1 The Digital du Cange: Moldy Old Tomes Make an Internet Comeback Andrew Gollan and Ross Scaife Modern and Classical Languages, Literatures, and Cultures February 23, 2005

2 How do we move this 17 th century resource into the 21 st century?

3 Major Periods of Latin Literature Archaic: down to c. 100 BCE Classical: c. 100 BCE to c. 200 CE Late Antique: c. 200 CE to 500 CE Medieval: c. 500 CE to c CE Renaissance (Humanistic): c CE to c Neolatin: c CE to present

4 Some Lexica for Archaic and Classical Latin Thesaurus linguae latinae (TLL) Forcellini. Totius latinitatis lexicon Lewis and Short Oxford Latin Dictionary

5 Souter: A glossary of Later Latin to 600 A.D C. du Fresne, seigneur Du Cange. Glossarium ad scriptores mediae et infimae latinitatis, 10 vols J.F. Niermeyer. Mediae latinitatis lexicon minus Some Lexica for late Antique and Medieval Latin

6 Some Lexica for Humanistic and Neo- Latin Egger (Vatican): Lexicon recentis Latinitatis: a dictionary of contemporary Latin Hoven. Lexique de la prose latine de la renaissance. 1994

7 Problems with the status quo Physical access extremely limited: rare and expensive resources Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (TLL) moving at a snail’s pace inadequate application of computers Copyright restrictions vs. open access Desirability of corpus-based approach

8 Latin on line so far What about all the databases Young Library subscribes to? David Packard’s PHI: more promising Perseus Latin corpus: available but limited Lewis and Short Available in TEI-XML from Perseus Limited electronic extensions in place

9 Our goals and principles Incremental approach adding value at each level Push the envelope technically in how one goes about lexicography Network effect: leverage the distributed community Open Access licensing of all data (Creative Commons)

10 Where we are now: Stage I Indexed page images (scans, OCR, and CGI) Complete transcriptions with simple markup Gradually more elaborate markup of original lexica

11 What we want to do: Stage II Merge the parallel lemmata in the separate lexica: this is the hard part! Concatenate lemmata Map common citations Apply WordNet or similar approach to group semantically related definitions Create interface that allows humans to clean up the resulting mess

12 What we want to do: Stage III Implement methods for collaboration on extending this resource Multiple perspectives: from a single source, generate thesauri, lexica for particular authors or genres or locales or periods Die happy.

13 UK: a good locale for this work Strong interest in post-Classical Latin among faculty and graduate students History of projects in humanities computing related to classical languages and cultures

14 A propitious moment… Computational humanists standardizing on XML (mostly TEI) markup of texts Powerful tools emerging for working with XML, e.g. editors and XML-aware databases Also: important recent advances in computational linguistics (machine learning systems) OCR getting much better

15 Challenges of networked scholarship Experts needed to improve merging of our electronic lexica extend them with new information Credit and recognition based on tracking and evaluation of incremental contributions to scholarship Emerging forms of evaluation