KELLIA Final White Paper
National Endowment for the Humanities Grant HG-229371
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (BE 4172/1-1)

Koptische/Coptic Electronic Language and Literature International Alliance(KELLIA)
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 and Humanities (German PI)
Institutional Grantees:
University of the Pacific (NEH)
Georgetown University (NEH)
Georg-August University (DFG)
Report Authors: Caroline T. Schroeder, Heike Behlmer, Elizabeth Platte,
Ulrich Schmid, Amir Zeldes, So Miyagawa, Frank Feder
27 April 2019

This work is licensed under a ​Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License​.

Project Activities
The KELLIA project is a collaboration between multiple institutions. At the time of the
grant application, the primary institutions were the Seminar for Egyptology and
Coptology at Georg-August University (Göttingen, Germany), the Department ofReligious Studies at the University of the Pacific (Stockton, California, USA), and theDepartment of Linguistics at Georgetown University (Washington, DC, USA) withadditional partners at the University of Münster and the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of
Sciences and Humanities. Prior to the funding of the project proposal, the Digital Editionof the Coptic Old Testament Project was established at the Göttingen Academy of
Sciences and Humanities, and they became a primary partner. During the course of the
grant, activities involved the following projects:● Coptic SCRIPTORIUM (University of the Pacific, Stockton CA; Georgetown
University, Washington DC)● Digital Edition of the Coptic Old Testament (Göttingen Academy of Sciences andHumanities)● Seminar for Egyptology and Coptic Studies (Georg August University Göttingen)● Institute for New Testament Textual Research (INTF) (University of Münster)● Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae​ (TLA) (Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciencesand Humanities (BBAW), Berlin):● Database and Dictionary of Greek Loan Words in Coptic (DDGLC) (​Leipzig
University, Freie Universität Berlin, BBAW​)● Electronic Text Reuse Acquisition Project (eTRAP) (Georg-August University,
Göttingen)● SFB 1136 “Bildung und Religion in Kulturen des Mittelmeerraums und seiner
Umwelt von der Antike bis zum Mittelalter und zum Klassischen Islam”(Georg-August University, Göttingen)● PAThs A​ n Archaeological Atlas of Coptic Literature ​(Sapienza University of Rome)
The KELLIA project hosted multiple project meetings and workshops to facilitate
collaborations that resulted in the Accomplishments and Grant Products described
below. Project meetings and workshops were held in Goettingen (September 2015),
Claremont (July 2016), Goettingen (July 2017), Washington DC (June 2018),
Goettingen (June 2018), and Washington DC (September 2018). In addition,
collaborators met informally at external conferences they mutually attended. Between
physical meetings, individuals worked at participants’ home institutions in the US andGermany and communicated electronically. Agendas are in ​Appendix 1​. The following
individuals participated in KELLIA Activities:
1

KELLIA Participants (Individuals)
Heike Behlmer, Georg-August University, Göttingen, and Göttingen Academy of
Sciences and Humanities
Caroline T. Schroeder, University of the PacificAmir Zeldes, Georgetown University
Frank Feder, Georg-August University, Göttingen, and Göttingen Academy of Sciencesand Humanities
Tonio Sebastian Richter, ​Freie Universität​, Berlin; Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of
Sciences and Humanities
Siegfried Richter, University of Münster
Ulrich Schmid, Georg-August University, Göttingen, and Göttingen Academy of
Sciences and Humanities
Elizabeth Platte, Reed College
Maxim Kupreyev, Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities
Troy Griffitts, Georg-August University, Göttingen, and Göttingen Academy of Sciencesand Humanities
Christine Luckritz Marquis, Union Presbyterian Seminary
Rebecca Krawiec, Canisius College
So Miyagawa, Georg-August University, Göttingen
Malte Rosenau, Georg-August University, Göttingen, and Göttingen Academy of
Sciences and Humanities
Uwe Sikora, Georg-August University, Göttingen
Julien Delhez, Georg-August University, Göttingen
Emma Manning, Georgetown University
Shuo Zhang, Georgetown University
Additional Contributors and Participants
Mitchell Abrams, Georgetown University
Diliana Atanassova, Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities
Julian Bogdani, Sapienza University of Rome
Dave Bricetti, independent programmer and software consultant
Dylan M. Burns, Freie Universität Berlin
Paola Buzi, Sapienza University of Rome
Elizabeth Davidson, The Westminster Schools
Paul Dilley, University of Iowa
Luke Gessler, Georgetown University
Katrin John
Theresa Kohl, Georg-August University, Göttingen2

Emma Manning, Georgetown University
Lance Martin, Catholic University of America
Simon Schweitzer, Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities
Melissa Harl Sellew, University of Minnesota
Laura Slaughter, University of Oslo
Agostino Soldati, Sapienza University of RomeAlin Suciu, Georg-August University, Göttingen, and Göttingen Academy of Sciencesand Humanities
Nathan Thomas, independent programmer
Tiffany Ziegler, Georg-August University, Göttingen
Coptic Scriptorium Advisory Board
Alain Delattre, Assistant Professor, Department of Languages and Literatures,
Université libre de Bruxelles; Papyri.info.
Eitan Grossman, Assistant Professor, Department of Linguistics and the School of
Language Sciences, Hebrew University.
Marco Büchler, Head of the eTRAP Research Group, Institute of Computer Science,
Georg-August-Universität Göttingen.
Robin Imhoff, Humanities Librarian, University of the Pacific.
Maged S. A. Mikhail, Professor of History, California State University, Fullerton, andManaging Editor of Coptica, the Journal for Coptic Studies.
Ellen Muehlberger, Associate Professor of Near Eastern Studies and History, Universityof Michigan.
Joshua Salyers, University of the Pacific Digital Collections Librarian.
Laura Slaughter, Associate Professor, Centre for Scalable Data Access, Department ofInformatics, University of Oslo.
Janet A. Timbie, Adjunct Associate Professor, Department of Semitic and Egyptian
Languages and Literatures, Catholic University of America.
Digital Edition of the Coptic Old Testament Advisory Board
Anne Boud’hors, Director of Research, Institut de recherche et d'histoire des textes
Jan Dochhorn, Associate Professor of New Testament, Durham University
Reinhard Gregor Kratz, University Professor for Old Testament, Georg August
University, Göttingen
Gerhard Lauer, Chair for Digital Humanities, University of Basel
Tonio Sebastian Richter, University Professor in the Egyptology Seminar, ​Freie
Universität​ Berlin

3Project activities were publicized via the Coptic Scriptorium blog, the Coptic Old
Testament blog, the Digital Coptic email list, conference presentations, institutional
publicity offices, and social media. Grant Products are disseminated on the main
KELLIA project website (​http://kellia.uni-goettingen.de/​) in addition to the Coptic
Scriptorium and Coptic Old Testament project websites (​http://copticscriptorium.org​,
http://coptot.manuscriptroom.com/​).

Accomplishments
In addition to the tools, publications, and standards outlined in the ​Grant Products
section​ below, KELLIA partners successfully:● built partnerships with other digital projects in the ancient world (Pelagios andPleiades for linked geographic data, PATHs for text-bearing objects from Coptic
Egypt, eTRAP for text-reuse, among others);● secured additional funding for a Coptic OCR (optical character recognition)
project in the form of a 12,000 Euro fellowship ("Digitalisierung undcomputergestützte Analyse“) from the University of Göttingen for Dr.
Eliese-Sophia Lincke to train and use OCRopy for Coptic (supervised by PIs
Heike Behlmer, Marco Büchler, Frank Feder, and Camilla Di Biase-Dyson);● Produced publications (completed and in progress) and conference papers
presented (see ​Appendix 2​)
All proposed grant outcomes were completed● Outcome 1: Milestones for data standards● Outcomes 2 and 4: Converter and Annotation tools● Outcomes 3 and 5: Integration of Corpus Linguistics Methods with Digital
Editions Methods

Audiences
When the grant began, the Virtual Manuscript Room for Coptic did not exist; now 83
VMR accounts exist for the Coptic Old Testament project. Improvements made to the
VMR during the KELLIA project also applied to the Greek New Testament project, which
has over 1500 users. The users include researchers, students, clergy, andlay/non-academic users with training in Greek. The Coptic Old Testament project is now
working to expand collaborations with working on Coptic and Arabic bilingual4manuscripts (Biblia Arabica Project, Prof. Ronny Vollandt)1 and people working in the
Bohairic dialect of Coptic.
Since the Coptic Dictionary Online (​http://coptic-dictionary.org​) went online two years
ago, it has become the most widely used electronic dictionary for the language.
According to Google Analytics, the site receives 895 distinct visitors per month (6 monthaverage), with each visitor returning for an average of 2.4 sessions monthly, viewing an
average of 9.7 pages in a single session, or approximately 3-4 dictionary queries, in an
average 10 minutes of usage time. An anonymized browser Search Engine Result Page
(SERP) analysis suggests that the dictionary is robustly represented, ranking first for the
Google queries “Coptic Dictionary”, “Coptic Lexicon” and “Coptic online dictionary”.
Coptic Scriptorium’s ANNIS search engine, which allows users to perform advanced
lexical and linguistic searches in Coptic corpora, receives an average of 1,111 search
queries each month (4 month average), in addition to an average 30 requests forcomplex frequency analyses, enabling quantitative research on Coptic data. The
queries cover a wide range of categories, including common words and names, which
are searched for often, and a long tail of complex grammatical queries, which areusually unique. On average, the interface receives 641 unique queries of the Coptic
corpora each month. About 47% of the queries target a single corpus, while the rest
target at least two works, with just over 40% targeting all Coptic corpora, suggesting
aggregate studies or users looking for attestations of dictionary headwords from theonline dictionary.

