Rome Wasn't Digitized in a Day - Council on Library and Information ...

25
The eBeth Arké Syriac Studies Collection, described by its project website as “an electronic onl<strong>in</strong>e
resource library for Syriac studies,” complements the Syriac Studies Reference Library 74 that is hosted
by BYU. Hold<strong>in</strong>gs for both collections have come from the Semitics/Institute of Christian Oriental
Research Library 75 at the Catholic University of America <strong>in</strong> Wash<strong>in</strong>gton, DC. When complete, eBeth
Arké will <strong>in</strong>clude approximately 650 digitized items. 76 This collection of Syriac texts <strong>in</strong>cludes early
pr<strong>in</strong>ted catalogs, grammars, and lexicons, as well as many other rare volumes. The eBeth Arké
Collection is hosted on Vivarium, the digital library of the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library
(HMML), 77 which uses the proprietary software CONTENTdm 78 to manage its digital collection, and
can be searched or browsed by a variety of options (e.g., keyword, name of author). Each digitized
item can be viewed onl<strong>in</strong>e as an image book (<strong>in</strong> PDF format), and users can also create a collection of
favorites. Access to these books is also available through the Syriac Studies Reference Library at
BYU, and the collection can be browsed by ancient author (e.g., Cyril of Alexandria, Philoxenus) or
topic, or searched by keyword.
The largest research project <strong>in</strong> terms of provid<strong>in</strong>g access to digitized Syriac texts is currently under
way at BYU and seeks to create a comprehensive Syriac corpus of electronic texts. The project website
notes that no “coord<strong>in</strong>ated and large scale effort has yet been attempted” 79 so BYU began work<strong>in</strong>g to
create a Syriac corpus <strong>in</strong> 2001 and their efforts were jo<strong>in</strong>ed by David G. K. Taylor of Oxford
University <strong>in</strong> 2004. The project is work<strong>in</strong>g with both pr<strong>in</strong>ted editions of Syriac and manuscript
collections. 80 An electronic lexicon will be fully <strong>in</strong>tegrated <strong>in</strong>to this corpus, and the project has chosen
to use Jessie Payne-Smith’s Compendious Syriac Dictionary. This dictionary is be<strong>in</strong>g converted <strong>in</strong>to a
lexical database, and each word that is tagged <strong>in</strong> the corpus will be l<strong>in</strong>ked to its appropriate lexicon
entry.
Several recent publications address the work currently be<strong>in</strong>g undertaken <strong>in</strong> the development of the
“BYU-Oxford Corpus of Syriac Literature.” McClanahan et al. (2010) describe Syriac as an “underresourced”
dialect <strong>in</strong> that there are either few or no language tools (e.g., morphological analyzers, POS
taggers) available to work with and there are relatively little “labeled data” available (e.g., tagged
corpora, digitized Syriac texts) upon which to tra<strong>in</strong> and test algorithms. 81 Despite these challenges,
McClanahan et al. sought to replicate the type of manual annotation used to create the Peshitta New
Testament (Kiraz 1994) on a far larger scale us<strong>in</strong>g a number of computational tools and the data from
this s<strong>in</strong>gle labeled resource, or essentially to automatically annotate Syriac texts <strong>in</strong> a “data-driven
fashion,” an approach they labeled Syromorph. They created a probabilistic morphological analyzer for
Syriac that made use of “five probabilistic sub-models that can be tra<strong>in</strong>ed <strong>in</strong> a supervised fashion and
comb<strong>in</strong>ed <strong>in</strong> a jo<strong>in</strong>t model of morphological annotation” (McClanahan et al. 2010).
One other major contribution of their work is the <strong>in</strong>troduction of “novel algorithms” for the important
natural language process<strong>in</strong>g (NLP) subtasks of segmentation (often described as tokenization),
dictionary l<strong>in</strong>kage, and morphological tagg<strong>in</strong>g. All these algorithms made use of maximum entropy
74 http://www.lib.byu.edu/dlib/cua/
75 http://libraries.cua.edu/semicoll/<strong>in</strong>dex.html
76 Information about the digitization of these materials is available <strong>in</strong> a project report that was published <strong>in</strong> Hugoye, the onl<strong>in</strong>e journal of Syriac studies
(http://syrcom.cua.edu/Hugoye/Vol8No1/HV8N1PRBlanchard.html). Both the digitization and preparation of <strong>in</strong>itial metadata were undertaken by a
project team from Beth Mardutho of the Syriac Institute.
77 http://www.hmml.org/
78 http://www.contentdm.org/
79 The project notes that the most significant effort so far has been the work of the Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon with the Peshitta, a Syriac translation
of the Bible (http://cal1.cn.huc.edu/
80 See http://cpart.byu.edu/page=114&sidebar for a list of <strong>in</strong>itial texts that will be available
81 The work reported here made use of an annotated version of the Peshitta New Testament as well as of a concordance described <strong>in</strong> Kiraz (1994) and
(2000).