actual history of the dismemberment of the library is not completely known,
but we do know that in the 18th c., pieces of this library were on the
antiquities market. Whether taken by European traders or offered up by Egyptian
Christians at the monastery, we don’t know for sure. But our first record of
White Monastery manuscripts leaving Egypt for Europe is their acquisition by the
Borgias in Italy in 1778. Most of the last of the manuscripts were found by the
French scholar Gaston Maspero in a small room, essentially discarded by people
who no longer knew Coptic, and were taken to Paris .
Today, the manuscripts are scattered across the globe. Only a handful remain in
Egypt. The largest collections are in Naples, Vienna, Paris, and England. The
map in Figure 6 shows only the locations of manuscripts of Shenoute’s writings.
Not where all the biblical texts are located, nor liturgical, hagiographical,
and other White Monastery texts. Including all the known White Monastery
manuscripts would add to the number of modern repositories on this map. Of
course, we do not know the number of documents (whether fragments or whole
codices) that exist in private collections.
The texts were dispersed page by page, not codex by codex. Thus, the pages of one
original codex might now be all over the globe. Figure 7 is a page from a copy
of Volume Three of Shenoute’s
Canons for monks;
many other folios from his corpus are similarly damaged or fragmented. The chart
in Figure 8 illustrates the dispersal of the manuscripts of one text — not a
codex but one text — known as Abraham Our Father,
which is a letter to monks in Volume Three of Shenoute's Canons. Folios survive from a few copies of Canons vol. 3, so this pie chart represents pages from 6 separate
codices. Though six repositories are represented in the chart, each codex's
pages went to different repositories. And there are gaps; the text does not
survive in entirety even after piecing together all the surviving folios.
Less than 50% of Shenoute’s corpus survives. Of the entire library, the
percentage is probably similar, but we don’t know for sure.
Part III: The Corpus Strikes Back
One challenge with this level of corpus dismemberment is access: how can we
access these texts and understand them with both depth and breadth? What will it
require to develop and curate a Coptic corpus suitable for cross-disciplinary,
digital and computational research? Some of the challenges to developing a
cross-disciplinary digital Coptic research environment include:
Digitization and copyrightThe patchwork nature of public domain editionsThe need for field-wide standards for stable universal references for
documentsIntegrating technologies for linguistic, historical, and codicological
researchThe need for semi-permanent archives for corpora, akin to the Perseus
Digital Library
Despite the situation of the manuscripts, the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries saw flurries in the publication of Coptic literary texts: biblical
texts, hagiography, liturgy, monastic texts, and others. Issues of access,
however, endure. Many texts remain unpublished in whole or in part, and even
more are untranslated. In the case of Shenoute’s writings, it was not even until
1993 that a scholar pieced together all the dispersed manuscripts in a
codicological reconstruction, enabling various scholars to read all the known
surviving pages of any one given text by our most important Coptic author
outside of the bible .
Copyright and editorial issues also exist. The publication status of Coptic texts
is a patchwork, with some texts partially published and partially unpublished
due to the dispersal of their original manuscripts in multiple repositories.
Some publications are now in the public domain, while others are not. Often,
only one publication of any given manuscript exists. (And by manuscript, we
refer to the segmented pieces of codices, not entire codices.) Some older,
public domain editions are also regarded as problematic by current scholars.
Scholars working in Greek and Latin face similar obstacles in digitizing sources,
in that many desirable editions are under copyright. However, in Classics, often
there are multiple published editions of any given text, with at least one of
them being in the public domain. The Perseus Digital Library (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu)
publishes online previous print, public domain editions. This model works for
Classical texts but is not sufficient for Coptic literature, because of the
different nature of the sources.
Additionally, since the manuscripts themselves have been dismembered, scholars
cannot rely upon a given repository and community of librarians to digitize a
vital text.
Going back to the original manuscripts for digitization is desirable for basic
reasons of scholarship and to provide a digital-native text that is not created
from published editions still under copyright. Digitizing the manuscript and
encoding all the line breaks, column breaks, page breaks, punctuation,
diacritics, and other markings enables the study of many aspects of the language
and literature. But it is also time consuming, especially when encoding texts
that have not been studied thoroughly, or perhaps have never been translated
into a modern language, or even published.