Evaluation
The two main partners in the grant application, Coptic SCRIPTORIUM and the Seminarfor Egyptology and Coptology, established a plan to have have KELLIA activities
evaluated by the advisory boards and agencies of Coptic SCRIPTORIUM and the
Coptic Old Testament Project. Both projects also write regular self-reports, annually for
the Coptic Old Testament Project, and semi-annually for Coptic SCRIPTORIUM. CS’s
reports are posted publicly online.2
Coptic SCRIPTORIUM consulted with its advisory board en masse 3 times a year andwith individual board members as needed on particular issues. Evaluations were1

​https://biblia-arabica.com/

2​http://copticscriptorium.org/reports5generally positive, and recommendations were incorporated into future work. A draft of
the White Paper was reviewed by all members of the Advisory Board.
The Coptic Old Testament Project created a pre-evaluation self-report in April, 2017.
Evaluators chosen by the Scientific Commission (Wissenschaftliche Kommission) of
the Union of German Academies read the report and conducted a site visit;
subsequently the Commission created an evaluation that is on file at the Academy. The
letter from the Commission to the president of the Göttingen Academy gave the projecta positive evaluation and particularly emphasized as a strength the networks with otherprojects, which include the KELLIA collaboration. The next evaluation will be in 2022.

Continuation of the Project
The Coptic Dictionary Online, ANNIS search engine of Coptic Scriptorium, and Coptic
Natural Language Processing API are set to continue offering the same services, withadditional developments depending on the project’s ability to secure funding for future
resources. A follow up grant for the development of new Coptic Scriptorium tools wasawarded by the NEH in 2018.
Specific collaborations between KELLIA partners will continue. The Coptic OT projectwill use the NLP API to annotate their digital editions in the future. We continue to sharetextual data, as Coptic Scriptorium publishes additional Coptic documents digitized byGerman partners. Support and ongoing development of the Coptic Dictionary willcontinue.

Long Term Impact
As a result of the project, our participating universities are known for digital research in
Coptic, generating interest from researchers, visiting scholars, and prospective
students. Many of the tools and texts are being used in the classroom (the dictionary,
the NLP pipeline, the treebanking annotations, digital corpora and annotations) and forresearch. The materials are used in the Coptic Summer Schools offered by Goettingenand other partners.
The Coptic Old Testament project has the potential for funding until 2036; the tools andcollaborations developed here are the foundation for this long term project. The tools
and methods are also foundational for multi-language support being developed (e.g.,
Greek, other Coptic dialects, Arabic, Armenian).

6

The Coptic Dictionary will continue to be used widely. Coptic NLP tools are being andwill continue to be used by Coptic scholars for studying stylometry, linguistics, and text
reuse.

Grant Products
Online Coptic Dictionary
The online Coptic dictionary (​http://coptic-dictionary.org​) was created by members of the
KELLIA collaboration using data from KELLIA partner Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptae(TLA) at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences (BBAW). Bidirectional links havebeen integrated into the digital text in Coptic SCRIPTORIUM’s corpora. Entries in the
online dictionary link to Coptic SCRIPTORIUM corpora by lemma; a link in eachdictionary entry directs the user to results of a query for all instances of the lemma in thecorpora published in ANNIS. In the Coptic. Likewise clicking on links of words in the
Coptic SCRIPTORIUM corpora published in ANNIS direct the user to a dictionary
search for that word’s lemma. Normalized digital editions of Coptic SCRIPTORIUM texts
also link individual words to linked queries in the online dictionary. The integration ofdata from the BBAW lexicon and Coptic SCRIPTORIUM’s annotated digital editions
increases the scholarly utility and discoverability of both projects’ data. Any project canuse these linking features by linking digital Coptic texts to the dictionary via a query forlemmas.

Coptic Treebank
The Coptic treebank includes Coptic SCRIPTORIUM texts with full syntactic
annotations.3 This treebank forms the basis for training stochastic parsers for automatic
analysis of Coptic syntax, which is still in very early steps. The syntactic analyses in thetreebank are foundational to further work on automatic entity tagging in the corpora,since syntactic annotation allows us to recognize the word borders covered by entity
mentions and to resolve their discourse relations to each other (e.g. apposition,
pronominalization and subsequent mention). This automatic syntactic annotation lays
the groundwork for linking data about entities within Coptic texts, as outlined in theentity recognition section, below. In 2017, the Coptic Treebank joined the Universal
Dependencies project, offering over 100 syntactically annotated corpora in more than3

​http://copticscriptorium.org/treebank.htm

7

60 languages, all annotated using uniform guidelines.4 As of the latest release, thetreebank is included in the public UD dataset (Nivre et al. 2017), which is used to train
automatic parsers cross-linguistically.

Entity recognition
During the KELLIA grant period, US partner Amir Zeldes has completed preliminary
work on Named Entity Recognition (NER) on Coptic SCRIPTORIUM texts. First entity
tagging tests have been done on select ​Apophthegmata​ as well as Shenoute’s “Not
Because a Fox Barks” as the gold standard for these tools. Using entity lists taken from
Coptic SCRIPTORIUM corpora, Zeldes used xrenner to recognize classes of entities.5
NER annotations are possible due to the dependency annotations provided by thetreebank, and we expect future advances for NER in the Coptic SCRIPTORIUM corpora
and in Coptic literature in general as the treebank data improves. This work in NER willallow for entity disambiguation and linking opportunities for Coptic literature, which willin turn provide data to scholars working on, for instance, mapping or social networking
in Coptic literature.

VMR-Coptic SCRIPTORIUM Converter
The VMR (German partners) generates digital manuscript transcription data. The Coptic
SCRIPTORIUM (US partner) produced tools to semi-automatically analyze Coptic text
data. The idea was to build a conversion routine to transform VMR-data to the Coptic
SCRIPTORIUM EpiDoc-Format and push it to the NLP-Pipeline (natural language
processing) in order to integrate the digital text corpora developing in both projects. The
final result is a VMR-API call based on some scripts using the JAVA version of the
Saxon XSLT-Processor as a subprocess and converting data retrieved from the VMR to
the format used by Coptic SCRIPTORIUM.6 This VMR-Coptic SCRIPTORIUM
Converter can be used independently from the VMR-API and is available on GitHub.7

4​http://universaldependencies.org/

5​https://corpling.uis.georgetown.edu/xrenner/#6​http://coptot.manuscriptroom.com/community/vmr/api/projects/kellia/

7​https://github.com/KELLIA/vmr_converter

8GitDox Online Transcription and Annotation Tool
GitDox​ is a light-weight transcription and annotation tool customizable for individual
projects and for multiple languages.8 Created by researchers at Georgetown University
during the KELLIA project, it currently contains a transcription/text editor withcustomizable encoding validation options and a spreadsheet editor for collaborative
editing of a multi-layer annotated document. The tool can be adapted to different
languages and is currently also in use for other annotation projects: it has been used forbuilding the English GUM corpus (​http://corpling.uis.georgetown.edu/gum/​) and forannotating texts from reddit forum discussions as part of a course on Corpus Linguistics
at the 2017 Linguistic Institute of the Linguistic Society of America(​http://lsa2017.uky.edu/​). the Coptic Scriptorium version is linked to our Coptic natural
language processing tools. After researchers transcribe a Coptic text with light XML
markup for structural information (​i.e.​ page breaks, missing text, etc.), they can click abutton to run the text through the NLP tool pipeline; this annotated text is presented to
the researcher in a multilayer format in spreadsheet mode. Researchers commit thedata and subsequent edits to our repositories on GitHub. The tool includes space fordocument metadata and customizable validation mechanisms. Access to the Coptic
Scriptorium instance requires a username and password, managed by Dr. Zeldes at
Georgetown University. The tool is open-source (Apache 2.0 license9) and available fordownload and installation.

