KELLIA White Paper on Transcription and EncodingStandards for Digital Coptic
By Caroline T. Schroeder, Ulrich Schmid, So Miyagawa, Elizabeth Platte,
Amir Zeldes

From the Koptische/Coptic Electronic Language and Literature International
Alliance (KELLIA) Project (​https://kellia.uni-goettingen.de​)
Product of a joint Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities(HG-229371) and Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (BE 4172/1-1)
Project Directors: Caroline T. Schroeder, University of the Pacific(American PI), Amir Zeldes, Georgetown University (co-PI), Heike Behlmer,
Georg-August University, Göttingen; Göttingen Academy of Sciences andHumanities (German PI)
Institutional Grantees: University of the Pacific (NEH), Georgetown
University (NEH), Georg-August University (DFG)The KELLIA White Paper on Transcription and Encoding Standards for Digital Coptic byCaroline T. Schroeder, Ulrich Schmid, So Miyagawa, Elizabeth Platte, Amir Zeldes​ islicensed under a ​Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 InternationalLicense​.

27 March 2019

Transcription and Encoding Standards for Digital Coptic
Members of the Advisory Boards for the Coptic Scriptorium project and the Digital
Edition of the Coptic Old Testament project as well as project participants havereviewed this document prior to publication. This White Paper is also attached to themain KELLIA project White Paper(h​ ttps://kellia.uni-goettingen.de/downloads/KELLIA-white-paper.pdf​) ​as Appendix 3.

1. Introduction
This document provides recommended guidelines for anyone working in digital Coptic
textual studies, including manuscript studies and paleography, linguistics and naturallanguage processing, philology, and other relevant fields. These guidelines wereproduced as an outcome of a collaborative, international exchange. They should beconsidered minimal recommendations applicable to most projects. Each researcher or
research group will have particular research questions, and therefore project-specificneeds for transcription and encoding. ​We recommend each individual researcher or
project produce their own guidelines and practices specific to the needs of their
particular research in consultation with these guidelines.
These guidelines assume either manual transcription of text or the encoding andannotation of previously digitized text. We anticipate they can be easily adapted for text
digitized via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for Coptic as that technology
improves.
These guidelines cover transcription of text, the encoding of Coptic characters,
metadata (information about the textual object), and annotations of the text itself.

2. Transcription environments
Many projects find it useful to transcribe plain text before annotating it with further
information. When transcribing Coptic on one’s personal computer, transcription with asimple text editor in a plain text file (.txt format) is recommended. Scholars of Coptic
have reported multiple occasions when proprietary word-processing software such as
Microsoft Word does not visualize Coptic characters properly.

1Transcriptions with annotations can be composed in a variety of programs installed on
one’s computer or with web-based tools. Installed programs include simple text editors(which require manual typing of annotations or tags) or more robust programs, such as
the Oxygen editor (which can be customized for a project’s particular annotationschema). A variety of open-source web-based tools for transcription also exist, many ofwhich would need customization for Coptic (e.g., T-Pen) or for a particular project’sneeds (e.g., papyri.info’s Papyrological Editor). ​We strongly recommend projects
working in Coptic contact KELLIA partners about adapting the following two tools
developed for transcription and annotation in Coptic:● GitDox: a light-weight transcription and annotation tool customizable forindividual projects and for multiple languages, linked to Coptic natural language
processing tools (supported by Coptic SCRIPTORIUM)● Virtual Manuscript Room: a transcription and annotation tool used for biblicaland literary manuscript transcription (supported by the Coptic Old Testament
project)
Researchers will likely need to customize the tool or their own workflow.

3. Character Encoding
We recommend using the official Unicode (UTF-8) Coptic character set. Transcribing in
ASCII legacy fonts leads to a mismatch between the digital characters in the digital fileand the visualization of those characters using a font; thus digital texts using ASCII
characters and legacy fonts are neither sustainable nor easily shared.
A table of the Unicode Coptic Characters can be found on the Coptic SCRIPTORIUM
wiki and the Pennsylvania State University languages site.1
We invite researchers in digital Coptic to contribute their expertise in the use andapplication of these characters to the Coptic SCRIPTORIUM wiki.
Use of unofficial characters or character encodings in the “Private Usage Area” are ​notrecommended, due to potential problems with sustainability and exchange of data.
Researchers should be aware that the Coptic character set for manuscript andpaleographical symbols apart from the alphabet is incomplete. As of this writing, two
1

