New methods for working with old languages: Corpus Linguistics and the future of Textual Scholarship

FAIN: HW-50010-09

Tufts University (Somerville, MA 02144-2401)
Gregory R. Crane (Project Director: November 2008 to July 2013)

Two joint workshops in collaboration with Humboldt University in Berlin (DFG request: 32,200 euros) on the state of the art in digital classics, exploring potential exchanges with other humanities fields, and detailing new areas of research.

We are seeking DFG/NEH support to allow us to host workshops in the US in the summer of 2009 and in Germany in the summer of 2010 in order to explore the application of emerging analytical technologies to classics in particular and the humanities in general. These workshops will focus not only on emerging services (such as named entity recognition, syntactic and morphological analysis, text mining) and knowledge structures (such as domain-specific ontologies), but on the new forms of scholarly knowledge and intellectual analysis that arise as a result. The 2009 workshop will produce a series of papers that document the state of language technologies in the field of classical philology and propose a roadmap for a more general cyberinfrastructure for the study of historical linguistic sources. These papers will circulate during the 2009-10 academic year and lay the foundation for the 2010 workshop in Germany, which will engage other humanities disciplines.