KELLIA: Koptische/Coptic Electronic Language and Literature International Alliance

FAIN: HG-229371-15

University of the Pacific (Stockton, CA 95211-0110)
Caroline T. Schroeder (Project Director: September 2014 to November 2019)
Amir Zeldes (Co Project Director: June 2015 to November 2019)

The Koptische/Coptic Electronic Language and Literature International Alliance (KELLIA), a partnership among leading Coptic scholars and digital humanities experts in the United States and Germany. The project would document best practices for digital Coptic initiatives and would adapt existing open-source tools for linguistic analysis and collaborative annotation. Georg-August University, Göttingen, is requesting 122,610€ from DFG.

KELLIA (the Koptische/Coptic Electronic Language and Literature International Alliance) will promote interdisciplinary collaborations across the Digital Humanities and international standards in Coptic Studies. Coptic, the last phase of the Egyptian language family, flourished in Egypt's Roman and early Islamic periods and reflects over a millennium of history of a multicultural and multilingual Near Eastern society. Coptic documents are fundamental primary sources for diverse scholarly fields, and virtually all DH research in Coptic is conducted by projects anchored in the United States or Germany. This collaboration will enable advances not only in Coptic Studies but also in other fields that use corpus linguistics methods or produce digital text editions. KELLIA will produce international standards for data curation in Coptic, tools that integrate corpus linguistics and digital philology methods, and models using shared corpora from the KELLIA partners.

Associated Products

An NLP Pipeline for Coptic (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: An NLP Pipeline for Coptic
Author: Amir Zeldes
Author: Caroline T. Schroeder
Abstract: The Coptic language of Hellenistic era Egypt in the first millennium C.E. is a treasure trove of information for History, Religious Studies, Classics, Linguistics and many other Humanities disciplines. Despite the existence of large amounts of text in the language, comparatively few digital resources have been available, and almost no tools for Natural Language Processing. This paper presents an endto-end, freely available open source tool chain starting with Unicode plain text or XML transcriptions of Coptic manuscript data, which adds fully automatic word and morpheme segmentation, normalization, language of origin recognition, part of speech tagging, lemmatization, and dependency parsing at the click of a button. We evaluate each component of the pipeline, which is accessible as a Web interface and machine readable API online.
Date: 8/11/2016
Primary URL: http://aclweb.org/anthology/W/W16/W16-2119.pdf
Conference Name: 10th SIGHUM Workshop on Language Technology for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, and Humanities at LaTeCH 2016

Coptic Dictionary, Online (Web Resource)
Title: Coptic Dictionary, Online
Author: Frank Feder
Author: Julien Delhez
Author: Maxim Kupreyev
Author: Emma Manning
Author: Amir Zeldes
Abstract: A digital dictionary for Coptic.
Year: 2016
Primary URL: https://corpling.uis.georgetown.edu/coptic-dictionary/

Prizes

Best DH Tool or Suite of Tools
Date: 3/4/2020
Organization: DH Awards 2019
Abstract: Digital Humanities Awards are a set of annual awards where the public is able to nominate resources for the recognition of talent and expertise in the digital humanities community.

Natural Language Processing Pipeline for Coptic (Web Resource)
Title: Natural Language Processing Pipeline for Coptic
Author: Amir Zeldes
Abstract: Web service for natural language processing tools for Coptic.
Year: 2015
Primary URL: https://corpling.uis.georgetown.edu/coptic-nlp/

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