http://wiki.copticscriptorium.org/doku.php?id=kellia:unicode:coptic_unicode_standards_and_guidelines_fo
r_coptologists​; ​http://sites.psu.edu/symbolcodes/languages/ancient/coptic/copticchart/2email list-serves exist to discuss digital Coptic and Coptic Unicode. Researchersinterested in discussing these issues in more detail are encouraged to contact amember of the KELLIA group about joining one or both of these list-serves.
The Antinoou font is recommended for properly visualizing the Coptic characters.2 It
also visualizes combining characters (such as supra-linear strokes). The font created by
the Institute français d’archéologie orientale uses Private Usage Area character
encodings and is not recommended.3 The New Athena Unicode font is an alternative toAntinoou.4 When typing in Unicode characters, one must install both a font to visualize
the characters on screen and a digital keyboard to map your computer’s keystrokes onto the Coptic character set.
Many scholars have digitized text in legacy (pre-Unicode) fonts. We recommend all
projects convert or re-transcribe texts in these legacy fonts. Coptic SCRIPTORIUM andPAThs both provide tools to convert legacy fonts into Unicode characters.5

4. Transcription and Digitization
The following guidelines apply to text transcription and digitization, whether using a
web-based tool or simple text editor.
● Preserve the original source text spellings and orthography, whether that source
is a manuscript, a print edition, or previously digitized edition. Resist thetemptation to “correct” spelling in the source text; instead use annotations fornormalization, lemmas, etc.
● We recommend against using capitalization, since Coptic does not have thesame concept of “capital” letters as modern languages. We instead recommend
using annotation to mark oversize characters.
● Projects may wish to use a previously digitized text (e.g., Warren Wells’ Sahidica
New Testament or OCR of a print edition) as a “base text” which then is modified
in consultation with a manuscript or another source; using a base text can save2

​https://www.evertype.com/fonts/coptic/

3​http://www.ifao.egnet.net/publications/publier/outils-ed/polices/4​https://apagreekkeys.org/NAUdownload.html​https://github.com/CopticScriptorium/converters​, ​https://github.com/paths-erc/cmcl2unicode​ with demo
at ​http://paths.uniroma1.it/cmcl2unicode/index.html​.
53

time in transcribing a manuscript, for example. Exercise care in proofreading thework, as with all transcriptions.
● Projects that wish to use the ​Natural Language Processing services of Coptic
Scriptorium6 should use word segmentation that follows principles of binding
and segmentation that conform to the linguistic principles of Bentley Layton’s
Coptic Grammar.​ 7 Place a ​unique character​ (such as a space or underscore)
between Coptic bound groups. If a project transcribes using Walter Till’s
principles of transcribing Coptic8 and wishes to use Coptic Scriptorium’s NLP
service, we recommend transcribers place a unique character between
morphemes or words that are bound in Coptic Scriptorium’s protocols9 but
typically remain unbound using Till’s principles (e.g., long prepositions followedby articles or nouns). This character can be removed prior to running the text
through NLP; it can be replaced by a space prior to the project visualizing the text
in other forms.

5. Digital Annotation and Encoding for Textual Structure and Metadata
We urge all projects provide rich metadata as documentation of analog and digital
information about their texts. Research into Coptic text increasingly is addressing thehistorical context of these documents and their circulation in the ancient and modernworlds. Additionally, Coptic Studies as a field highly values the ability to gauge“authenticity” and “validity” of textual and philological research. Information about thesource, curatorial, and editorial histories of the digitized text enables further researchand confers upon the project a greater likelihood of recognized scholarly legitimacy bythe field.

Amir Zeldes and Caroline T. Schroeder, “An NLP Pipeline for Coptic,” ​Proceedings of the 10th ACL
SIGHUM Workshop on Language Technology for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, and Humanities(LaTeCH2016)​ Berlin, 2016.​ ​https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/W16-2119​. The NLP pipeline can be accessed athttps://corpling.uis.georgetown.edu/coptic-nlp/​.
6Bentley Layton, ​A Coptic Grammar,​ 3rd Edition, Porta Linguarum Orientalium Neue Serie 20(Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2011).
7Walter C. Till, “La Séparation des Mots en Copte,” ​Bulletin de l’Institut Français d’archéologie Orientale
60 (1960): 151–70.
8

9See Section 4 of Schroeder and Zeldes, “Coptic SCRIPTORIUM Diplomatic Transcription Guidelines,” v.
1.3 (2018), online, accessed 18 June 2018; the most up-to-date version of the guidelines can be found at
http://copticscriptorium.org/documentation​.

