Call for Contribution: Special Issue on Computer-Aided Processing of Intertextuality in Ancient Languages
“Europe’s future is digital”. This was the headline of a speech given at the Hannover exhibition in April 2015 by Günther Oettinger, EU-Commissioner for Digital Economy and Society. While businesses and industries have already made major advances in digital ecosystems, the digital transformation of texts stretching over a period of more than two millennia is far from complete. On the one hand, mass digitisation leads to an “information overload” of digitally available data; on the other, the “information poverty” embodied by the loss of books and the fragmentary state of ancient texts form an incomplete and biased view of our past. In a digital ecosystem, this coexistence of data overload and poverty adds considerable complexity to scholarly research.
With this special issue on Computer-Aided Processing of Intertextuality in Ancient Languages, the HiSoMA lab in Lyon,
France, and the Göttingen Centre for Digital Humanities in Germany, aim to create a collection of papers that discuss the state-of-the-art on intertextuality, linguistic preprocessing and the preservation of scholarly research results specifically applied to corpora in ancient languages and for which few online resources exist (Ancient Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Syriac, Coptic, Arabic, Ethiopic, etc.).
Relevant topics include:
- Methods for the detection of intertexts and text reuse, manual (e.g. crowd-sourcing) or automatic (e.g. algorithms);
- Infrastructure for the preservation of digital texts and quotations between different text passages; Linguistic preprocessing and data normalisation, such as lemmatisation of historical languages, root stemming, normalisation of variants, etc.;
- Visualisation of intertextuality and text reuse;
- Creation of, and research on, stemmata.
The special issue will be published by the Journal on Data Mining and Digital Humanities (http://jdmdh.episciences.org/), an online open access journal that will release the issue shortly after its submission in order to elicit feedback from readers while concurrently supervising the standard peer review process.
Interested authors are asked to:
- send a title, an author list and a one page (or shorter) abstract specifying the type of contribution (full paper or project presentation) to Laurence Mellerin [laurence.mellerin(at)mom(dot)fr] and Marco Büchler [mbuechler(at)gcdh(dot)de] by October 31st.
- send a paper (long: up to 40 pages OR short: 2 to 4 pages illustrating the scope and research of the project), following the guidelines of JDMDH by January 31st 2016.
For further questions, do not hesitate to contact Laurence and Marco.