Some existing digital Coptic resources include:
Digital editions of documentary papyri and ostraca at http://papyri.info. Papyrologists are
beginning to expand this predominantly Greek collection into Coptic using
the EpiDoc subset of the Text Encoding Initiative XML standards and the Unicode Coptic character set.The Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae plans to expand into the Coptic dialects
at http://aaew.bbaw.de/tla/
(subscription required, free to scholars) The Corpus dei Manuscritti Copti Litterari project encodes Coptic text in
html, sgml, with legacy fonts at http://cmcl.aai.uni-hamburg.de/ (subscription required) A searchable Bible in the Unicode Coptic character set is in progress at
http://www.crosswire.org/study/fulllibrary.jsp?show=SahidicBible.Some Sahidic New Testament manuscripts at the New Testament Virtual
Manuscript Room, which concentrates on Greek at http://ntvmr.uni-muenster.de/The Marcion project (http://marcion.sourceforge.net/), established primarily to study
Gnostic texts from the Nag Hammadi Library, has searchable text and a
dictionary which are primarily accessible only through software that
requires installation on one’s computer.
A few resources are available commercially.
The field currently has no generally accepted set of data curation standards for
metadata or textual data for Coptic literature. Stable, field-recognized
identifiers and digital citation methods for Coptic literature still do not
exist. As Joel Kalvesmaki has argued, canonical referencing is complex for text
collections with such complicated histories and provenance issues . The Trismegistos portal provides unique
identifiers for various ancient text-bearing objects, but more work remains to
be done . Existing publications do not even use a
common word segmentation practice for printing Coptic text. Only open,
collaborative work among various scholars and across digital Coptic projects
will ensure that each digital Coptic project does not develop its own unique
protocols and datasets that are not applicable for multiple research questions,
or that are not readable or transferrable across projects.
Martin Mueller’s keynote lecture at the 2012 Chicago Colloquium on Digital
Humanities and Computer Science noted philology’s tendency toward perfectionism
. Philologists' resistance to releasing editions
too soon bumps up against the digital scholarly world’s impulses to
release data openly and swiftly, in order to increase access to texts. The
ability to edit and annotate a digital corpus resolves some of these anxieties,
provided that the technology of the environment for the corpus enables
revisions. An example of such a corpus is the Papyri.info site, where the
Papyrological Editor enables further edits and refinements.
The recent controversy over the so-called
Gospel of Jesus’s
Wife Fragment demonstrates the necessity for an open, well-curated,
and annotated digital Coptic corpus. Harvard University announced the discovery
of a papyrus fragment containing a small portion of a Coptic literary text
containing the terms Mary,Jesus, and my wife in September 2012, and a slew of media fanfare
followed, including a front-page story in the New York
Times. The primary questions were: is this document an
authentic ancient text and does it provide evidence that Jesus was married —
possibly to Mary Magdalene? — or at least that a particular early Christian
group wrote about Jesus marrying Mary Magdalene ?
For two years, scholars debated the authenticity of the fragment, examining the
vocabulary, syntax, and handwriting. Similarities to vocabulary in the Nag
Hammadi Library were noted, although the grammar of the Coptic in the fragment
struck some scholars as inauthentic very early in controversy . And since the fragment appeared on a small piece of
papyrus, it seemed possible the text could be an amulet, spell, or prayer
fragment.
Immediately, the potential for analyzing the document against digital corpora
curated for Coptic’s particular language structure and annotated linguistically
became apparent. The lack of such corpora meant that only one scholar made such
an attempt, using a widely circulating digital version of the Sahidic New
Testament gospels and the Nag Hammadi Library’s Gospel of Thomas . These digitized texts, however, however, contain many
irregularities in spelling and word segmentation, and are not annotated. While
helpful, they could not be called well-curated nor comprehensive. Scholarly
debate over the authenticity of the fragment continued, focusing on traditional
methodologies of studying ink, papyrus, handwriting, and grammar, in blogs,
social media, and traditional scholarly outlets . Finally Coptic scholar Christian Askeland determined
the text was indeed a modern forgery, since another document using the same ink
and written in the same hand was also forged. He published his results in a blog
post and later a traditional article . Traditional
scholarly methodologies informed this debate, but open access corpora and images
would have accelerated the findings and would have allowed for testing of
hypotheses speculated between 2012 and 2014.