Digital Corpora: Richly Annotated Coptic Literary Texts
During the grant period, KELLIA members have published several literary texts withlinguistic annotations. These texts are available in ANNIS, the search and visualization
tool used by Coptic SCRIPTORIUM, and are available for download in TEI XML,PAULA XML, and relANNIS formats from the Coptic SCRIPTORIUM GitHub repository.
Texts published as part of the KELLIA grant include sections of Shenoute’s Acephalous
Work 22 and Some Kinds of People Sift Dirt; large portions of his ​I See Your
Eagerness;​ over two dozen sayings in the ​Apophthegmata Patrum;​ letters of Besa;
Pseudo-Theophilus’ ​On the Cross and the Thief;​ and sections of the ​Martyrdom of Saint
Victor the General​ and the ​Canons​ of Apa Johannes. We have also published updates
to Shenoute’s ​Not Because the Fox Barks​ and some biblical books. These texts include8​https://github.com/gucorpling/gitdox/

9​https://github.com/gucorpling/gitdox/blob/master/LICENSE

9material previously transcribed prior to the KELLIA project, contributed by Diliana
Atanassova, David Brakke, Alin Suciu, and the Marcion project.

Digital Corpora: Coptic Old Testament Texts
The Sahidic Coptic Old Testament consists of some 50+ books basically covering theentire Old Testament available from the Greek translation of the Jewish scriptures.
During the grant period, the CoptOT team has assembled, augmented and revised
authoritative text files for said body of literature. These files are used as base texts
throughout the vmr in order to facilitate transcription work. Moreover, these files are also
used to successively replace and enhance the files that are currently serving a searchtool created by Christian Askeland and Matthias Schulz for the Chrome and Firefox webbrowsers.10 In addition said files will also be exposed under a Creative Commonslicense (BY-SA) via our api to potential users outside of the mentioned use cases.
Finally, the entire Sahidic Old Testament files - be it authoritative base text files ortranscriptions of extant manuscripts created in the course of the ongoing CoptOT
project - is destined to be fed via the VMR-Coptic SCRIPTORIUM Converter into the
NLP-pipeline.

Optical Character Recognition
Optical character recognition for Coptic printed texts except those of Bohairic liturgicaltexts has not been available up to this point. KELLIA, represented by So Miyagawa, andthe eTRAP research team at the Institute for Computer Science (University Göttingen)tested existing OCR programs applicable to Coptic texts (OCROPY and TESSERACT)and found out that OCROPY is the better choice, especially for texts with diacriticalmarks. The team provides trained data for Sahidic and Bohairic on GitHub.11 This
(sub-)project was considered so successful, that KELLIA partners secured funding for a
6-month fellowship to train more data and add to the corpus of OCRed Coptic printed
texts (see above, Accomplishments).

​https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sahidic-bible-askeland-sc/mbhdolnomjodfmgihfajipihojajgdjk​,
https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/sahidic-bible/
1011​https://github.com/KELLIA/CopticOCR

10

Digital Humanities Field Survey
As part of the work on metadata standards the German KELLIA team produced asurvey of DH projects in Coptology/Egyptology and related fields (Historic Philologies,
Ancient History). The survey was conducted in 2015 and 2016 and aggregated data for
39 such DH projects. These data have been compiled in an eXIST_db application andpublished in html. The html version has been published on the KELLIA website.12

Metadata Standards
Recommended standards and practices regarding metadata were developed as a resultof the field survey and can be found in ​Appendix 4 (Metadata)​ and ​Appendix 5 (Linked
Data)​.

Virtual Manuscript Room Enhancements
The following user-facing improvements were made to the VMR during the grant period:● New Quire metadata capture facility to record codicological data
● New Biblia Coptica manuscript display option to show manuscript information in aformat familiar to all Coptologists● New Transcription Importer which allows transcriptions to be uploaded frommultiple sources and imported to selected user account and publish level● Greatly improved transcription display with better support for corrector popups,
page/folio number, multiple project and translation language support withadditional tabs, better inscriptio/subscriptio and lection metadata support● Better information and improved user experience for image management,
including new folio number generation tool
● Better handling of manuscript pages which include both Old and New Testament● All new interactive Published Apparatus display (dECM display)● Improved Zotero integration for bibliography data(worked around the 150 entry
restriction)● New Lection Index metadata facility to capture the intricate details for lectionary
entries● Improved Institution registry service to better support sharing Holding Institution
collection with partner projects
12​http://kellia.uni-goettingen.de/editions/11

● Added the beginnings of support for page fragments by allowing individual
images assigned to a page to designate to which shelf number they belong. Thismechanism will be used when a page is divided into many fragments and thosefragments live in various different institutions. Now one image can represent
each individual fragment and associated with the appropriate shelf instance so
no ambiguity remains about which fragments are at which institutions labeled aswhat shelf number.
● Integrated new release of Transcription Editor from Trier, which includes many
bug fixes and improved editing experience● Improved export options to include page ranges

Linked Data Standards
Please see Appendix 5

12Appendix 1: Agendas from Project Workshops and Meetings
1st KELLIA Workshop in Göttingen, September 7-11, 2015
Participants
KELLIA participants: Heike Behlmer, Troy Griffitts, So Miyagawa, Ulrich Schmid,
Caroline T. Schroeder, Uwe Sikora, Amir Zeldes, Tonio Sebastian Richter, Julien
Delhez, Siegfried Richter, Frank Feder
Coptic Old Testament partners beyond the KELLIA group: Diliana Atanassova, Malte
RosenauGöttingen Center for the Digital Humanities: Marco Büchler
Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae: Maxim Kupreyev, Simon Schweitzer
Dictionary and Database of Greek Loan Words in Coptic: Katrin John

AgendaMonday, September 7
Overview● Present NLP pipeline○ API for communication with VMR?
● Discuss segmentation (all)○ Subword morphemes (mnt-, r- & co)○ Bound groups (Till vs. Layton)○ Word boundaries (esp. handling of compounds)○ VMR and annotation tools (Carrie, Amir, Ulrich, Troy, So)○ TEI subsets for annotation○ VMR and Scriptorium teams tag subsets / standards○ Switch scriptorium annotators to use VMR? Separate instance?
○ Other annotation interfaces (EtherCalc prototype or similar to replace
Excel)○ Github connection (commit VMR text?)● Lemmatization
13

●

●
●
●

○ Show new lemmatizer○ Discuss use of TLA lemma list
○ technical integration
Metadata scan - Uwe (+Carrie, Amir, Heike, So)○ incl linked data (below)○ incl persistent urns -- show data.copticscriptorium.org○ Trismegistos and CTS URN○ authority files and vocabularies
Linked data - parsing, entities (people, geo, …), coreference
versification and indexation
Collaboration with TLA○ Crum in XML○ TLA in JSON, couchDB and their software which runs on Java
○ Funk lemmata○ Funk corpus was already lemmatized.
○ license problem○ Hyper-lemmatization; good for diachronic research

5:45 pm

Meeting with Marco Büchler

7:30 pm

Dinner at APEX, Burgstraße

Tuesday, September 8
Simon, Maxim (TLA); CoptOT; Kellia
09:00 TLA presentation (lemmatization)
Afternoon: metadata

Wednesday, September 9
10:00 Segmentation of Coptic texts
Use of the VMR, Coordination and Cooperation of CoptOT and INTF

14

Thursday, September 10
Continued General discussion of above topics
Skype presentation from Paul Dilley (Iowa) on Coptic Text Analysis

Friday, September 11
General discussion/Summary
DecisionsTasks/Next steps
Dissemination

2016 KELLIA meeting
Saturday, July 23 and Sunday, July 24
Burkle Building, Room 12
Claremont Graduate University

Each portion of the program will consist of a short, informal presentation by the listed
speaker(s) followed by discussion.
Participants:
Heike Behlmer, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
Paul Dilley, University of Iowa
Frank Feder, Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen
Troy Griffitts, Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen
Christine Luckritz Marquis, Union Presbyterian Seminary
15

Rebecca Krawiec, Canisius College
Maxim Kupreyev, Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities
So Miyagawa, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
Beth Platte, Coptic SCRIPTORIUM
Tonio Sebastian Richter, Freie Universität Berlin
Caroline Schroeder, University of the Pacific
Melissa [Philip] Harl Sellew, University of Minnesota
Uwe Sikora, SUB Göttingen
Alin Suciu, Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen
Amir Zeldes, Georgetown University
ProgramSaturday, July 23
9:00

Welcome

9:15

Uwe Sikora: Data model
So Miyagawa: ​Coptic OCR with a neural network modelled OCR engine andhigh-performance computing

10:15 Break
10:30 Maxim Kupreyev: TLA Lexicon update
11:30 Amir Zeldes: Web Application for the TLA lexicon
12:30 lunch
1:45

Amir Zeldes: NLP Pipeline and spreadsheet editor

2:45

Troy Griffitts: VMR and satellite sites

16

3:45

Break

4:00

Frank Feder: Transcription guidelines (developed with C. Askeland)

