Student researchers, citizen scholars and the trillion word library

Abstract

The surviving corpora of Greek and Latin are relatively compact but the shift from books and written objects to digitized texts has already challenged students of these languages to move away from books as organizing metaphors and to ask, instead, what do you do with a billion, or even a trillion, words? We need a new culture of intellectual production in which student researchers and citizen scholars play a central role. And we need as a consequence to reorganize the education that we provide in the humanities, stressing participatory learning, and supporting a virtuous cycle where students contribute data as they learn and learn in order to contribute knowledge. We report on five strategies that we have implemented to further this virtuous cycle: (1) reading environments by which learners can work with languages that they have not studied, (2) feedback for those who choose to internalize knowledge about a particular language, (3) methods whereby those with knowledge of different languages can collaborate to develop interpretations and to produce new annotations, (4) dynamic reading lists that allow learners to assess and to document what they have mastered, and ( 5) general e-portfolios in which learners can track what they have accomplished and document what they have contributed and learned to the public or to particular groups.

Integrating Canonical Text Services into CLARIN's Search Infrastructure

“…The Canonical Text Service protocol [11] [3] 6 -which translates to the text passage from the second "the" in book one to the third character "a" in the second sentence in the fourth chapter of the second book. Sub passages are resolved using the exact string, which normally correlates to a word but may also be a string of words or a letter.…”

“…The relationship between CTS URNs and different levels of text granularity is also depicted in figure 1 for an excerpt of the English King James translation of the Bible. One central aspect of CTS is that it was developed by humanists and reflects their perspective on text references, as for instance described by [3]. This perspective might differ from the one used in other communities.…”

Edições digitais nas Clássicas: elementos de gênero na produção e leitura da língua grega e do latim

“…Os avanços na infraestrutura da tecnologia de informação em rede têm sido vistos como aliados no rompimento de barreiras e no enfrentamento de desafios no ensino das letras clássicas, seja no Brasil, seja no mundo (CRANE et al, 2012). As barreiras são conhecidamente o fato de se lidar com línguas históricas restritas à universidade, requerer-se um longo período de formação, competir com outras áreas e disciplinas por alunos e recursos e apontar para uma carreira profissional incerta.…”

Towards a flexible open-source software library for multi-layered scholarly textual studies: An Arabic case study dealing with semi-automatic language processing

“…On the basis of our experience and of authoritative scientific papers [4] [6][7][8][9][11] [13][14] [16][17][18], this field of the digital humanities has shown to require programming interfaces and abstract data structures for multi-lingual and multi-witness texts [16]. Since literary cross-lingual studies are constantly growing and evolving, both in number and in complexity, related soundness applications have become more and more demanding [6][8] [17].…”

“…Instead, computational projects for worthy cultural heritage cannot be addressed by specific needs or languages, even less can they rely on rigid and monolithic applications [2][3] [8][9] [13][14]. A modular and abstract framework would allow developers, on the one hand, to reuse the general model and the core components and, on the other hand, to add functionalities and to solve new requirements by plugging extensions into the system [3].…”