A Collaborative Ecosystem for Digital Coptic Studies

TL;DR

This paper presents a digital ecosystem for Coptic studies that leverages collaborative tools and NLP to address challenges posed by fragmented manuscripts and complex morphology, enabling more accessible and analyzable resources.

Contribution

It introduces the Coptic Scriptorium project, a digital platform that standardizes resources and employs NLP tools to facilitate global scholarly collaboration and analysis.

Findings

Development of a unified digital platform for Coptic resources

Implementation of NLP tools for text processing and annotation

Enhanced accessibility and collaboration among Coptic scholars

Abstract

Scholarship on underresourced languages bring with them a variety of challenges which make access to the full spectrum of source materials and their evaluation difficult. For Coptic in particular, large scale analyses and any kind of quantitative work become difficult due to the fragmentation of manuscripts, the highly fusional nature of an incorporational morphology, and the complications of dealing with influences from Hellenistic era Greek, among other concerns. Many of these challenges, however, can be addressed using Digital Humanities tools and standards. In this paper, we outline some of the latest developments in Coptic Scriptorium, a DH project dedicated to bringing Coptic resources online in uniform, machine readable, and openly available formats. Collaborative web-based tools create online 'virtual departments' in which scholars dispersed sparsely across the globe can collaborate, and natural language processing tools counterbalance the scarcity of trained editors by enabling machine processing of Coptic text to produce searchable, annotated corpora.