Sunday, July 24
9:00

Welcome

9:15

Frank Feder: Report on OT Base text

10:15 Break
10:30 Beth Platte/Amir Zeldes: Entities
11:30 Sebastian Richter: Database and Dictionary of Greek Loanwords in Coptic
12:30 lunch
1:45 Paul Dilley: Big Ancient Mediterranean/Iowa Canon of Coptic Authors and Works
project report
2:45

Break

3:00

Melissa Harl Sellew: Ancient Lives project report

4:00

Wrap up/plan for next year

KELLIA Meeting in Washington, DC, December 2017
Participants
Elizabeth Davidson
Rebecca Krawiec
Christine Luckritz Marquis
Caroline T. Schroeder

17

Amir Zeldes
Via Skype: Elizabeth Platte
AgendaCoptic Treebanking
Annotating and preparing corpora for publication
Linked Data (geographical)
Data Standards
Documentation

KELLIA Meeting in Göttingen, June 19-23, 2017
Participants
Agostino Soldati (PAThs)
Alberto Winterberg (DDGLC)
Alin Suciu (University of Göttingen/CoptOT)
Amir Zeldes (SCRIPTORIUM)
Becky (Rebecca) Krawiec (SCRIPTORIUM)
Beth (Elizabeth) Platte (SCRIPTORIUM)
Carrie (Caroline T.) Schroeder (SCRIPTORIUM)
Diliana Atanassova (University of Göttingen/CoptOT)
Frank Feder (University of Göttingen/CoptOT)
Heike Behlmer (University of Göttingen/CoptOT)
Julian Bogdani 20-23 (PAThs)
Julien Delhez (University of Göttingen/CoptOT)
18

Katrin John 21 via (DDGLC)
Laura Slaughter (University of Oslo)
Matt (Matthew) Munson (GCDH)
Marco Büchler (GCDH)
Malte Rosenau (University of Göttingen/CoptOT)
Maxim Kupreyev (BBAW)
Paola Buzi (PAThs)
Paul Dilley (University of Iowa) via Videolink
Sebastian Richter (BBAW/DDGLC)
Siegfried Richter (INTF, Münster)
So Miyagawa (University of Göttingen/CoptOT/Kyoto University)
Theresa Kohl (University of Göttingen/CoptOT)
Troy Griffitts (University of Göttingen/CoptOT)
Ulrich Schmid (University of Göttingen/CoptOT)
Wolf-Peter Funk (Guest)
Student Assistants: Lina Elhage-Mensching, Joanna Hypszer, Eva Kremer-Brinkmann

Schedule
Monday, June 19
10:00-12:00
Friedländer Weg: guided visit for KELLIA participants by CoptOT staff; Internal
Scriptorium meeting;(simultaneously: CoptOT Steering Committee Meeting in
Heyne-Haus)

19

13:30-15:00
Agenda; Discussion of progress from last meeting
15:30 Discussion with eTrap members (Text re-use) OCR of Coptic Texts (So, Kirill, andMarco)

Tuesday, June 20
9:00–9:30 NLP pipeline and online spreadsheet (Amir)
9:30-10:00 Coptic Treebank (Amir)
10:00-12:00 Exchange formats and text segmentation in digital editions: discussion
13:30-14:00 Metadata standards and exchange (So, Beth, Ulrich, Troy)
14:00-15:00 News from CoptOT: Infrastructure, Base-Texts, and Metadata(Frank, Malte, Ulrich, Troy) & Discussion
15:30 Topic modelling in the Greek NT (Paul, via Videolink)

Wednesday, June 21
9:00–10:00
Discussion about the Coptic Dictionary Online
10:00-10:30 Presentation of the actual status of the Coptic Lemma List and BTS(Maxim)
10:30 DDGLC (Katrin via Skype)
13:30-14:00 PAThs presentation (Paola)
14:00-14:30 Digital Infrastructure of PAThs (Julian) & Discussion
15:30 Colophons of Biblical and other Mss (Agostino) & Discussion of future20

cooperation

Thursday, June 22
9:00-10:30 C(anonical)T(ext)S(ervice) and CapiTainS Suite (Matt) & Discussion
10:30-12:00 Discussion about Unicode
13:30-15:00 How to construct a Coptic wordnet? (Laura) & Discussion
15:30 Scriptorium’s internal meeting

Friday, June 23
Discussion of results; further steps; final report for KELLIAKELLIA Concluding Meetings in Washington DC (11-14 June 2018),
Göttingen (18-19 June 2018), Washington DC (13-14 September 2018)
Participants (Washington DC, June 2018)
So Miyagawa
Amir Zeldes
Via Skype: Caroline T. Schroeder, Rebecca Krawiec, Christine Luckritz Marquis
AgendaCorpus editing and publication
Text data exchanges across projects
Treebanking and linguistic annotations
Participants (Göttingen, June 2018)
Diliana Atanassova
Heike Behlmer
21Frank Feder
So Miyagawa
Ulrich Schmid
Caroline T. Schroeder
AgendaDetecting text-reuse in Coptic (using eTrap’s Tracer)
Documentation, White Paper
Text data exchanges
Future collaborations
Participants (Washington DC 13-14 September 2018)
Rebecca Krawiec
Christine Luckritz Marquis
Elizabeth Platte
Caroline T. Schroeder
Amir Zeldes
AgendaUpdating NLP tools
Annotating and publishing corpora
Linked data
Documentation, White Paper
Future, post-KELLIA collaborations

22

Appendix 2: Publications and Presentations
Publications
Behlmer, Heike. (2016) “Digitale Gesamtedtion und Übersetzung deskoptisch-sahidischen Alten Testamentes” (annual report) In ​Jahrbuch der Akademie
der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen.​ Berlin: De Gruyter, 277-282.
Behlmer, Heike and Ulrich Schmid. “Towards a New Digital Edition of the Coptic Old
Testament,” In ​Studies in Coptic Culture: Ordinary Lives, Changing Times​ (ed. M.
Ayad; Cairo: American University Press), forthcoming.
Behlmer, Heike. (2017) “Digitale Gesamtedition und Übersetzung deskoptisch-sahidischen Alten Testamentes” (annual report) In ​Jahrbuch der Akademie
der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen​ Berlin: De Gruyter, forthcoming.
Behlmer, Heike and Frank Feder. (2017) "The Complete Digital Edition and Translationof the Coptic Sahidic Old Testament. A New Research Project at the Göttingen
Academy of Sciences and Humanities", ​Early Christianity​ 8, 97–107
Feder, Frank, Kupreyev, Maxim, Manning, Emma, Schroeder, Caroline T. and Zeldes,
Amir (2018) "​A Linked Coptic Dictionary Online​". ​Proceedings of LaTeCH 2018 - The
11th SIGHUM Workshop at COLING2018.​ Santa Fe, NM, 12-21.
Krawiec, Rebecca and Caroline T. Schroeder. (2019, forthcoming) “Digital approaches
to Studying Authorial Style and Monastic Subjectivity in Early Christian Egypt.” In
Digital Humanities and Religious Studies​, ed. Christopher Cantwell and KristianPeterson.
Miyagawa, So, Kirill Bulert, Marco Büchler, and Heike Behlmer. (forthcoming). “Opticalcharacter recognition of typeset Coptic text with neural networks”. ​Digital
Scholarship in the Humanities.
Miyagawa, So, Amir Zeldes, Marco Büchler, Heike Behlmer and Troy Griffitts (2018)
Building Linguistically and Intertextually Tagged Coptic Corpora with Open Source
Tools. In: Chikahiko Suzuki (ed.), ​Proceedings of the 8th Conference of Japanese
Association for Digital Humanities.​ ​139-41. Tokyo: Center for Open Data in the
Humanities.
Miyagawa, So, Marco Büchler and Heike Behlmer. (forthcoming) “Computational
Analysis of Text Reuse/Intertextuality: The Example of Shenoute Canon 6”. In Hany
N. Takla, Stephen Emmel, and Maged S. A. Mikhail (eds.), ​Proceedings of the23

Eleventh International Congress of Coptic Studies.​ Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta.
Leuven.
Miyagawa, So. (2018) Koputogo Saīdo Hōgen no Gengo Shiryō to Bunpō Chūshaku:
Napori Kokuritsu Vittōrio Emanuēre 3 Sei Toshokan-zō Bēsa ni yoru Tekusuto no
Danpen [Text Corpus and Grammatical Annotation of Sahidic Coptic: Fragments ofa Text by Besa Preserved at Biblioteca Nazionale Vittorio Emanuele III, Naples].
Journal of KIJUTSUKEN (Descriptive Linguistics Study Group) ​10, 271-320.
Schroeder, Caroline T., Amir Zeldes, ​et al.,​ Coptic SCRIPTORIUM corpora, 2015-2018,
versions 1.5.0-2.6.0, ​http://copticscriptorium.org​.
Zeldes, Amir and Caroline T. Schroeder. (2016) "​An NLP Pipeline for Coptic​". In:
Proceedings of LaTeCH 2016 - The 10th SIGHUM Workshop at the Annual Meetingof the ACL.​ Berlin, 146-155.
Zhang, Shuo and Amir Zeldes. (2017) "​GitDOX: A Linked Version Controlled Online
XML Editor for Manuscript Transcription​". In: Proceedings of FLAIRS 2017, Special
Track on Natural Language Processing of Ancient and other Low-resource
Languages. Marco Island, FL.

