1. Participatory Philology:
The History of Science and the
Future of Historical Language
Education
Citizen Cyberscience Summit
February 2014

2. What is Philology?
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)
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3. What is Philology?
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].
Augustus Boeck, “Oratio nataliciis
Friderici Guilelmi III.” (1822)
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4. (What are written sources?)
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5. What is Philology?
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.
Augustus Boeck, “Oratio nataliciis
Friderici Guilelmi III.” (1822)
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6. The Open Philology Project: two
fundamental goals:
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.
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7. The geography of Greek and
Latin
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8. The Open Philology Project: two
fundamental goals:
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.
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9. What is Participatory Philology?
“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.
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10. 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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11. The Open Philology Project:
workflow
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Slide credit: Greta
Franzini (2013)

12. Greek and Latin Education in
Europe
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Infographic courtesy of
Emily Franzini (2013)

13. Pillars of OPP eLearning
Pillar
Includes…
I. Social
Constructivism
actively creating new knowledge from prior localization of resources and
understanding and context: conversation
working on sources of local
between student and self
provenance
II.
Apprenticeship
learning the craft from experts in the field
and learning by doing: active collaboration
between students, teachers, and
researchers
III. Dialogue
collaborative translation,
old conversations, new participants:
knowlege exchange across space and time, games and enhanced digital
editions
between students in different places and
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different eras
Open Philology Tools &
Resources
annotation, ePortfolios and
distributed review

14. I. Localization: current
collaboration
English
Europe/North
America
Goals
German
Italian
Europe
•
Croatian
Bulgarian
Georgian
Persian
•
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.
Eurasia
Western
Asia
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15. I. Localization: materials of local
interest
Goals
•
INSERT SCREENSHOT OF CROALA
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CroaLa

16. I. Dynamic Syllabi
Customized in accordance with the particular needs of...
Texts
Example: current Open Philology development of introductory Greek course for Thucydides
Potential variables: what morphology and vocabulary exists in the text?
Textbooks
Example: usage by Open Philology eLearning of digitized John Williams White First Greek Book
Potential variables: in what order and what language are grammatical concepts presented?
Learners
Example: collection of user data by Phaidra and Perseids, translation of learning resources
Potential variables: learning style, age, L1
Teachers
Example: Perseids syllabi for Tufts University Classes
Potential variables: Semester length, hours facetime per week, school/student technical ability
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17. II. Aligned translation for reading, learning,
and analysis
Published English
Literal English
Literal Persian
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Persian translation by
Maryam Foradi (2013)

18. II. Morphological analysis: L1-independent display
of a sentence
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19. II. ePortfolios: Building a shareable index of digital
reputation
Scoring
Database
Optimisation of
individual learning
Syntax
Data-driven learning
research
Alignment
Morphology
Level-Up:
Assessment of
knowledge
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Identification of
reputation index for
micro-publications
Slide credit: Maria
Moritz & Frederik
Baumgardt

20. III. Games for data contribution
Transcriptio
n
Translation
(Alignment)
•
•
•
Practise typing by
Captchas
Identify OCR errors
•
Linguistic
Annotation
Fill in a missing
word (forms)
•
Align new
translation
•
Suggest correction
for existing
translations
•
Name
Collaborative
translation
environment.
•
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Identify the
morphology of a
given word and
context
Identify the
syntactic function of
a word
(treebanking)
•
Who/where/what is
it?
•
Uncover ethnicities,
locations, events in
ancient texts

21. III. Digital editions:
Games cover every stage in the workflow of a digital edition
Goal
Transcription: OCR correction
Translation: alignment + collaborative translation
Linguistic Annotation
Identifying people and places(named entities)
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Alpheios.net

22. Back to the future
Humboldt vision of education = Students produce knowledge

23. Positive feedback loop for researchers
Citizen
contribution
Textual data + user
metadata
Better resources for
historical texts
New Knowledge
This data contributes to the work of researchers in multiple fields
across the sciences and humanities, including....
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24. Natural Language Processing, Computational linguistics
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Slide credit: Marco
Büchler

25. Teaching & learning, Cognitive science: quantifying
learning progress
Example: What percentage of the
original texts can already be
understood?
Thucydides
"The Peloponnesian War”
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Slide credit: Monica
Lent (2013)

26. And of course, the humanities!

27. And of course, the humanities!

28. A word of caution!
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.
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29. Thank you!
www.dh.uni-leipzig.de
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30. Further reading
Crane, G. et al. Student Researchers, Citizen Scholars and the
Trillion Word Library.
Smith, N. (2009) Citation in Classical Studies.

31. Image Sources
Slide #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

32. Medieval civilizations in
conversation
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33. Text-based dialogue across
space & time