SunoikisisDC. An International Consortium of Digital Classics Programs.

Berti, Monica
Leipzig Universität, Germany
monica.berti@uni-leipzig.de

The goal of this contribution is to present “SunoikisisDC”, which is an international consortium of Digital Classics programs developed by the Alexander von Humboldt Chair of Digital Humanities at the University of Leipzig in collaboration with the Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies and the Perseus Digital Library.

SunoikisisDC offers collaborative courses that foster interdisciplinary paradigms of learning and allow students of both the humanities and computer science to work together by contributing to digital classics projects in a collaborative environment. The form of the courses include morpho-syntactic annotations about primary sources, modern language translations aligned to primary source texts, machine actionable information about social and geospatial networks, automatically detected and human edited links describing how texts cite, paraphrase and quote each other, and iconographic and linguistic data from media such as stone, coins, inscriptions, vases, sculpture and other objects.

Research topics for humanists can include the impact of new media on both the development and communication of research data, which allow us to pose new questions and develop new insights that change the cognitive impact and the conclusions that we can draw from it. Research topics for computer scientists include automatic text alignment, multilingual topic modelling, social network analysis, text reuse and allusion detection, and temporal spatial data visualization. Research topics can also include evaluation of technology among different user groups (including students and citizen scientists as well as professional researchers from outside of Greco-Roman studies). Projects may also focus on the development of standards for new modes of publication, such as for example how to align Classical sources to various modern language translations.

SunoikisisDC courses aim at producing a huge set of different kinds of annotations that include: morphology and syntax (treebanking); named entities (identifying people and places); social and geospatial relationships; translation alignment (intensive alignment and analysis of Classical texts with one or more modern translations and with new translations designed from the start to be used in conjunction with linguistic annotation); quotations and text reuses (retrieving and encoding fragmentary texts); reference works (updating older reference works, such as entries in the Smith’s dictionaries for people and places or Wikipedia entries); the social context (drawing on evidence from the sculpture, coins, vases, etc.); epigraphic data (TEI XML EpiDoc subset); image visualization (integrating information about the physical objects with the transcriptions of the text).

SunoikisisDC offers a possible reply to the “Challenges” of DHd 2016 (integrating research and teaching; integrating different communities; integrating the global and the local; integrating different scholarly domains). The aim of the contribution is to present different activities and results that SunoikisisDC faculty members and students of different countries have been producing (syllabi, planning seminars, online discussions and presentations, students’ projects, field trips, etc.).