Part IV: A New Hope
A richly annotated corpus of digital Coptic literary texts in an open-access
environment, with well curated metadata, and which adheres to existing digital
and traditional field-based standards, enables the exploration of the
multidisciplinary research areas we have described. Such work requires tools to
process and annotate Coptic text, a search and visualization infrastructure, and
community-based standards. Coptic SCRIPTORIUM is developing such tools and
technologies, plus a digitized corpus created with these tools.
To create a digital corpus of Coptic texts suitable to automated search and other
digital and computational methods, new technologies must be developed
specifically for processing the Coptic language, and existing technologies must
be adapted. Such technologies include:
Character converters to convert text visualized as
Coptic characters using legacy fonts into the Unicode Coptic character set.
Many scholars have existing digitized Coptic text on their computers, which
could contribute to a large collaborative corpus. But the transcriptions are
in legacy fonts, which need to be converted into Unicode (UTF-8)
characters.A tokenizer to break up Coptic word groups into their
constituent, grammatical parts. The Coptic language is agglutinative. Words
are in fact bound groups of morphemes, each with its own grammatical
purpose. Figure 9 gives one example from the text, Abraham
Our Father, by Shenoute:
There is no universal, uniform method of word segmentation in Coptic; different
scholars have followed different guidelines. The emerging standard in the United
States is currently that of Bentley Layton, in his Coptic Grammar . In Germany, however, some scholars follow the
paradigm established by Walter Till . Tokenizing Coptic
is essential for linguistic study, since each morpheme needs its own
part-of-speech annotation. Historical research using basic vocabulary searches
also requires tokenization. Finally, more complex research into style and
rhetoric, authorship attribution of unidentified texts, and searching for text
reuse and quotation (especially using algorithms to search for biblical
citations) demand a tokenized text
A normalizer to standardize spelling of Coptic words
and remove or standardize diacritics and punctuation. Normalization of
spelling is essential for search, and often for further machine-enabled
annotation. Some tools to annotate the text automatically or
semi-automatically rely on consistent spelling of terms. Issues include
spelling variants due to geographical practices, scribal inconsistencies or
idiosyncrasies; expansion of scribal abbreviations for nomina sacra;
differing practices across manuscripts for diacritical marks such as
supralinear strokes or circumflexes. Figure 10 provides examples of
abbreviations to be expanded and diacritics removed:TEI XML annotation standards, specifically the EpiDoc subset,
to markup the diplomatic transcription of texts and their metadata. Encoding
standards developed by the Text Encoding Initiative and
especially the EpiDoc subset used by epigraphers and papyrologists can be adapted for Coptic literary manuscripts.
Metadata and paleographical information can be encoded.
Other existing, community standards used in both digital and print scholarship
can be adapted, as well. Trismegistos numbers from the Trismegistos database of
ancient texts and texts-bearing objects should be included in metadata to enable
linked data across digital projects . For works
specifically in Coptic, the CMCL abbreviations for manuscript codices (e.g.,
MONB.YA = White Monastery manuscript YA) and Clavis Coptica for authors and
texts are existing standards . For texts by Shenoute, the incipits and
abbreviations for texts developed by Stephen Emmel in Shenoute's Literary Corpus should be used for metadata . The field still needs a system for Uniform Resource
Names (URNs) and other more refined citation methods for curating digital data
and documents — especially given the dismembered nature of the corpus, and that
some pieces of the corpus may be published in born-digital formats while others
may be adapted from previously published editions.