4

Depending on the specific research questions of the project, you may seek to annotate
digital text with information (paleographic information about columns, page breaks,marginalia; linguistic information such as part of speech; citations and references of“text reuse” such as quotes and allusions to biblical passages or other ancient literature;etc.). Plain text (in UTF-8 character encoding) is often quite a useful format for sharing
source material and for some forms of research; other projects may need furtherannotation.
For encoding both textual data and metadata, we recommend the following
considerations:
1. Although it is possible to specify one’s own schemas we recommend consulting
existing standards and models, such as the specifications of the Text Encoding
Initiative (TEI)10. TEI XML counts as the most used and broadly accepted
standard to describe textual phenomena.11 The TEI-Standard consists of several
modules focusing on different aspects of textuality and thus represents a highly
customisable Schema to create TEI-valid but project-specific Sub-Schemas.
2. Existing standards may not always fulfill all the needs of a project and do notguarantee interoperability across projects. Application of standards involves
project-specific interpretation and modification.
3. Nonetheless, using or adapting existing standards may help a project with
data-modeling, even if the project ultimately does not use fully-compliant TEIXML. For example, a project may use spreadsheets or databases to record
metadata. The categories and data-modeling provided by TEI XML may inform aproject’s data model, even if the project doesn’t use XML.
4. One sub-schema broadly used and tested by projects describing epigraphicaldata is the EpiDoc (Epigraphic Documents in TEI XML) Schema.12 Since
Coptology is confronted with handwritten manuscripts not conforming the modern
concept of typographic textuality and its implications, EpiDoc13 is recommended
to encode Coptic text-bearing objects or as a data model.

10​http://www.tei-c.org/

11​http://www.tei-c.org/Guidelines/Customization/

12​https://sourceforge.net/p/epidoc/wiki/Home/

13​http://www.tei-c.org/Guidelines/P5/5

6. Additional textual annotation considerations
Best practices include not only using TEI tags but documenting the usage of the tags
and structures from the TEI set. The structure and tagset of XML-Documents can be
specified by DTDs (Document Type Definition) or Schema-languages like XML-Schema
14, Relax NG (RNG)15 or Schematron16 to guarantee standardised and valid XML-data.
An ODD Format (“One Document does it all”)17 can be used. It brings together theDocumentation of Tags and the formal declaration which can be compiled18 into
different schema-languages.

7. Tools
Encoding textual data is typically accomplished by using so called markup-languages.
XML (Extensible Markup Language) is used as today's de facto standard to represent
Texts as hierarchically structured, machine readable data. Furthermore XML markup
and related processing scripts are non-proprietary and thus free to use while specified,refined and documented by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) (e.g., XSLT, amechanism to query XML encoded texts or to transform them into different
visualizations such as HTML web pages; and XQuery, a language to query XML
encoded texts).

8. Additional metadata considerations
See the KELLIA White Paper on Metadata Standards, also published as Appendix 4 ofthe main KELLIA project White Paper.1914​https://www.w3.org/XML/Schema15​http://relaxng.org/

16​http://schematron.com/

See ​http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/TD.html​ andhttp://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/USE.html
1718

Using the Tool Roma provided by TEI on ​http://www.tei-c.org/Roma/​https://kellia.uni-goettingen.de/downloads/KELLIA-metadata-white-paper.pdf​,
https://kellia.uni-goettingen.de/downloads/KELLIA-white-paper.pdf
196

9. Visualizing and Publishing Encoded Text DataTEI-C provides several stylesheets (XSL) to convert xml files into various file formats
including html.20 It is recommended that projects use existing stylesheets and amendthem where necessary to ensure the proper display of all of their encoded data.
For visualisation of linguistic text data, ANNIS is recommended.21 ANNIS is a highly
multifunctional visualization platform of XML data with linguistic annotation. One can
add various things such as syntactic tree, morphological information, part-of-speech,translation, audio, video as well as philological information such as page, column, andquire numbers and identification number of manuscripts. ANNIS can visualise the data
written in PAULA XML. Using Salt N Pepper or Exmeralda, one can convert various
XML file formats including TEI XML into PAULA XML.

20

​https://github.com/TEIC/Stylesheets/tree/dev/html

21​http://corpus-tools.org/annis/7