research-article

Extracting two thousand years of latin from a million book library

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David SmithAuthors Info & Claims

Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage (JOCCH), Volume 5, Issue 1

Article No.: 2, Pages 1 - 13

https://doi.org/10.1145/2160165.2160167

Published: 27 April 2012 Publication History

Abstract

With the rise of large open digitization projects such as the Internet Archive and Google Books, we are witnessing an explosive growth in the number of source texts becoming available to researchers in historical languages. The Internet Archive alone contains over 27,014 texts catalogued as Latin, including classical prose and poetry written under the Roman Empire, ecclesiastical treatises from the Middle Ages, and dissertations from 19th-century Germany written—in Latin—on the philosophy of Hegel. At one billion words, this collection eclipses the extant corpus of Classical Latin by several orders of magnitude. In addition, the much larger collection of books in English, German, French, and other languages already scanned contains unknown numbers of translations for many Latin books, or parts of books.

The sheer scale of this collection offers a broad vista of new research questions, and we focus here on both the opportunities and challenges of computing over such a large space of heterogeneous texts. The works in this massive collection do not constitute a finely curated (or much less balanced) corpus of Latin; it is, instead, simply all the Latin that can be extracted, and in its reach of twenty-one centuries (from approximately 200 BCE to 1922 CE) arguably spans the greatest historical distance of any major textual collection today. While we might hope that the size and historical reach of this collection can eventually offer insight into grand questions such as the evolution of a language over both time and space, we must contend as well with the noise inherent in a corpus that has been assembled with minimal human intervention.

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Cited By

Eberle OBüttner Jel-Hajj HMontavon GMüller KValleriani M(2024)Historical insights at scale: A corpus-wide machine learning analysis of early modern astronomic tablesScience Advances10.1126/sciadv.adj171910:43Online publication date: 25-Oct-2024
https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adj1719
Candy PRonin M(2023)Interdisciplinary approaches to water in the Roman worldWater History10.1007/s12685-023-00318-115:1(1-10)Online publication date: 22-Mar-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/s12685-023-00318-1
Sprugnoli RMoretti GPassarotti M(2020)Building and Comparing Lemma Embeddings for Latin. Classical Latin versus Thomas AquinasItalian Journal of Computational Linguistics10.4000/ijcol.6246:1(29-45)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2020
https://doi.org/10.4000/ijcol.624
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Index Terms

Extracting two thousand years of latin from a million book library
1. Applied computing
  1. Computers in other domains
    1. Digital libraries and archives
2. Information systems
  1. Information systems applications
    1. Digital libraries and archives

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cover image Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage

Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage Volume 5, Issue 1

April 2012

53 pages

ISSN:1556-4673

EISSN:1556-4711

DOI:10.1145/2160165

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2012 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 27 April 2012

Accepted: 01 June 2011

Received: 01 February 2011

Published in JOCCH Volume 5, Issue 1

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Cited By

Eberle OBüttner Jel-Hajj HMontavon GMüller KValleriani M(2024)Historical insights at scale: A corpus-wide machine learning analysis of early modern astronomic tablesScience Advances10.1126/sciadv.adj171910:43Online publication date: 25-Oct-2024
https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adj1719
Candy PRonin M(2023)Interdisciplinary approaches to water in the Roman worldWater History10.1007/s12685-023-00318-115:1(1-10)Online publication date: 22-Mar-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/s12685-023-00318-1
Sprugnoli RMoretti GPassarotti M(2020)Building and Comparing Lemma Embeddings for Latin. Classical Latin versus Thomas AquinasItalian Journal of Computational Linguistics10.4000/ijcol.6246:1(29-45)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2020
https://doi.org/10.4000/ijcol.624
Van Hal TVan Rooy R(2017)‘Differing only in dialect’, or How collocations can co-shape conceptsLanguage & Communication10.1016/j.langcom.2017.04.00656(95-109)Online publication date: Sep-2017
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2017.04.006
Alam SMehmood FNelson MBogen PAllard SMercer HBeck MCunningham SGoh DHenry G(2015)Improving Accessibility of Archived Raster Dictionaries of Complex Script LanguagesProceedings of the 15th ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries10.1145/2756406.2756926(47-56)Online publication date: 21-Jun-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2756406.2756926
Crane GAlmas BBabeu ACerrato LKrohn ABaumgart FBerti MFranzini GStoyanova SAntonacopoulos ASchulz K(2014)Cataloging for a billion word library of Greek and LatinProceedings of the First International Conference on Digital Access to Textual Cultural Heritage10.1145/2595188.2595190(83-88)Online publication date: 19-May-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2595188.2595190
Jovanović N(2012)CroALaJournal of the Text Encoding Initiative10.4000/jtei.425Online publication date: 3-Feb-2012
https://doi.org/10.4000/jtei.425
Crane GAlmas BBabeu ACerrato LHarrington MBamman DDiakoff HBoughida KHoward BNelson MVan de Sompel HSølvberg I(2012)Student researchers, citizen scholars and the trillion word libraryProceedings of the 12th ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital Libraries10.1145/2232817.2232857(213-222)Online publication date: 10-Jun-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2232817.2232857

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