Presentations
Albrecht, Felix and Frank Feder. (2017) “Editing the Coptic Old Testament,” Society of
Biblical Literature Annual Meeting, Boston.
Albrecht, Felix and Malte Rosenau. (2017), “Digital Old Testament,” 33. Deutscher
Orientalistentag, Jena.
Behlmer, Heike. (2018) “Digitale Edition des koptischen Alten Testaments:
Herausforderungen und Perspektiven,” Basel University Theology Faculty.
Behlmer, Heike. (2017), “Digitale Gesamtedition und Übersetzung deskoptisch-sahidischen Alten Testaments (Keynote), Leibniz-Projekt “Polyphonie desspätantiken Christentums, Frankfurt
Behlmer, Heike. (2017) “Chancen und Herausforderungen der Digitalisierung deskoptischen Kulturgutes (Keynote)” Altorientalisch-evangelischer theologischer
Dialog, Berlin Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland
Behlmer, Heike. (2017) “‘Ich verbitte mir alle ungezogenen Bemerkungen darüber, dassich Handschriften des Auslands nicht benutzt habe…’ Der Zugang zu Manuskripten
und Sammlungen und die Erforschung der koptischen Bibel,” Berlin-Brandenburg
Academy of Arts and Sciences24

Behlmer, Heike (2016) Digital Edition and Translation of the Coptic Old Testament“(poster), Fourth Australasian Egyptology Conference, Monash University Melbourne
Behlmer, Heike (2016) “Die Bibel auf Koptisch: Kulturerbe Ägyptens und der Welt,” Das
Erbe der Pharaonen, Coptic Orthodox Monastery of Höxter-Brenkhausen
Behlmer, Heike and Frank Feder. (2017) “Digital Edition and Translation of the Coptic
Old Testament” (poster), Ständigen Ägyptologenkonferenz, Goettingen.
Behlmer, Heike and So Miyagawa. (2017) “KELLIA” (poster), StändigenÄgyptologenkonferenz, Göttingen.
Bulert, Kirill and So Miyagawa. (2017) “Optical Character Recognition with a Neural
Network Model for Coptic.” Digital Humanities 2017, McGill University. Montreal,
Canada.
Bulert, Kirill and So Miyagawa. (2016). “Optical Character Recognition with Neural
Network Model and High-performance Computing on Printed and Handwritten Texts
in Coptic.” Shenoute and the Bible International Conference.
Georg-August-Universität Göttingen​.
Dilley, Paul. (2016) “Coptic Scriptorium beyond the Manuscript: Towards a DistantReading of Coptic Texts,” Digital Humanities Panel at the International Associationof Coptic Studies Congress, Claremont Graduate University
Feder, Frank. (2017) “The Digital Coptic Old Testament: Towards the Virtual
Reconstruction of a Unique Linguistic, Literary, and Religious Monument,” Coptic
Studies in the Digital World Conference, University of Toronto.
Feder, Frank. (2017) “Editing the Coptic Old Testament,”Society of Biblical Literature
Annual Meeting, Boston.
Griffitts, Troy. (2017) “The NT VMR as a Gateway to Manuscripts,” Society of Biblical
Literature Annual Meeting, Boston.
Griffitts, Troy. (2016) “The Virtual Manuscript Room Collaborative Research
Environment,” Quinto convegno annuale Associazione per l'Informatica Umanistica ele Culture Digitali, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice.
Krawiec, Rebecca. (2018) “Studying Ancient Egyptian Christianity in a Modern Digital
World,” Digital Humanities Speaker Series, Canisius College
Krawiec, Rebecca. (2016) “Charting Rhetorical Choices in Shenoute: Abraham ourFather and I See Your Eagerness as Case-Studies,” KELLIA Digital Coptic Studies

25

Panel at the International Association of Coptic Studies Congress, Claremont
Graduate University
Lincke, Eliese-Sophia. (2016) “Optical Character Recogition (OCR) for Coptic. Testing
Automated Digitization of Texts with OCRopy” Digital Humanities Panel at theInternational Association of Coptic Studies Congress, Claremont Graduate
University
Luckritz Marquis, Christine. (2016) “Reimagining the Apophthegmata Patrum in a Digital
Culture,” KELLIA Digital Coptic Studies Panel at the International Association of
Coptic Studies Congress, Claremont Graduate University
Miyagawa, So. 2018. Quotation from the Psalms and Its Authority in Shenoute’s
Monastic Education. “As It Is Written"? Uses of Sources in Ancient Mediterranean
Texts. Georg-August-Universität Göttingen.
Miyagawa, So, Amir Zeldes,Marco Büchler, Heike Behlmer and Troy Griffitts. (2018)
Building Linguistically and Intertextually Tagged Coptic Corpora with Open Source
Tools. Eighth Conference of Japanese Association for Digital Humanities(JADH2018) "Leveraging Open data". Hitotsubashi Hall, Tokyo.
Miyagawa, So and Marco Büchler. (2018) “The Use of Digital Tools in Studies of BiblicalIntertextuality in Early Christian Authors: The Case of Shenoute and Besa, Coptic
Abbots in the 4-5th Centuries Digital Humanities.” Biblical Studies, Early Jewish andChristian Studies (EABS). SBL 2018 International Meeting. University of Helsinki,
Helsinki, Finland.
Miyagawa, So and Amir Zeldes. (2018) "A Semantic Map of the Coptic Complementizer
če Based on Corpus Analysis: Grammaticalization and Areal Typology in Africa,"
International Workshop on Semantic maps: Where do we stand and where are wegoing? Liège, Belgium.
Miyagawa, So. (2018) “Evaluation of the Digital Text Reuse Detection on Coptic Texts
by TRACER A Case Study on Besa.” eTRAP Sponsor Meeting,Georg-August-Universität Göttingen.
Miyagawa, So. (2018) “Digitisation of Coptic Manuscripts and Digital Humanities
Initiatives in Germany, the U.S., Japan, and Israel.” The 21st Century Curatorship
Seminar Series. The British Library, London, the United Kingdom.
Miyagawa, So. (2017) “Shenoute and the Bible: Digital Text Re-Use Analysis of
Selected Monastic Writings from Egypt.”​Tag der GSGG 2017.
Georg-August-Universität Göttingen.

26

Miyagawa, So. (2017) “Word Segmentation and Polysynthesis in Coptic.” International
Summer School on Typology and Lexicon (TyLex) National Research University
Higher School of Economics, jointly with Hebrew University of Jerusalem andStockholm University, Moscow. (poster session)
Miyagawa, So, Julien Delhez and Heike Behlmer. (2017) “Schriftauslegung und
Bildungstraditionen im koptischsprachigen ägyptischen Christentum der Spätantike:
Schenute, Kanon 6.” Jahrestagung "Was ist Bildung in der
Vormoderne?"Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. (poster session)
Miyagawa, So, Kirill Bulert and Marco Büchler. (2017) “Utilization of Common OCR
Tools for Typeset Coptic Texts” DATeCH (Digital Access to Textual Cultural
Heritage), Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. (poster session).
Miyagawa, So. (2017) “The Integration of Existing Digital Text Corpora and
Corpus-Linguistic Tools into Research on Transitivity and Valency in Coptic.”
Inaugural Workshop of the GIF Project „Transitivity and Valency in Contact: The
Case of Coptic“ Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften Berlin,
Germany.
Miyagawa, So. (2016) “The Use of the Psalms in Educational Monastic Literature in
Byzantine Egypt: A Case Study of Shenoute, an Egyptian Monastic Leader of the
Fourth and Fifth Centuries.” Third Parekbolai Symposium on Byzantine Literatureand Philology National and Kapodistrian University of Athens & Byzantine andChristian Museum Athens, Greece.
Miyagawa, So. (2016) Coptic Studies and Digital Humanities Digitale Unterstützung in
den Geistes- und Gesellschaftswissenschaften Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
Göttingen. Germany.
Miyagawa, So. (2016) “Biblical Quotations and Allusions in Coptic Literature.”International Conference ‘The World in Motion: Language, Culture, and Intercultural
Communication in Asian and African Studies’ University of Warsaw Warsaw, Poland
Miyagawa, So, and Marco Büchler. (2016) “Computational Analysis of Text Reuse in
Shenoute and Besa,” Digital Humanities Panel at the International Association of
Coptic Studies Congress, Claremont Graduate University
Miyagawa, So and Behlmer, Heike. (2016) “Processing Non-Biblical Texts (e.g. Besa
and Shenoute) for the Old Testament Virtual Manuscript Room and Using Text
Re-Use Software for Detecting and Describing (Biblical) Intertextuality.” Shenouteand the Bible International Conference. Georg-August-Universität Göttingen​.
Miyagawa, So. (2016) “Koputo Ejiputogo Saīdo Hōgen Tekusuto no Deijitaruka ni okeru
Shomondai: Unicode, OCR, Denshikōpasu wo Chūshin ni [Problems in Digitization27

