Participatory Philology: The History of Science and the Future of Historical Language
Education
Citizen Cyberscience SummitFebruary 2014
What is Philology?
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Itaque ubi, quae et qualis philologia meo iudicio sit, quaeritis, simplicissima ratione respondeo, si non latiore, quae in ipso vocabulo inest, potestate accipitur, sed ut solet ad antiquas litteras refertur, universae antiquitatis cognitionem historicam et philosophicam.
Augustus Boeck, “Oratio nataliciis Friderici Guilelmi III.” (1822)
What is Philology?
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Augustus Boeck, “Oratio nataliciis Friderici Guilelmi III.” (1822)
Philology is the analysis of the ancient world in its entirety, including everything in the physical and the intellectual world through the use of written sources. [paraphrase].
(What are written sources?)
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What is Philology?
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Augustus Boeck, “Oratio nataliciis Friderici Guilelmi III.” (1822)
No aspect of human culture is outside the purview of the philologist. No methodology is out of scope if it allows us to draw meaning from the words of the past – whether that methodology involves archaeological digs, irregular verbs, or probability theory.
The Open Philology Project: two fundamental goals:
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1. To advance the role of historical language texts in human intellectual life as broadly and as deeply as possible in a global world, with initial resources focused on Greco-Roman culture and Classical Greek and Latin languages.
The geography of Greek and Latin
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The Open Philology Project: two fundamental goals:
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1. To advance the role of historical language texts in human intellectual life as broadly and as deeply as possible in a global world, with initial resources focused on Greco-Roman culture and Classical Greek and Latin languages.
2. To blow the dust off the simple, cogent and ancient term philology and to support an open philology that can, in turn, support a dialogue among civilizations.
What is Participatory Philology?
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“Illustration to Archimedes remark “Δοσ μοι που στω και κινω την γην”, as quoted by Pappus of Alexandria in Collection or Synagoge, Book VIII, c. AD 340. Greek text in Pappi Alexandrini Collectionis edited by Friedrich Otto Hultsch, Berlin, 1878, page 1060.
Often translated into English as “Give me a place to stand on, and I will move the earth” (Dikshoorn 1987) or “Give me but one firm spot on which to stand, and I will move the earth” (Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, 1953). ”
Giving students and interested citizens a “place to stand on“ in the discipline.
Current Challenges in Participatory Philology
1. More text than academic researchers, or computers, can analyze alone.
Solution? Citizen and student engagement. But...
2. Wide geographic dispersal and variable abilities of students.
And...
3. Little institutional incentive to teach many historical languages, particularly those with a geographic center outside of contemporary regional boundaries (e.g. Coptic, Classical Arabic among European and North American institutions, or Greek and Latin at Iranian universities).
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The Open Philology Project: workflow
11Slide credit: Greta
Franzini (2013)
Greek and Latin Education in Europe
12Infographic courtesy
of Emily Franzini (2013)
Pillars of OPP eLearning
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Pillar Includes… Open Philology Tools & Resources
I. Social Constructivism
actively creating new knowledge from prior understanding and context: conversation between student and self
localization of resources and working on sources of local provenance
II. Apprenticeship
learning the craft from experts in the field and learning by doing: active collaboration between students, teachers, and researchers
annotation, ePortfolios and distributed review
III. Dialogue old conversations, new participants: knowlege exchange across space and time, between students in different places and different eras
collaborative translation, games and enhanced digital editions
I. Localization: current collaboration
Persian
Croatian
Italian
German
Georgian
Bulgarian
Goals
• Allow learners to work with digitized textbooks and translations in their preferred modern language.
• Present learners with explanatory material sensitive to the context of their language.
Europe
Eurasia
Western Asia
English
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Europe/North
America
I. Localization: materials of local interest
Goals
• INSERT SCREENSHOT OF CROALA
15 CroaLa
I. Dynamic Syllabi
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Customized in accordance with the particular needs of...
TextsExample: current Open Philology development of introductory Greek course for
ThucydidesPotential variables: what morphology and vocabulary exists in the text?
TextbooksExample: usage by Open Philology eLearning of digitized John Williams White First Greek
BookPotential variables: in what order and what language are grammatical concepts
presented?
LearnersExample: collection of user data by Phaidra and Perseids, translation of learning resources Potential variables: learning style, age, L1
TeachersExample: Perseids syllabi for Tufts University ClassesPotential variables: Semester length, hours facetime per week, school/student technical
ability
II. Aligned translation for reading, learning, and analysis
Literal English
Published English
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Literal Persian
Persian translation by Maryam Foradi
(2013)
II. Morphological analysis: L1-independent display of a sentence
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II. ePortfolios: Building a shareable index of digital reputation
Scoring
Database
Syntax
Morphology
Alignment
Level-Up: Assessment of
knowledge
Optimisation of individual learning
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Identification of reputation index for micro-publications
Data-driven learning research
Slide credit: Maria Moritz & Frederik
Baumgardt
III. Games for data contribution
Linguistic Annotation
Translation
(Alignment)
Transcription
Name
• Identify the morphology of a given word and context
• Identify the syntactic function of a word (treebanking)
• Fill in a missing word (forms)
• Align new translation
• Suggest correction for existing translations
• Collaborative translation environment.
• Practise typing by Captchas
• Identify OCR errors
• Who/where/what is it?
• Uncover ethnicities, locations, events in ancient texts
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III. Digital editions: Goal
Games cover every stage in the workflow of a digital edition
Linguistic Annotation
Translation: alignment + collaborative translation
Transcription: OCR correction
Identifying people and places(named entities)
21 Alpheios.net
Back to the future
Humboldt vision of education = Students produce knowledge
Positive feedback loop for researchers
Textual data + user metadata
Citizen contributio
n
New Knowledge
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Better resources for historical
texts
This data contributes to the work of researchers in multiple fields across the sciences and humanities, including....
Natural Language Processing, Computational linguistics
24Slide credit: Marco
Büchler
Example: What percentage of the original texts can already
be understood?
Teaching & learning, Cognitive science: quantifying learning progress
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Thucydides "The Peloponnesian War”
Slide credit: Monica Lent (2013)
And of course, the humanities!
And of course, the humanities!
A word of caution!
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Scholars often insist that we’re not meant to take accounts of Atlantis literally. ‘The idea
is that we should use the story to examine our ideas of government and power,’ says
the philosopher Julia Annas in Plato: A Very Short Introduction (2003). ‘We have
missed the point if instead of thinking about these issues we go off exploring the sea
bed.’
Platt, E. (2013). “Out of the Deep.” aeon Magazine.
Thank you!
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www.dh.uni-leipzig.de
Further reading
Crane, G. et al. Student Researchers, Citizen Scholars and the Trillion Word Library.
Smith, N. (2009) Citation in Classical Studies.
Image SourcesSlide #4: Top from left: inscribed objects, printed books
Bottom from left: Inscriptions, papyri, manuscripts
Image source: book: http://library.wustl.edu/wishlist/images/emblemata.jpg
Image source: inscription: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bf/Gortys_law_inscription.jpg
Image source: papyrus: http://www.schoyencollection.com/papyri_files/ms2752.jpg
Slide #9:Image and caption in the public domain: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Archimedes_lever.png
Slide #33: Image credit: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Talmud-Berachoth.jpg
Medieval civilizations in conversation
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Text-based dialogue across space & time