Digital Humanities and students of Latin
Experiences and comparisons
Neven Jovanović
September 29, 2023
What are the Digital Humanities?
Patrick Sahle, 2013:
die alten Fragen der Geisteswissenschaften
angesichts der neuen Möglichkeiten
durch die technischen Entwicklungen
neu zu beantworten
~
„Informatisierung der Geisteswissenschaften“
oder umgekehrt
„auf die Geisteswissenschaften angewandte Informatik“
John Unsworth, 2003:
a toolkit that helps us ask new questions,
and answer old ones
2023?
Transformations of sources
- Google Books, archive.org, Deutsche digitale Bibliothek
- Papyri, inscriptions (Papyri.info, EAGLE…)
- Manuscripts (Biblissima, DigiVatLib)
Today we can read Bernhard Bischoff’s Paläographie des römischen
Altertums und des abendländischen Mittelalters
or Armando Petrucci’s La scrittura di Francesco Petrarca
and find online digital facsimiles of many manuscripts mentioned
there.
Cf. https://www.bibsonomy.org/user/filologanoga/manuscript%20nastava
Quis leget haec?
“We need to demonstrate the usefulness of all the stuff we have digitized”
Approaches
Search / browse
Users / programmers
Transformations of texts
Concordance
Use AntConc to produce a (rough) concordance of a text
Linking Latin: IDs for words
Why https://logeion.uchicago.edu/latro
and why https://lila-erc.eu/data/id/lemma/110043?
Transformations of syntax
Perseids: https://perseids.org/
Treebanks
Transformations of translations
Simple tasks which contribute to knowledge and stimulate reflection
Transformations of teaching
SunoikisisDC: https://sunoikisisdc.github.io/
- Learn from people around the globe
- Get support from the local teacher
Acta
- Show, don’t tell
- Present languages and texts as open, not finite
- Accept English as a language of scholarship
- Dynamics of very small groups?
Desiderata
- Get more opportunities to browse (explore and play)
- Learn to program (regular expressions, query languages)
- Work with people around the globe