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SunoikisisDC 2015 Deutsches Archäologisches Institut Berlin

francescomambrini edited this page May 22, 2015 · 2 revisions

Deutsches Archäologisches Institut

Linguistic annotation for corpus-based historical research

The Deutsches Archäologisches Institut is pursuing experiments on how digital annotations can open up new ways of reading the sources (both written and archaeological) for Ancient Greek history.

In particular, with the Hellespont Project we concentrated on the original text of Thucydides' Pentekontaetia (1.89-118). The annotation on the text covered several linguistic aspects, including:

  • Named-Entity classification (persons, locations, organizations)
  • Morphology and Syntax (following the guidelines of the Ancient Greek Dependency Treebank)
  • Semantic and pragmatic aspects, such as: valency, co-reference, topic-focus articulation, semantic roles

The semantic and pragmatic aspects were annotating following the model of the tectogrammatical annotation of the Prague Dependency Treebank (2.0).

The aims and methods used to adapt tectogrammatical annotation to Ancient Greek were outlined in a paper presented at the CHS research symposium and discussed in a seminar at the Digital Classicist, Berlin.

Plan for Sunoikisis DC

The activities for the Sunoikisis DC seminar are focused on the possible applications of the annotated corpus for the analysis of Thucydides' account. In particular, we think that the combination of valency, co-reference and NE-annotation is crucial to enable a corpus-based analysis on important historiographical questions. The problem that we will focus our attention on is the role of individual and collective actors in Thucydides' narrative. We will investigate our all our corpora and resources can be leveraged to answer such questions as:

  • how many collective actors are named in Thuc.' Histories? and how many individuals. Can we outline significant trends?
  • what are the types of actions that are attributed to individuals vs collective actors in the Pentekontaetia?
  • who are the most significant individuals in Thucydides' history of the period?

The analysis will show how beneficial linguistic annotation is also for such important content-related questions.