Future Philologies: Digital Directions in Ancient World Text

Conference organized by Patrick J. Burns (ISAW), David Ratzan (ISAW), and Sebastian Heath (ISAW)

Note: We are now fully booked for this event and are no longer accepting RSVPs.

Future Philologies will provide a forum for historical-language projects with a strong text analysis component to present their work across language-specific barriers in an effort to foster cross-linguistic, comparative feedback, recommendations, criticism, etc. between projects. Moreover, it is meant to embrace the scope of ancient-world languages represented at ISAW, which states in its mission the goal of offering "an unshuttered view of antiquity across vast stretches of time and place.” The format will be presentations on the state of corpus/text analysis/natural language processing work for each language coupled with recent successes and immediate challenges to be addressed in the near future. Projects will represent Latin, Greek, Coptic, Arabic, Classical Chinese, and cuneiform languages among others. Researchers in Computer Science and Information Science who can offer different perspectives on philological and corpus-based language work have also been included.

Program:

Introduction:

9:30am - Patrick J. Burns (ISAW), "The 'Point' of Future Philologies"

Keynote:

10:00am - Caroline Schroeder (Pacific/Coptic Scriptorium), "Annotating Heresies"

10:45 - Coffee

Ancient World Text and Digital Corpora (Moderator: Emily Cole, ISAW):

11:15am - Gregory Crane (Tufts/Leipzig), "Digital Philology 2.0, Smart Editions, and the Future of Work"

12:00pm - Alexander Magidow (URI) and Yonatan Belinkov (MIT), "Analyzing the History of Formal Written Arabic"

12:45pm - Lunch

Ancient World Text and Digital Methods (Moderator: Sebastian Heath, ISAW):

1:45pm - Donald Sturgeon (Harvard), "Accessible Digital Text Analysis for Classical Chinese"

2:30pm - Émilie Pagé-Perron (Toronto/MTAAC), "Machine Translation for the Sumerian language: Workflow and Pre-Requisites"

3:15pm - Coffee

Ancient World Text: Responses from Computer Science:

3:45pm - Kyle P. Johnson (Accenture), on historical text and natural language processing, "The Next 700 Classical Languages"

4:15pm - David Mimno and Laure Thompson (Cornell) on historical text and information retrieval, "Authorship and Translation: Bilingual Modeling of the Patrologia Graeca"

4:45pm - David Smith (Northeastern) on historical text and machine learning, "Viral Texts and Networked Authors: Computational Models of Information Propagation"

Speaker presentations will be followed by a panel discussion.

This event is co-sponsored by ISAW, the NYU Center for Humanities, the NYU Division of Libraries, the NYU Center for Ancient Studies, and the NYU Department of Classics.

Registration is required at isaw.nyu.edu/rsvp

Please check isaw.nyu.edu for event updates.

On a limited, first-come, first-served basis, ISAW is able to provide assistive listening devices at public events in our Lecture Hall. To ensure an optimal listening experience, we recommend that guests bring their own headphones (with a standard 1/8-inch audio jack) to connect to our devices. Please direct questions, comments, or suggestions to .