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

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In these cases we must provide a means for encod<strong>in</strong>g multiple annotations for a text and
allow<strong>in</strong>g scholars who disagree with a specific annotation to encode their disagreement <strong>in</strong> a
quantifiable form. For historical texts especially, scholarly disagreement can be found not only
on the level of the correct syntactic parse, but also on the form of the text itself (Bamman,
Mambr<strong>in</strong>i, and Crane 2009).
The text of Aeschylus serves as a useful example, they argue, for many scholars would disagree not
only on how a text had been annotated but also on the reconstructed text, or the specific edition that
was used as the source for annotation. The authors argue that the process of creat<strong>in</strong>g scholarly
treebanks is similar to that of creat<strong>in</strong>g critical editions:
As the product of scholarly labor, a critical edition displays the text as it is reconstructed by an
editor; it is thus an <strong>in</strong>terpretative hypothesis whose foundations lie on the methods of textual
criticism. A scholarly treebank may be def<strong>in</strong>ed by analogy as a syntactically annotated corpus
that aga<strong>in</strong> reflects an <strong>in</strong>terpretation of a s<strong>in</strong>gle scholar, based not only on the scholar’s
philological acumen but also on a degree of personal taste and op<strong>in</strong>ions that are culturally and
historically determ<strong>in</strong>ed. A scholarly treebank thus distances itself from the notion that l<strong>in</strong>guistic
annotations can be absolute; when deal<strong>in</strong>g with non-native historical languages especially, a
syntactic <strong>in</strong>terpretation of a sentence is always the <strong>in</strong>terpretation of an <strong>in</strong>dividual and therefore
subject to debate (Bamman, Mambr<strong>in</strong>i, and Crane 2009).
In order to address this issue, the AGDT focused on creat<strong>in</strong>g a model that allowed for assign<strong>in</strong>g
authorship to all <strong>in</strong>terpretative annotations. By do<strong>in</strong>g so, the authors hoped to achieve two goals. First,
by publicly releas<strong>in</strong>g the data with citable ownership, they wanted to provide a core data set around
which scholars could add their own annotations; second, they hoped that by publicly acknowledg<strong>in</strong>g
the creators of annotations they could promote the idea of scholarly treebank<strong>in</strong>g as an act of scholarly
publication that is similar <strong>in</strong> form to publish<strong>in</strong>g a critical edition or commentary. They also hoped that
their model, which gave <strong>in</strong>dividual recognition to student contributions to a treebank, would serve as a
model for <strong>in</strong>corporat<strong>in</strong>g undergraduate research <strong>in</strong>to classical teach<strong>in</strong>g. Many of these issues are
revisited through this review, specifically the need for digital <strong>in</strong>frastructure to support multiple
annotations of different scholars (regard<strong>in</strong>g op<strong>in</strong>ion, certa<strong>in</strong>ty, etc.), the ability to show that the
creation of digital objects is <strong>in</strong> itself an act of <strong>in</strong>terpretative scholarship, the importance of attributable
and citable scholarship, and the need to support new models of collaboration.
Morphological Analysis
Some of the challenges of automatic morphological process<strong>in</strong>g for Sanskrit (Huet 2004) and Sumerian
(Tablan et al. 2006) have already been discussed. This subsection focuses on some recent research
work <strong>in</strong> Greek and Lat<strong>in</strong>.
Classical Greek is a highly <strong>in</strong>flected language and this poses challenges for both students and scholars
as detailed by John Lee:
Indeed, a staple exercise for students of ancient Greek is to identify the root form of an
<strong>in</strong>flected verb. This skill is essential; without know<strong>in</strong>g the root form, one cannot understand the
mean<strong>in</strong>g of the word, or even look it up <strong>in</strong> a dictionary. For Classics scholars, these myriad
forms also pose formidable challenges. In order to search for occurrences of a word <strong>in</strong> a corpus,
all of its forms must be enumerated, s<strong>in</strong>ce words do not frequently appear <strong>in</strong> their root forms.