Patrick J. Burns

Patrick J. Burns is Associate Research Scholar, Digital Projects for the ISAW Library and Research Associate Professor at ISAW. In this role he is engaged in a variety of data-driven research and software development projects, including directing ISAW Library projects such as ISAW Library New Titles, the Digital South Caucasus Collection, and ISAW Digital Monographs, as well as collaborating more broadly with ISAW Digital Programs in the areas of ancient world data processing and historical language text mining and analysis.

Patrick earned his doctorate in Classics from Fordham University in 2016 and was appointed as the first-ever Assistant Research Scholar in the ISAW Library in 2016. Between 2019 and 2022 Patrick held research positions in the Culture, Cognition, and Coevolution Lab at Harvard University and the Quantitative Criticism Lab at the University of Texas at Austin, conducting research on computational approaches to historical-language text, working at the intersection of literary criticism, philology, and big data. Patrick is the maintainer of LatinCy, pretrained natural language processing pipelines for Latin, a co-author/developer (with David Bamman) for Latin BERT, and has been a contributor to the Classical Language Toolkit, topics covered in his chapter “Building Text Analysis Pipelines for Classical Languages” for a collected volume Digital Classical Philology: Ancient Greek and Latin in the Digital Revolution, edited by Monica Berti for DeGruyter. Patrick also directs the "Representing Women Authorship in the Latin Treebanks" textual data annotation project.

Patrick has also taught a number of courses that bring together ancient world study and computational methods, including  “Introduction to Digital Humanities for the Ancient World”, "Text Analysis for Historical Language Research", "Statistical Programming for Ancient World Study", and "Generating Antiquity:  Generating Antiquity: Artificial Intelligence for the Ancient World". He has presented at and organized several professional panels, notably the Future Philologies: Digital Directions in Ancient World Text conference at ISAW in April 2018 and the Ancient Makerspaces workshop at the annual meetings of the Society for Classical Studies from 2017 to 2019. Recent publications include:

• 2024. “(Re)active Latin: Computational Chat as Future colloquia,” New England Classical Journal 51(1).
• 2024. “Do You Remember Being natus?: Some Thoughts on Latin Verse Composition and Artificial Intelligence.” Classical Outlook 99(3): 206–9.

His current book project is Exploratory Philology: Learning about Ancient Languages through Computer Programming, the product of a Spring 2022 fellowship at the Center for Hellenic Studies.