of the Texts in the Sahidic Dialect of Coptic Egyptian: with a Focus on Unicode,
OCR, and Electronic Corpus].” Tōzaibunka no Tayō to Kyōzon Moderu: “TōhōKirisutokyōken” wo Takakuteki ni Kangaeru Gakusaiteki Kokoromi, 2015 Kyōto
Daigaku Bun’ya Ōdan Purattofōmu Kōchiku Kikaku (Kenkyū Daigaku Kyōka
Sokushin Jigyō “Hyakka Sōmei” Puroguramu) [Diversity and Coexistance Model in
the Cultures of the West and East: Interdisciplinary Attempt to Think on“Eastern/Oriental Christian Area,” 2015 Kyoto University Interdiciplinary Platform
Building Plan (Research Univeristy Intensification “Hyakka Sōmei” Program)], Kyoto
University.
Miyagawa, So and Kirill Bulert. (2016). “Coptic OCR”, Workshop on Supercomputing in
the Humanities Gesellschaft für wissenschaftliche Datenverarbeitung mbH
Göttingen, Göttingen.
Platte, Elizabeth and Caroline T. Schroeder. (2016) “Coptic Scriptorium: Data from theDesert.” Linking the Big Ancient Mediterranean Conference, University of Iowa.
Rosenau, Malte. (2017) “Digital Humanities and Coptology,” Colloque
Census—Recenser et identifier les manuscrits par langue et par pays, Bibliothèque
Nationale Paris.
Schroeder, Caroline T. (2018) “The Materiality of Digital Apocryphal Studies,” The
Material of Christian Apocrypha Conference (of the North American Society for the
Study of Christian Apocryphal Literature), University of Virginia.
Schroeder, Caroline T. (2018) “Annotating Heresies (Keynote).” Future Philologies.
Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. New York University.
Schroeder, Caroline T. (2018) “A Homily is a Homily is a Homily is a Corpus: Digital
Approaches to Shenoute,” The Transmission of Early Christian Homilies from Late
Antiquity to the Middle Ages Conference, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main.
Schroeder, Caroline T. (2017) “Web-based Natural Language Processing andAnnotation Technologies for Ancient Languages,” Leipzig University.
Schroeder, Caroline T. (2016) “Coptic SCRIPTORIUM: A Digital Platform Research in
Coptic Language and Literature,” KELLIA Digital Coptic Studies Panel at theInternational Association of Coptic Studies Congress, Claremont Graduate
University
Schmid, Ulrich. (2018) “Towards a joint digital catalogue of Sahidic biblicalmanuscripts,” Manuscript Cataloguing in a Comparative Perspective: State of theArt, Common Challenges, Future Directions Conference, Hamburg University.

28

Schmid, Ulrich. (2016) “The Virtual Manuscript Room,” Global Philology Planning
Meeting, Freie Universität Berlin.
Schmid, Ulrich. (2016) “Eine digitale Edition der koptischen (sahidischen) LXX Probleme und Lösungen” Kirchliche Hochschule Wuppertal, 6. Internationale
Septuaginta-Konferenz “ Die Septuaginta, Geschichte, Wirkung, Relevanz”
Schmid, Ulrich. (2016), “Der New Testament Virtual Manuscript Room (NTVMR) unddas koptisch-sahidische Alte Testament”, Düsseldorf, Nordrhein-Westfälische
Akademie der Wissenschaften, Workshop AG “eHumanities”
Sikora, Uwe. (2016) “Text Encoding - Opportunities and Challenges,” Digital Humanities
Panel at the International Association of Coptic Studies Congress, Claremont
Graduate University
Zeldes, Amir, Rebecca Krawiec, Elizabeth Platte, Caroline T. Schroeder. (2018) “A
Linked Digital Environment for Coptic Studies,” Friday Speaker Series, Georgetown
University Department of Linguistics
Zeldes, Amir. (2016) “A Quantitative Approach to Syntactic Alternations in Sahidic,”
KELLIA Digital Coptic Studies Panel at the International Association of Coptic
Studies Congress, Claremont Graduate University

Training Workshops on Tools and Methods
Coptic Fonts & Coptic Bible. International Association of Coptic Studies Congress, July
2016, Claremont CA. Led by Christian Askeland and Frank Feder, Caroline T.
Schroeder participant.
Digital Tools for Beginners (Workshop on Coptic SCRIPTORIUM). International
Association of Coptic Studies Congress, July 2016, Claremont CA. Caroline T.
Schroeder, Amir Zeldes, and Rebecca Krawiec.
Digital Editions and Text Analysis: Coptic as Case Study. North American Patristics
Society Annual Meeting, May 2017, Chicago IL. Caroline T. Schroeder, Rebecca
Krawiec.
Digital Humanities Tools and Methods for Studying Antiquity. Department of Ancient
History, University of Basel. 11-15 December 2017. Caroline T. Schroeder
Einführung in digitale Forschungsmethoden der Digital Humanities (DH) in derÄgyptologie und Koptologie. Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. 20 Juli 2018. So
Miyagawa and Uwe Sikora.

29

30

Appendix 3: Transcription and Encoding Standards
1. Introduction
This document provides recommended guidelines for anyone working in digital Coptic
textual studies, including manuscript studies and paleography, linguistics and natural
language processing, philology, and other relevant fields. These guidelines were
produced 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.
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 annotation
schema). 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’s
needs (e.g., papyri.info’s Papyrological Editor). ​We strongly recommend projects

31

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.13
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, twoemail 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.14 It
also visualizes combining characters (such as supra-linear strokes). The font created by13

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

32

the Institute français d’archéologie orientale uses Private Usage Area character
encodings and is not recommended.15 The New Athena Unicode font is an alternative to
Antinoou.16 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 and
PAThs both provide tools to convert legacy fonts into Unicode characters.17

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 savetime 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
Scriptorium18 should use word segmentation that follows principles of binding
and segmentation that conform to the linguistic principles of Bentley Layton’s
15​http://www.ifao.egnet.net/publications/publier/outils-ed/polices/16​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​.
17

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/​.
18

33

Coptic Grammar.​ 19 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 Coptic20 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 protocols21 but
typically remain unbound using Till’s principles (e.g., long prepositions followed
by 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 modern
worlds. 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 by
the field.
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 further
annotation.

Bentley Layton, ​A Coptic Grammar,​ 3rd Edition, Porta Linguarum Orientalium Neue Serie 20(Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2011).
19

Walter C. Till, “La Séparation des Mots en Copte,” ​Bulletin de l’Institut Français d’archéologie Orientale
60 (1960): 151–70.
20

21

See 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 foundat ​http://copticscriptorium.org/documentation​.

34

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)22. TEI XML counts as the most used and broadly accepted
standard to describe textual phenomena.23 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 a
project’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.24 Since
Coptology is confronted with handwritten manuscripts not conforming the modern
concept of typographic textuality and its implications, EpiDoc25 is recommended
to encode Coptic text-bearing objects or as a data model.

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
26, Relax NG (RNG)27 or Schematron28 to guarantee standardised and valid XML-data.
22​http://www.tei-c.org/

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

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

25​http://www.tei-c.org/Guidelines/P5/26​https://www.w3.org/XML/Schema

35

An ODD Format (“One Document does it all”)29 can be used. It brings together theDocumentation of Tags and the formal declaration which can be compiled30 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.31

9. Visualizing and Publishing Encoded Text Data
TEI-C provides several stylesheets (XSL) to convert xml files into various file formats
including html.32 It is recommended that projects use existing stylesheets and amendthem where necessary to ensure the proper display of all of their encoded data.

27​http://relaxng.org/

28​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
2930

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
31

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

36

For visualisation of linguistic text data, ANNIS is recommended.33 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 SaltNPepper or Exmaralda, one can convert various XML
file formats including TEI XML into PAULA XML.

33

​http://corpus-tools.org/annis/37

Appendix 4: Metadata Standards
1. Introduction
Metadata records basic descriptive and administrative metadata like license statements
and call numbers from holding institutions, as well as much more detailed descriptions,e.g., of the materiality of information carriers or more abstract aspects of the encodedsource and its cultural implications are possible.
German partners completed a survey of Metadata Standards and formats used in thefield of Coptic studies and neighboring disciplines. The survey results are in a ​databasepublished as KELLIA E-ditions​.34 This appendix contains a summary of findings andrecommendations based on the survey and work in KELLIA. The survey was conductedprior​ to the establishment of the PAThs project in Rome.35 PAThs will be providing
unique identifiers to Coptic text-bearing objects; we encourage projects to follow PAThs
ongoing work.