Tools to annotate or mark up the digitized, curated text enable search and
computational research methods for work in a variety of disciplines need to be
developed. We know of no other open source tools to annotate digital texts in
the Egyptian language family. SCRIPTORIUM is working on the following
technologies
A Part-of-Speech tagger automatically annotates
Coptic morphemes according to the linguistic conventions established in
Layton's Coptic Grammar (the field standard),
enabling research into linguistics and style. It uses the trainable
TreeTagger natural language processing tool .A lemmatizer can automatically annotate various forms
of a word to the standard, dictionary headword. The lemmatizer will enable
linking data to online lexica either at SCRIPTORIUM or elsewhere on the
web.A language-of-origin tagger automatically annotates
words of Greek, Hebrew, Latin, or other non-Egyptian language origin,
enabling research into loan words, language contact, and bilingualism. Entity taggers to annotate digital corpora for people and places to
connect literary data with linked open data initiatives such as PELAGIOS for
geographic locations in the ancient world and SNAP on ancient prosopography
are also desirable
At Coptic SCRIPTORIUM textual annotations are made using multi-layer and standoff
markup , which can capture the variety of annotations:
linguistic, paleographic, philological, etc. The token layer is the base layer
of data, the smallest unit of data annotated, as seen in Figure 11, which shows
the annotation of two bound groups (one in red, one in blue), which translate
into of a son of Abraham:
The layers provide data for the morphemes, the bound group, the line number in
which the text appears in the original manuscript (lb, following the TEI/EpiDoc
standard), the column in which the text appears in the original manuscript (cb),
the page on which the text appears in the original manuscript (pb, in which
MONB.YA is the siglum for White Monastery codex YA as designated by the CMCL
standards), the normalized morphemes, and the part of speech tags for the
normalized morphemes (PREP=preposition, ART=article, N=noun, NPROP=proper
noun).
SCRIPTORIUM provides the means to search the multiple layers of data in various
combinations, including in conjunction with metadata. We use the open-source
search and visualization tool ANNIS . ANNIS contains
built-in visualization capabilities and can be customized for each corpus.
Coptic SCRIPTORIUM has embedded a Coptic keyboard, a web font for Coptic Unicode
characters, and various visualizations of the data. All the tools and corpora
discussed in this essay are available at http://www.copticscriptorium.org.
The multilayer architecture allows for multidisciplinary research . Historians may be interested in vocabulary searches
on the normalized words. Linguists may query the parts of speech for
computational morphological and syntactic research. Scholars working on ancient
prosopography or network analysis may search for named entities. Additional
layers may be added if other researchers wish to annotate the corpora for other
research questions. Since all data documents are licensed with Creative Commons
Attribution licenses, philologists and paleographers who wish to publish their
own digital editions of manuscripts may download, modify, and annotate or
re-annotate our XML documents for their own work as long as they provide
attribution to the source.
The community of Coptic scholars is small, but the impact of our work ripples out
into many fields. The true hope for digital scholarship in the Coptic language
and literature lies beyond our individual efforts and in the community of Coptic
scholars within and outside the academy: scholars who digitize texts, write
annotations, inspire and develop new technologies, conduct research using the
platform, and contribute to the evolving standards.
Anon, Pelagios: Enable Linked Ancient
Geodata In Open Systems. Available at: http://pelagios-project.blogspot.com/ [Accessed May 19, 2014].Askeland, C., 2015. A Lycopolitan Forgery of John’s Gospel. New Testament Studies, 61(03), pp.314–334.Askeland, C., Schulz, M. &
Griffitts, T., The Bible Tool: Sahidic Bible -
Askeland/Schulz. Available at: http://www.crosswire.org/study/fulllibrary.jsp?show=SahidicBible
[Accessed October 21, 2014].Gregg, R.C. ed., 1980. Athanasius : The Life of Antony and the Letter To
Marcellinus, Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press.Azzarelli,
J.M., Goods, J.B. & Swager, T.M., 2014. Study of Two
Papyrus Fragments with Fourier Transform Infrared Microspectroscopy.
Harvard Theological Review, 107(02),
pp.165–165.Brakke, D., 2007. Shenoute, Weber, and the Monastic Prophet: Ancient and Modern Articulations
of Ascetic Authority. In Foundations of Power
and Conflicts of Authority in Late-Antique Monasticism: Proceedings of the
International Seminar in Turin, December 2-4, 2004. Orientalia
Lovaniensia Analecta. Leuven: Peeters.Carletta, J., Evert, S., Heid, U., Kilgour, J., Robertson,
J. & Voormann, H. 2003. The NITE XML toolkit: Flexible
annotation for multi-modal language data. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, and Computers 35(3),
353–363.Čéplö, S., 2012. tahime. bulbulistan. Available at: http://blog.bulbul.sk/2012/09/tahime.html#more [Accessed July 22,
2015].Champollion, Jean-François.
Précis du système hiéroglyphique des anciens
Égyptiens. Paris: Treuttel et Würtz, 1824.Choat, M., 2014. The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife: A Preliminary Paleographical
Assessment. Harvard Theological Review,
107(02), pp.160–162.Clavis Patrum Copticorum, CMCL - Clavis Patrum Copticorum.
