Referring is such an essential part of scholarly activity across disciplines that it has been regarded by John Unsworth (2000) as one of the scholarly primitives. There is, however, a kind of citation whose potential has not been fully exploited to date, despite the attention they recently received within Digital Classics research (Romanello, Boschetti, and Crane 2009; Smith 2010; Romanello 2011). These are called “canonical citations” and are the references commonly used to refer to passages of ancient texts. Given their importance to classicists, Crane et al. (2009) have argued, services for extracting and exploiting them should be part of the Cyberinfrastructure for Classics.
In this paper I discuss the various aspects of making such citations–together with the network of links they create–computable. Firstly, I will present the characteristics of such citations by showing how their semantics can be modeled by means of a formal ontology. Once such an ontology is created and populated, it can be used by a machine as a surrogate for domain knowledge in order to make inferences about texts and citations.
Secondly, I will illustrate how an expert system that captures canonical citations and their meaning from modern journal papers can be implemented by using Natural Language Processing techniques that are well known in Computer Science. I will then present two resources that were developed for this task and made available under Open Source licenses: 1) a manually corrected, multilingual corpus of approximately 30,000 tokens drawn from L’Année Philologique with annotated Named Entities; 2) a machine learning-based classifier that can be trained with this corpus to extract from texts canonical citations and mentions of ancient authors and works.
Finally, I will show some examples of how the citation network so extracted– consisting of journal papers and the ancient texts they refer to–can be exploited to offer scholars new ways and tools to studying intertexuality.
References
Crane, Gregory, Brent Seales, and Melissa Terras. 2009. “Cyberinfrastructure for Classical Philology.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 3.
Romanello, Matteo. 2011. “New Value-Added Services for Electronic Journals in Classics.” JLIS.it 2. doi:10.4403/jlis.it-4603.
Romanello, Matteo, Federico Boschetti, and Gregory Crane. 2009. “Citations in the digital library of classics: extracting canonical references by using conditional random fields.” In , 80–87. Morristown, NJ, USA: Association for Computational Linguistics.
Smith, Neel. 2010. “Digital Infrastructure and the Homer Multitext Project.” In Digital Research in the Study of Classical Antiquity, ed. Gabriel Bodard and Simon Mahony, 121–137. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing.
Unsworth, John. 2000. “Scholarly Primitives: what methods do humanities researchers have in common, and how might our tools reflect this?.” http://www3.isrl.illinois.edu/~unsworth/Kings.5-00/primitives.html.
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Exploring Citation Networks to StudyIntertextuality in Classics
Matteo Romanello (DAI, KCL) @mr56k
Digital Classics Assoc. Conference–Buffalo NY, April 5-6 2013
Matteo Romanello (DAI, KCL) @mr56k Exploring Citation Networks to Study Intertextuality in Classics
Scholarly disciplines such as classics need specializednamed entity searches: we need to determine not onlywhether “Th. 1.38” is a citation to a primary source butalso, if so, whether it designates Thucydides, book 1,chapter 38, Theocritus, Idyll 1, line 38 or some other text.
Matteo Romanello (DAI, KCL) @mr56k Exploring Citation Networks to Study Intertextuality in Classics
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.. PhD Research Project.scope........
modern (XIX–) publications in Classics
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new/more effective meansto find information for studying classical textsover (possibly) large text corpora
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to capture and make computable canonical citationsby applying Computer Science methods/tools (NLP, ontologymodelling)
Matteo Romanello (DAI, KCL) @mr56k Exploring Citation Networks to Study Intertextuality in Classics
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.. Big Picture
Matteo Romanello (DAI, KCL) @mr56k Exploring Citation Networks to Study Intertextuality in Classics
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.. Canonical Citations.why..
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references to object of research %* not only Classical texts:Bible, Shakespeare, etc.pre-digital text interoperability
.challenges..
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ambiguity: “Th.” Thucydides, Theogonia or Thebaid?alternative forms: “Hom. Od. I 1” / “α 1”implicit domain knowledge (e.g. opus maximum)discursive formunderspecification †lack of resources
Hom. Il. I 1 ; Athen. Deipn., X 412a ; Arist. Poetics 1451a35-b6
Matteo Romanello (DAI, KCL) @mr56k Exploring Citation Networks to Study Intertextuality in Classics
.S. Braund & G. Gilbert “An ABC of epic ira: anger, beasts, and cannibalism”Yale Classical Studies 32:250-285..
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In Statius’ « Achilleid » (2, 96-102) Achilles describes his diet ofwild animals in infancy, which rendered him fearless and mayindicate another aspect of his character - a tendency towardaggression and anger.
The portrayal of angry warriors in Roman epic is effected for themost part not by direct descriptions but indirectly, by similes of wildbeasts (e.g. Vergil, Aen. 12, 101-109 ; Lucan 1, 204-212 ;Statius, Th. 12, 736-740 ; Silius 5, 306-315).
These similes may be compared to two passages from Statius (Th.1, 395-433 and 8, 383-394) that portray the onset of anger indirect narrative. Analysis of these passages demonstrates that theconcept of « ira » in epic takes its moral aspect from the context.
Matteo Romanello (DAI, KCL) @mr56k Exploring Citation Networks to Study Intertextuality in Classics
Crane, Gregory, Brent Seales, and Melissa Terras. 2009. “Cyberinfrastructurefor Classical Philology.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 3.http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/3/1/000023/000023.html.
Ekbal, Asif, Francesca Bonin, Sriparna Saha, Egon Stemle, Eduard Barbu,Fabio Cavulli, Christian Girardi, and Massimo Poesio. 2011. “Rapid Adaptationof NE Resolvers for Humanities Domains using Active Annotation.” Journal forLanguage Technology and Computational Linguistics 26: 39–51.
Romanello, Matteo. 2013. “Creating an Annotated Corpus for ExtractingCanonical Citations from Classics-Related Texts by Using Active Annotation.”In Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing. 14thInternational Conference, CICLing 2013, Samos, Greece, March 24-30, 2013,Proceedings, Part I, ed. Alexander Gelbukh, 1:60–76. Springer BerlinHeidelberg. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-37247-6\_6.
Matteo Romanello (DAI, KCL) @mr56k Exploring Citation Networks to Study Intertextuality in Classics