2. Encoding
Most projects use TEI-P5 or a specialised subset of TEI as EpiDoc to ensureinteroperability in theory. TEI XML (and the EpiDoc subset) includes themsdescription-module with elements for describing manuscripts.36
Since every project has its own perspective, in reality many tags are interpreted indifferent ways due to the very general TEI-Definitions. Projects often develop their own
metadata categories and map a set of metadata on to TEI-P5. The Coptic Old
Testament project’s metadata model is ​available online as an example​.3734​http://kellia.uni-goettingen.de/editions/35​http://paths.uniroma1.it/

36​http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/MS.html

37​https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/189qBxOylUyo0rgUSP20kdkE5SBaAAHg7tAerIL1D5Yg

38

3. Authority files
Recommended is also the use of authority files or similar data to link identical entities toa general information resource. For Coptic Studies, currently the best solution is to linkto Trismegistos People38 for a historic person or authority data for proper names. (Note:the Trismegistos People database ​is not​ a complete or precise prosopography.)
Pelagios39 and Pleiades40 are the best authorities for linking ancient geographicalentities. To find names to specify a geographic location one may use GeoNames41 or
Getty.
PAThs is developing identifiers for place names in Egypt; projects should contact
PAThs regarding their metadata and identifiers for provenance.
A general tendency is to link personal, geographic or other kinds of entities to Wikidata42
to use structured linked open data-sets (also known as “Wikification”). One benefit isthat one can generate data-sets that can be used by anyone.

4. Standards and Controlled Vocabularies
There are no cross-project controlled vocabularies for metadata, and existing controlled
vocabularies (Getty, Dublin Core, EAGLE) do not suffice for Coptic Studies. We
recommend that each project publish their own controlled vocabularies to ensure data
integrity and consistency within the project; new projects should survey existing projects
so they do not need to “reinvent the wheel.” For more on controlled vocabularies, see
KELLIA White Paper on Linked Data Standards and Practices​, also published as
Appendix 5 of the main KELLIA project White Paper.43

38​www.trismegistos.org

39​http://commons.pelagios.org/

40​https://pleiades.stoa.org/

41​http://www.geonames.org/

42​www.wikidata.org​https://kellia.uni-goettingen.de/downloads/KELLIA-linked-data-white-paper.pdf​,
https://kellia.uni-goettingen.de/downloads/KELLIA-white-paper.pdf
43

39

The PAThs project in Rome will be publishing stable identifiers for every Coptic
manuscript and for place names in Egypt; it will also Clavis Coptica entries for each
known Coptic text work.44 ​KELLIA partners encourage all Coptic projects to include
these identifiers in their metadata.
The Coptic Old Testament project explored mapping VMR-Data to METS/MODS toprovide an internationally approved metadata exchange format. This task could not be
accomplished:
Mapping the complex VMR structure to the even more complex METS/MODS
was time consuming; we aborted the trial during the conception-phase after
realising that we do not have the time to dig deep into METS/MODS to achieve aproper result.
● Due to the fragmentation of Coptic manuscripts, one “document” would be split in
the VMR into different items with different rightholders and holding institutions.
Mapping multiple items to a single METS/MODS representation was difficult,since METS/MODS is designed to present a single dataset for a single legal
Resource.
●

5. Data-AccessTo make data accessible for future research the metadata should be saved andprovided in a machine-readable form and under special licence agreements that allow
re-usage.
Many Coptological projects are accessible via self published or institutionally hosted
websites.45 But it depends on the project holders themselves if and how they publish
their data on this platform. On some websites one can easily download the required
information because free access to the data is provided. Just to name a few examples,
this is the case for the following projects: Coptic Scriptorium46, Inscriptions of Israel /Palestine47, U.S. Epigraphy Project48, epidat - epigraphische Datenbank49, Monasterium44​http://paths.uniroma1.it/

45

This White Paper’s scope is digital editions projects in a narrower sense (see above). As a side note,the blog of Alin Suciu should nevertheless be mentioned, where resources regarding coptological (mainly
philologically centered) publications are provided. (​http://alinsuciu.com​)46​http://copticscriptorium.org/

47​http://cds.library.brown.edu/projects/Inscriptions/index.shtml

40

50

, Epigraphische Datenbank Heidelberg51, Inscriptiones Graecae52, digilibLT - Biblioteca
digitale di testi latini tardoantichi53, Bibliotheca Palatina digital54, Papyri.info55 andPapyrus und Ostraka Projekt56. Most of them provide the data via XML-files. The
Deutsches Textarchiv57 and Germania Sacra. Die Kirche des Alten Reiches und ihre
Institutionen58 even offer more data formats like TCF, Turtle or json-ld). Sometimes afree registration is required to download the information (Papsturkunden des frühen undhohen Mittelalters59) and on a few occasions one can only register by paying a fee(Corpus dei Manoscritti Copti Letterari (CMCL)60).
Several homepages provide a section in which a reference to similar or related projects
such as Epigraphische Datenbank Heidelberg61, U.S. Epigraphy Project62, Inscriptionsof Israel / Palestine63, Papyri.info64, and Germania Sacra: Die Kirche des Alten Reiches

48​http://usepigraphy.brown.edu/projects/usep/collections/49​http://www.steinheim-institut.de/cgi-bin/epidat

50​http://monasterium.net/mom/home?_lang=deu

51​http://edh-www.adw.uni-heidelberg.de/home?lang=de52​http://telota.bbaw.de/ig/

53​http://digiliblt.lett.unipmn.it/index.php

54​http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/de/bpd/index.html

55​http://papyri.info/56​https://papyri.uni-leipzig.de/content/start.xml?XSL.lastPage.SESSION=/content/start.xml

57​http://www.deutschestextarchiv.de/58​https://adw-goe.de/fr/forschung/forschungsprojekte-akademienprogramm/germania-sacra/

59​http://www.papsturkunden.de/EditMOM/home.do60​http://www.cmcl.it/

61​http://edh-www.adw.uni-heidelberg.de/links

62​http://usepigraphy.brown.edu/projects/usep/links/

63​http://cds.library.brown.edu/projects/Inscriptions/related.shtml

64​http://papyri.info/docs/resources

41

und ihre Institutionen65 can be found. In doing so, it is easier for the user to get to know
and browse already existing and theme related undertakings. But this is a far cry froman extensive catalogue in which projects using digital methods are listed as it is justrudimentary linking from project-website to project-website. A central coptologicalplatform aggregating discipline-related digital editions or similar data does not exist at
the moment.
Some projects provide access to content data via defined APIs like OAI-PMH. (See Das
Altägyptische Totenbuch. Ein Digitales Textzeugenarchiv66 OAI-PMH interface.)

6. Recommendations
Data created by computer aided Coptological research should be provided asmachine-readable and thus digital data. In this manner encoded data including
metadata should be archived by institutionally or disciplinary bound repositories whichallow long-term digital preservation. This comprises not just storage space or its support
but also persistent identification of digital resources via persistent identifiers (PIDs) like
DOI67 or other kinds of Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI).68 As an institutional
Repository, for example, TextGrid-Repository69 can be mentioned which created aconsistent long-term preservation policy and infrastructure: Each digital resource [there]
is identified by a PID and accessible via an URL.70 Furthermore the Repository and its
data is fulltext searchable and thus provides direct access to all digital data produced.
Whereas recommending a specific Repository is not in the scope of this whitepaper’s
responsibility, repositories that are qualified by a ​DINI-Certificate71 or a similar
certification mark may be more desirable.

65​https://adw-goe.de/fr/forschung/forschungsprojekte-akademienprogramm/germania-sacra/links/

66​http://totenbuch.awk.nrw.de/

67​https://www.doi.org/

68

Persistent identifiers are not just to identify resources but also to cite content from digital resources.

69​https://textgridrep.org/

70

See for example the resource textgrid:123rw that may be accessed via
https://textgridrep.org/browse/-/browse/123rw_0
71​http://www.dini.de/dini-zertifikat/

42

Machine-readable data created during the process of digital editing should be explicitly
bound to a license which allows free access by means of scientific reuse. Therefore, theCreative Commons Licenses CC-BY72 and CC-BY-SA73 are recommended.
Data access does not just concern physical access to analog or digital resources but
also legal aspects with regard to creation and usage of resources. In that manner in themetadata, legal technicalities should be clarified for both the source and the digital
encoded data regarding authorship, data privacy and personality rights if applicable.
For linking and access, well-resourced projects should consider providing access tometadata via APIs (REST, OAI-PMH). Smaller projects can provide metadata
downloadable as csv files for further manipulation and research.
One desiderata is a central Coptological platform that catalogues projects withdescriptive and administrative metadata that can be searched (possibly drawn fromlinked data API’s from the projects). Desirable attributes include the following features:● in English and including projects world wide
● Searchable metadata and documentation:○ the link to the according project website (maintained to avoid dead links)○ a brief outline of the project○ the responsible persons and institutions○ metadata with regard to geographically, chronologically, thematically,
institutionally, data-access (free, registration, fee-based), status (ongoing,
completed, discontinued) information● a defined scope, eg. “digital editions”, “linguistically encoded corpora” etc.
● interactive: the user can contribute to the list of digital projects or correct an entry● list can be downloaded in various forms● license for use of data is stated72​https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/73​https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

43

● connection with other networks / platforms

44Appendix 5: Linked Data Standards and Practices
1.