Available at: http://cmcl.aai.uni-hamburg.de/chiam_clavis.html [Accessed October
21, 2014].CMCL, Corpus dei Manoscritti Copti Letterari.
CMCL - Studies in Coptic Civilization.
Available at: http://cmcl.aai.uni-hamburg.de/ [Accessed September 11, 2012].Depuydt, L., 2014. The Alleged Gospel of Jesus’s Wife: Assessment and Evaluation
of Authenticity. Harvard Theological
Review, 107(02), pp.172–189.Dipper, S. 2005. XML-based stand-off representation and exploitation of multi-level
linguistic annotation. In Proceedings of
Berliner XML Tage 2005 (BXML 2005). Berlin, Germany, pp.
39–50.Le Donne, A., 2013. The Wife of Jesus: Ancient Texts and Modern Scandals,
Oneworld Publications.Elliott, T. et al., 2006.
EpiDoc: Epigraphic Documents in TEI XML.
Available at: http://epidoc.sf.net/
[Accessed September 11, 2012].Emmel, S., 2004. Shenoute’s Literary Corpus, Louvain: Peeters.Emmel, S. & Römer, C.E.,
2008. The Library of the White Monastery in Upper Egypt/Die
Bibliothek des Weißen Klosers in Oberägypten. In Spätantike Bibliotheken: Leben und Lesen in den frühen
Klöstern Ägyptens. Nilus: Studien zur Kultur Ägyptens und des
Vorderen Orients. Vienna: Phoibos Verlag, pp. 5–25.Goodacre, M., 2014a. Jesus’ Wife Fragment: Another Round-Up. NT Blog. Available at: http://ntweblog.blogspot.com/2014/05/jesus-wife-fragment-another-round-up.html
[Accessed July 22, 2015].Goodacre, M., 2014b. Jesus’ Wife Fragment Round-up. NT
Blog. Available at: http://ntweblog.blogspot.com/2014/05/jesus-wife-fragment-round-up.html
[Accessed July 22, 2015].Goodstein, L., 2012. Historian Says Piece of Papyrus Refers to Jesus’ Wife.
The New York Times. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/19/us/historian-says-piece-of-papyrus-refers-to-jesus-wife.html
[Accessed July 22, 2015].Greenhalgh, M., 2008. Art History. In S. Schreibman, R. Siemens, & J.
Unsworth, eds. A Companion to Digital Humanities.
Malden, Mass.: John Wiley & Sons, pp. 31–45.Hamilton, Alastair. The Copts and the West, 1439-1822 the European Discovery of
the Egyptian Church. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Chapter
12.Hodgins, G., 2014. Accelerated Mass Spectrometry Radiocarbon Determination of
Papyrus Samples. Harvard Theological
Review, 107(02), pp.166–169.Kalvesmaki, J., 2014. Canonical References in Electronic Texts: Rationale and Best
Practices. Digital Humanities
Quarterly, 8(2). Available at: http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/8/2/000181/000181.html
[Accessed October 19, 2014].King, K.L., 2014a. Jesus said to them, ‘My wife . . .’: A New Coptic Papyrus
Fragment. Harvard Theological Review,
107(02), pp.131–159.King, K.L., 2014b. Response to Leo Depuydt, The Alleged Gospel of Jesus’s Wife: Assessment
and Evaluation of Authenticity. Harvard
Theological Review, 107(02), pp.190–193.Krause, Thomas &
Zeldes, Amir,ANNIS3: A New Architecture for Generic Corpus
Query and Visualization. Digital Scholarship in
the Humanities 31(1), 118-139.Layton, B., 2011. A Coptic Grammar 3rd Edition, Rev., Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.Moretti, F., 2013. Distant Reading 1 edition., London; New York:
Verso.Mueller, M., 2012. Big Data in the Humanities: Curation, Exploration,
Collaboration. In Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities & Computer
Science 2012. University of Chicago. Available at: http://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/dhcs/dhcs-2012-program/ [Accessed
May 19, 2014].NTVMR, New Testament Virtual
Manuscript Room. Available at: http://ntvmr.uni-muenster.de/
[Accessed October 21, 2014].Orlandi, T., 2002. The Library of the Monastery of Saint Shenute at
Atripe. In Perspectives on Panopolis: an
Egyptian Town from Alexander the Great to the Arab Conquest. Leiden:
Brill, pp. 211–231.Robinson, A., 2012. Cracking the Egyptian Code: The Revolutionary Life of
Jean-Francois Champollion, Oxford University Press.Robinson, G.
