Participatory Philology: The History of Science and the Future of Historical Language

Education

Citizen Cyberscience SummitFebruary 2014

What is Philology?

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Itaque ubi, quae et qualis philologia meo iudicio sit, quaeritis, simplicissima ratione respondeo, si non latiore, quae in ipso vocabulo inest, potestate accipitur, sed ut solet ad antiquas litteras refertur, universae antiquitatis cognitionem historicam et philosophicam.

Augustus Boeck, “Oratio nataliciis Friderici Guilelmi III.” (1822)

What is Philology?

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Augustus Boeck, “Oratio nataliciis Friderici Guilelmi III.” (1822)

Philology is the analysis of the ancient world in its entirety, including everything in the physical and the intellectual world through the use of written sources. [paraphrase].

(What are written sources?)

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What is Philology?

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Augustus Boeck, “Oratio nataliciis Friderici Guilelmi III.” (1822)

No aspect of human culture is outside the purview of the philologist. No methodology is out of scope if it allows us to draw meaning from the words of the past – whether that methodology involves archaeological digs, irregular verbs, or probability theory.

The Open Philology Project: two fundamental goals:

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1. To advance the role of historical language texts in human intellectual life as broadly and as deeply as possible in a global world, with initial resources focused on Greco-Roman culture and Classical Greek and Latin languages.

The geography of Greek and Latin

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The Open Philology Project: two fundamental goals:

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1. To advance the role of historical language texts in human intellectual life as broadly and as deeply as possible in a global world, with initial resources focused on Greco-Roman culture and Classical Greek and Latin languages.

2. To blow the dust off the simple, cogent and ancient term philology and to support an open philology that can, in turn, support a dialogue among civilizations.

What is Participatory Philology?

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“Illustration to Archimedes remark “Δοσ μοι που στω και κινω την γην”, as quoted by Pappus of Alexandria in Collection or Synagoge, Book VIII, c. AD 340. Greek text in Pappi Alexandrini Collectionis edited by Friedrich Otto Hultsch, Berlin, 1878, page 1060.

Often translated into English as “Give me a place to stand on, and I will move the earth” (Dikshoorn 1987) or “Give me but one firm spot on which to stand, and I will move the earth” (Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, 1953). ”

Giving students and interested citizens a “place to stand on“ in the discipline.

Current Challenges in Participatory Philology

1. More text than academic researchers, or computers, can analyze alone.

Solution? Citizen and student engagement. But...

2. Wide geographic dispersal and variable abilities of students.

And...

3. Little institutional incentive to teach many historical languages, particularly those with a geographic center outside of contemporary regional boundaries (e.g. Coptic, Classical Arabic among European and North American institutions, or Greek and Latin at Iranian universities).

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The Open Philology Project: workflow

11Slide credit: Greta

Franzini (2013)

Greek and Latin Education in Europe

12Infographic courtesy

of Emily Franzini (2013)

Pillars of OPP eLearning

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Pillar Includes… Open Philology Tools & Resources

I. Social Constructivism

actively creating new knowledge from prior understanding and context: conversation between student and self

localization of resources and working on sources of local provenance

II. Apprenticeship

learning the craft from experts in the field and learning by doing: active collaboration between students, teachers, and researchers

annotation, ePortfolios and distributed review

III. Dialogue old conversations, new participants: knowlege exchange across space and time, between students in different places and different eras

collaborative translation, games and enhanced digital editions

I. Localization: current collaboration

Persian

Croatian

Italian

German

Georgian

Bulgarian

Goals

• Allow learners to work with digitized textbooks and translations in their preferred modern language.

• Present learners with explanatory material sensitive to the context of their language.

Europe

Eurasia

Western Asia

English

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Europe/North

America

I. Localization: materials of local interest

Goals

• INSERT SCREENSHOT OF CROALA

15 CroaLa

I. Dynamic Syllabi

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Customized in accordance with the particular needs of...

TextsExample: current Open Philology development of introductory Greek course for

ThucydidesPotential variables: what morphology and vocabulary exists in the text?

TextbooksExample: usage by Open Philology eLearning of digitized John Williams White First Greek

BookPotential variables: in what order and what language are grammatical concepts

presented?

LearnersExample: collection of user data by Phaidra and Perseids, translation of learning resources Potential variables: learning style, age, L1

TeachersExample: Perseids syllabi for Tufts University ClassesPotential variables: Semester length, hours facetime per week, school/student technical

ability

II. Aligned translation for reading, learning, and analysis

Literal English

Published English

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Literal Persian

Persian translation by Maryam Foradi

(2013)

II. Morphological analysis: L1-independent display of a sentence

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II. ePortfolios: Building a shareable index of digital reputation

Scoring

Database

Syntax

Morphology

Alignment

Level-Up: Assessment of

knowledge

Optimisation of individual learning

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Identification of reputation index for micro-publications

Data-driven learning research

Slide credit: Maria Moritz & Frederik

Baumgardt

III. Games for data contribution

Linguistic Annotation

Translation

(Alignment)

Transcription

Name

• Identify the morphology of a given word and context

• Identify the syntactic function of a word (treebanking)

• Fill in a missing word (forms)

• Align new translation

• Suggest correction for existing translations

• Collaborative translation environment.

• Practise typing by Captchas

• Identify OCR errors

• Who/where/what is it?

• Uncover ethnicities, locations, events in ancient texts

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III. Digital editions: Goal

Games cover every stage in the workflow of a digital edition

Linguistic Annotation

Translation: alignment + collaborative translation

Transcription: OCR correction

Identifying people and places(named entities)

21 Alpheios.net

Back to the future

Humboldt vision of education = Students produce knowledge

Positive feedback loop for researchers

Textual data + user metadata

Citizen contributio

n

New Knowledge

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Better resources for historical

texts

This data contributes to the work of researchers in multiple fields across the sciences and humanities, including....

Natural Language Processing, Computational linguistics

24Slide credit: Marco

Büchler

Example: What percentage of the original texts can already

be understood?

Teaching & learning, Cognitive science: quantifying learning progress

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Thucydides "The Peloponnesian War”

Slide credit: Monica Lent (2013)

And of course, the humanities!

And of course, the humanities!

A word of caution!

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Scholars often insist that we’re not meant to take accounts of Atlantis literally. ‘The idea

is that we should use the story to examine our ideas of government and power,’ says

the philosopher Julia Annas in Plato: A Very Short Introduction (2003). ‘We have

missed the point if instead of thinking about these issues we go off exploring the sea

bed.’

Platt, E. (2013). “Out of the Deep.” aeon Magazine.

Thank you!

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www.dh.uni-leipzig.de

Further reading

Crane, G. et al. Student Researchers, Citizen Scholars and the Trillion Word Library.

Smith, N. (2009) Citation in Classical Studies.

Image SourcesSlide #4: Top from left: inscribed objects, printed books

Bottom from left: Inscriptions, papyri, manuscripts

Image source: book: http://library.wustl.edu/wishlist/images/emblemata.jpg

Image source: inscription: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bf/Gortys_law_inscription.jpg

Image source: papyrus: http://www.schoyencollection.com/papyri_files/ms2752.jpg

Slide #9:Image and caption in the public domain: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Archimedes_lever.png

Slide #33: Image credit: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Talmud-Berachoth.jpg

Medieval civilizations in conversation

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Text-based dialogue across space & time