Introduction

As part of the overall KELLIA collaboration goal of establishing data standards for
related and future projects, KELLIA set out to create standards that ensurecollaboration, data-exchange, and compatibility in linked-data initiatives across digital
Coptic projects. To this end, we have met with members of other projects working onlinked data initiatives in the ancient world, created products that are a result of dataexchange and link data across project in the KELLIA collaboration, and consideredcurrent practices in linked data when establishing standards, especially for metadata.
KELLIA partners and other digital projects working in Coptic need robust linked data
infrastructure that allows linking between KELLIA projects and to other projects, evenwhen standards between projects vary.
Several projects currently present opportunities to link geographical data from theancient world. In particular, US KELLIA partners have begun to work with Pleiades(​https://pleiades.stoa.org/​), a digital gazetteer of the ancient world. In doing so, they
have also worked with Pelagios (​http://commons.pelagios.org/​), which provides
infrastructure for linking geographic data. Pelagios works largely with projects focusedon the ancient and medieval periods. Both US and German KELLIA projects have also
used Trismegistos (​http://www.trismegistos.org/​) identifiers in metadata. Trismegistos isa group of metadata databases of information about texts, collections, authors, people,
and places. It originally began with information from papyrological and epigraphic
information from Egypt, but has since expanded to information from the ancient
Mediterranean world more generally.
Finally, KELLIA partners also look forward to working with PAThs(​http://paths.uniroma1.it/)​, a project focused on putting Coptic literary texts into theirgeographic context. PAThs plans to produce an “Archaeological Atlas of Coptic
Literature,” and, in doing so, collect and classify information about Coptic literature,collections, manuscripts, colophons, authors, copyists, donors, and institutions. Unlike
Trismegistos, which does not contain a comprehensive catalogue of Coptic manuscripts
and manuscript fragments, the PAThs project plans to provide permanent identifiers for
Coptic text-bearing objects. Ideally, future work will entail collaborating with
Trismegistos to update their catalogues. Such work will be very valuable for KELLIA
members, and controlled vocabularies and metadata standards in Coptic digital
humanities will certainly be influenced by the work of the PAThs project. Because
45

PAThs is a relatively new project, KELLIA partners are awaiting PAThs outcomes totake advantage of linked data opportunities more fully. Sharing and linking data makes
the work of the individual projects and initiatives that are part of KELLIA more valuable,
as other projects use and expand it. This has already been demonstrated by outcomesof sharing data noted below. Linking data to projects both within and outside of KELLIA
also makes our individual work more discoverable.

2.

KELLIA Linked Data Products

Online Coptic Dictionary:​ Entries in the online dictionary (​http://coptic-dictionary.org​)
are linked to Coptic SCRIPTORIUM digital textual data (described in more detail in the
Grant Products section​). The same linking opportunities are available to KELLIA
partners and other Coptic-language projects, who can freely annotate their digital texts
with links to online dictionary lemma searches.
Coptic Treebank: ​The automatic syntactic annotation lays the groundwork for linking
data about entities in Coptic texts, as described below. The treebank standards
themselves are described in more detail in the ​Grant Products section​.
Entity recognition: ​Proof-of-concept machine-processed entity-recognition (describedin more detail in the ​Grant Products section​) will allow for entity disambiguation andlinking opportunities for Coptic literature to named entities projects such as Pelagios,
Pleiades, Trismegistos, PATHs.
VMR-Coptic SCRIPTORIUM Converter: ​This converter (described in more detail inthe ​Grant Products section​) transforms digital text data produced by the Coptic Old
Testament project’s Virtual Manuscript Room to the EpiDoc TEI XML format used by
Coptic SCRIPTORIUM and pushes this XML text to Coptic SCRIPTORIUM’s natural
language processing pipeline. This converter facilitates the integration of digital text
corpora developing in both projects.

3.

Recommended standards

The KELLIA project recommends the following linked data standards, described in moredetail below.
● Projects should adopt and publicly document controlled vocabularies for use inmetadata, thus ensuring data integrity and the possibility of linking via API(section 3a)46

● Projects should provide automated metadata validation whenever possible(section 3a)● Projects should include metadata fields for collaborators’ unique identifiers(section 3a)● Projects should assign persistent identifiers to the digital objects they produce(section 3b)● Projects should include clear licensing information to facilitate data exchange(section 3b)
3a Standards for controlled vocabulary
In order to facilitate retrieving, linking, and exchanging data, KELLIA partners haveagreed upon recommended metadata and data structures, as outlined in the metadata
standards appendix of this grant report. We recommend all digital Coptic projects
establish internal controlled vocabularies for metadata. Such vocabularies provide
internal standards for populating metadata fields to ensure data integrity. Additionally, inthe absence of a robust hub for linked data (akin to Pelagios or Trismegistos), controlled
vocabularies lay the groundwork for linking via API’s or queries rendered in http URI
syntax. (E.g., in Coptic Scriptorium’s environment, the query
http://data.copticscriptorium.org/filter/author=Shenoute​ retrieves all documents where
the “author” metadatum is “Shenoute”, andhttp://data.copticscriptorium.org/filter/collection=Borgia%20Collection​ retrieves all
documents where the “collection metadatum is “Borgia Collection”). Controlled
vocabularies accessed through URI based queries can enable a project to achieve
4-star level linked data. Well-documented internal standards can also help to facilitate
the exchange of data, as conversions can be applied to communicate across different
project standards. Standards thus lay the groundwork for a more robust linking
environment for Coptic data in the future (such as Pelagios is for ancient geography).
To date, standard controlled vocabularies (such as Dublin Core, Getty, or theEuropeana EAGLE Vocabularies74) do not provide the coverage needed for Coptic
literary materials, and there is no comprehensive standard for controlled vocabulary forfields such as places, names, document identification, etc. in digital Coptic. Despite thislack of standard, we recommend projects develop internal standards, and the metadata
guidelines in this White Paper provide models. We also recommend an automatedprocess for metadata validation to ensure adherence to internal standards wheneverpossible. Our current annotation editor, the open source online XML editor GitDox,
provides automatic checking of metadata field names and values, ensuring that required74​https://www.eagle-network.eu/resources/vocabularies/47

metadata appears and matches regular expression patterns specifying valid values
across our documents. Likewise, whenever possible, projects should include unique
identifiers assigned to metadata fields by other projects. KELLIA partners should
therefore include a field for CoptOT/Coptic SCRIPTORIUM identifiers in metadata.
The Coptic Old Testament project has created and shared a list of standard names for
institutions that have Coptic manuscripts in order to standardize their metadata. Theirlist can be found here:(​https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jDeRLhM9tlG9pzkUWbyoi7CD2_L4yLdDM1y
J18ToT9A/edit#gid=0​). It includes references to the respective entries in the
Trismegistos “Collections” table ​http://www.trismegistos.org/coll/index.php​ Suchstandards will make the discovery and exchange of data across projects easier.
3b Standards for unique identifiers
As mentioned in the recommendations for data curation, digital objects created by eachprojects should be assigned persistent identifiers, such as Digital Object Identifiers orother Unique Resource Identifiers that are accessible via a URL (1.3.3). Section on
KELLIA current practices. Coptic SCRIPTORIUM assigns a unique document title toeach document as well as CTS (Canonical Text Service) URNs(​http://www.homermultitext.org/hmt-doc/cite/cts-urn-overview.html​) for the digital data intheir corpora. The URN schema includes two namespaces created specifically for
Coptic materials: copticLit for literary materials and copticDoc for documentarymaterials. Coptic SCRIPTORIUM provides a service (​data.copticscriptorium.org​) toresolve these URNs, and they can also be used in the ANNIS search and visualizationinterface.
Finally, as mentioned in the recommendations for data curation standards, all projects
should have clear licensing attached to all products in order to facilitate data sharing
and linking (1.3.4). Ideally, this information should both be included in the metadata
associated with each digital object and be evident or easily findable through any
web-based interface used to display the object.

4

Future plans in Coptic linked data

KELLIA partners look forward to continuing to share data and standards, as well as
collaborating with other Coptic and ancient studies projects. We have already begun towork with Pelagios and Pleiades to link our geographic data and make it discoverable toa wider scholarly and popular audience. We are especially excited about working with
the PAThs project in the future, as their proposed interlinked databases will provide an48

opportunity for other Coptic projects to review data and metadata standards in relation
to their work.

49