& Halton, C., 2012. Gesine Robinson on the Jesus
Wife Fragment. Charles Halton.
Available at: http://awilum.com/?p=2216 [Accessed July 22, 2015].Schmid, H., 1994. Probabilistic Part-of-Speech Tagging Using Decision Trees. In
Proceedings of International Conference on New Methods
in Language Processing, Manchester, UK. International Conference on
New Methods in Language Processing. Manchester.Schroeder, C.T., 2006. Prophecy and Porneia in Shenoute’s Letters: The Rhetoric of
Sexuality in a Late Antique Egyptian Monastery. Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 65/2, pp.81–97.Shenoute, 2014. Abraham Our Father (Electronic, Coptic SCRIPTORIUM).
scriptorium (ANNIS Corpus Search). Available
at: http://corpling.uis.georgetown.edu/annis/scriptorium#_c=c2hlbm91dGUuYWJyYWhhbS5vdXIuZmF0aGVy
[Accessed October 21, 2014].Shenoute, Österreichische
Nationalbibliothek Papyrussammlung K 09662, Codex MONB.XU. Available at: http://aleph.onb.ac.at/F/3VFYPENVSXMVKY61VGLCK78L7I5XDXPUQD98ETMUS4DR8VGNQM-00415?func=find-b&find_code=WRD&adjacent=N&request=K+9662
[Accessed October 21, 2014].Shisha-Halevy, A. 1986.
Coptic Grammatical Categories. Structural Studies in
the Syntax of Shenoutean Sahidic. Rome: Pontificum Institutum
Biblicum.SNAP:DRGN, Standards for Networking
Ancient Prosopographies | Data and Relations in Greco-roman Names. Standards for Networking Ancient Prosopographies.
Available at: http://snapdrgn.net/
[Accessed October 21, 2014].Suciu, A., 2012. What is Clavis Coptica?AlinSuciu.com. Available at: http://alinsuciu.com/2012/10/08/what-is-clavis-coptica/ [Accessed
October 21, 2014].TEI, TEI: Text Encoding
Initiative. Available at: http://www.tei-c.org [Accessed May 19, 2014].Till, W.C., 1960. La
séparation des mots en copte. Bulletin de
l’Institut français d’archéologie orientale, 60, pp.151–70.TLA, 2014. Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae.
Available at: http://aaew.bbaw.de/tla/ [Accessed May 19, 2014].Trismegistos. Available at: http://www.trismegistos.org/
[Accessed May 19, 2014].Tuross, N., 2014. Accelerated Mass Spectrometry Radiocarbon Determination of Papyrus
Samples. Harvard Theological Review,
107(02), pp.170–171.Veilleux, A., 1980. Pachomian Koinonia, Volume One: The Life of Saint Pachomius
and His Disciples, Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications.Ward, B. ed., 1975. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection,
Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications.Wernimont, J., 2013. Whence Feminism? Assessing Feminist Interventions in Digital
Literary Archives. Digital Humanities
Quarterly, 7(1).Wilkins, M., 2012. Canons, Close Reading, and the Evolution of Method. In
M. K. Gold, ed. Debates in the Digital Humanities.
Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota Press, pp. 249–258.Witmore, M., 2012. Text: A Massively Addressable Object. In M. K. Gold,
ed. Debates in the Digital Humanities. Minneapolis:
Univ Of Minnesota Press.Wortley, J. ed., 2014. The Anonymous Sayings of the Desert Fathers,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Yardley, J.T. &
Hagadorn, A., 2014. Characterization of the Chemical Nature
of the Black Ink in the Manuscript of The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife through
Micro-Raman Spectroscopy. Harvard Theological
Review, 107(02), pp.162–164.Zeldes, Amir, Ritz, Julia, Lüdeling, Anke and Chiarcos, Christian (2009). ANNIS: A Search Tool for Multi-Layer Annotated Corpora. In: Proceedings of Corpus
Linguistics 2009. Liverpool, UK. Available at: http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/publications/cl2009/ [Accessed September 10,
2012].