by Anna Jordanous
Draft abstract. Co-authored with Stuart Dunn (lead author), Mark Hedges and Christophe Storz. Full paper to appear in Proceedings of Computer applications and quantitative methods in Archaeology 2012, Southampton, UK
Most textual analysis in archaeology has focused on the digitization and retrieval of secondary or tertiary... more
Most textual analysis in archaeology has focused on the digitization and retrieval of secondary or tertiary literature. This means that there has been little examination of how the use of methods of marking-up and linking primary material culture can be used to inform primary textual analysis, and vice versa, despite many conceptual similarities. Like archaeological contexts, discrete and philologically significant sections of manuscripts require skill both to identify and to record, and defining them using quantitative means is not always easy. Like text editors, archaeologists link pieces of related information. For example the Harris Matrix describes links between contexts, and the stratigraphic sequences between them. Database management systems have long been used to link information about artefacts and features across sites, and to enable cross-searching. More recently, semantic-oriented approaches such as the CIDOC CRM and Semantic Web have been used to link defined entities of archaeological or cultural heritage information identified by URIs and described and linked using controlled standards such as RDF. This paper will examine the use of such standards and methods in archaeology, and focus on their transference to defining and linking related units of text in original manuscripts, using primary textual case studies from Sharing Ancient WisdomS (SAWS). SAWS comprises three teams, at King's College London, The Newman Institute Uppsala in Sweden, and the University of Vienna. The aim is to present and analyse the tradition of wisdom literatures in Greek, Arabic and other languages. Throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages, anthologies of extracts from larger texts, containing wise or useful sayings (gnomologia) were created and circulated widely, since few complete texts were available in manuscript form. Focusing on original manuscripts of gnomological texts (not editions), SAWS uses a bespoke TEI XML schema to mark up individual segments identified by expert editorial intervention. These include (for example) translations of individual sayings, derivations from a saying in one tradition to another, references to the same subject across traditions, authorship of sayings, and so on. Segments are then linked according to their significant properties, described according to an ontology that extends the CIDOC CRM, and linked using RDF.
The parallels with archaeological information and sequencing are thus pronounced. It is possible to regard such segments as artefacts, albeit of textual, rather than material, nature. While it would be facile to impose a straight metaphor of ‘textual artefacts’ on this material, the theory that they are connected in complex ways owes much to material culture, and the latter’s language provides clues for deeper interrogation: what typologies and common attributes can be applied to segments, how do these evolve over time, can one class of gnomic saying be demonstrated to have evolved in response to (and/or under the influence of) another. This paper will provide concrete examples from SAWS to demonstrate how the combination of XML, RDF and CIDOC are being employed; and thus delve deeper than existing secondary literature approaches to archaeological text mining, by comparing methodologically the informatics of complex primary texts with the informatics of cultural heritage.
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