Coptic Scriptorium

Coptic SCRIPTORIUM (Sahidic Corpus Research: Internet Platform for Interdisciplinary multilayer Methods) is a collaborative, digital project created by Caroline T. Schroeder (University of the Pacific) and Amir Zeldes (Georgetown University). The team is constantly growing.
Coptic SCRIPTORIUM provides a platform for interdisciplinary and computational research in texts in the Coptic language, particularly the Sahidic dialect.  As an open-source, open-access initiative, the SCRIPTORIUM technologies and corpus function as a collaborative environment for digital research by any scholars working in Coptic. It provides:

• tools to process Coptic texts
• a searchable, richly-annotated corpus of texts using the ANNIS search and visualization architecture
• visualizations of Coptic texts
• a collaborative platform for scholars to use and contribute to the project
• research results generated from the tools and corpus

We hope SCRIPTORIUM will serve as a model for future digital humanities projects utilizing historical corpora or corpora in languages outside of the Indo-European and Semitic language families.

Acephalous Work 22 by Shenoute

Abraham Our Father by Shenoute

Letters of Besa

Apophthegmata Patrum

Bible

Note: This corpus is derived from the Sahidica New Testament, which was released by Warren Wells and made available for free electronic distributionfor academic use only. It is not licensed CC-BY; click here for Sahidica licensing information.

Tools

Some of the tools below use a Sahidic Coptic lexicon based on data kindly provided by Prof. Tito Orlandi and the CMCL project. When using the part-of-speech tagging models or the tokenization script and its lexicon please make sure to refer back to the CMCL project.

Part-of-Speech Tagging

• Scripts and models
  • Tokenization script and lexicon (assumes normalized Coptic, see tokenization guidelines)
  • TreeTagger - an open source part-of-speech tagger (additional Windows interface WinTreeTagger)
  • Coptic TreeTagger training models - for the fine and coarse grained tagsets (see tagging guidelines below)
• Documentation
  • Diplomatic Transcription Guidelines(version 1.1.0)
  • Tokenization Guidelines (see sections 3 & 4 of the Transcription Guidelines)
  • Part-of-Speech Tagging Guidelines (version 1.1.0)

Additional Annotation Tools

• Normalizer (normalizes orthography, removes diacritics)
• Language of origin tagger (to annotate loan words from Greek, Latin, Hebrew/Greco-Hebrew, Aramaic)

Converters

• Coptic encoding converter (converts older text character systems used for fonts such as Coptic and Laser Coptic into standards-compliant Coptic Unicode characters)
  • Simple recoding script in Perl (supports CMCL, Laser Coptic and UTF-8 encoding conversion)
  • Converter for ASCII encoding / UTF-8 of Dirk Van Damme and Gregor Wurst
  • Download both converters
• SaltNPepper - a metamodel based Java framework for multi-format conversion
• Excel-Plugin for importing and exporting EXMARaLDA XML, SGML, PAULA XML and subsets of TEI XML