A Collaborative Ecosystem for Digital Coptic Studies
This work addresses the problem of fragmented and inaccessible Coptic manuscripts for digital humanities scholars, though it is incremental as it builds on existing digital tools and standards.
The paper tackles the challenges of studying Coptic, an underresourced language, by developing a collaborative digital ecosystem called Coptic Scriptorium, which provides machine-readable resources and tools to enable large-scale analysis and global scholarly collaboration.
Scholarship on underresourced languages bring with them a variety of challenges which make access to the full spectrum of source materials and their evaluation difficult. For Coptic in particular, large scale analyses and any kind of quantitative work become difficult due to the fragmentation of manuscripts, the highly fusional nature of an incorporational morphology, and the complications of dealing with influences from Hellenistic era Greek, among other concerns. Many of these challenges, however, can be addressed using Digital Humanities tools and standards. In this paper, we outline some of the latest developments in Coptic Scriptorium, a DH project dedicated to bringing Coptic resources online in uniform, machine readable, and openly available formats. Collaborative web-based tools create online 'virtual departments' in which scholars dispersed sparsely across the globe can collaborate, and natural language processing tools counterbalance the scarcity of trained editors by enabling machine processing of Coptic text to produce searchable, annotated corpora.