Guest lecture „A digital humanities approach to the study of medieval Latin documentary texts from the penitentiary archives"

On 29 November at 6:15 p.m., the University of Turku's PhD student Hanna-Mari Kupari will give a guest lecture on the digital humanities approach to medieval Latin penitential archival documents.

The lecture will be in English and it will be held in Lossi 3, room 415. The event is organised by the Karl Morgenstern Selts and the Department of Classical Philology. We will end the evening with a free format discussion and light refreshments, as is the tradition at Morgenstern Selts events.

"A digital humanities approach to the study of medieval Latin documentary texts from the penitentiary archives"

Hanna-Mari Kupari, University of Turku

My talk gives an easy-to-approach introduction for everyone interested in learning about the study of the Latin language with computational methods. All areas of historical linguistics require their own special considerations. For medieval Latin one area of attention is the conversion of printed editions—with plenty of implicit information and a human readable additional information in the apparatus—to digital language resources. It is not possible to just take some text and feed it into a computer algorithm and produce a database—the text needs an additional level of machine-readable metadata. One solution is to use a specific annotation to build a hierarchical structure, in this case, Extensible Markup Language (XML) by combining it with guidelines from The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). TEI is a joint effort in the text-centric community in digital humanities and has special guidelines for historical texts. In this talk, I will discuss some of the medieval Latin-specific issues while creating the penitentiary documents database. The penitentiary documents cover the petitions of absolutions and special licences of Catholics preserved as register copies by the Apostolic See in the Vatican dating from the late 14th century to the early 16th century.

This talk also offers an uncomplicated stepping stone to the world of automatic parsing. The use of material for various historical and linguistic research questions is difficult without the use of lemma-based search options and grammatical annotation. This is especially relevant for highly inflected languages like Latin and can be solved using syntactic parsing. Automatic parsing provides a machine learning-based dependency grammar analysis of the text. It determines the relationship among the words in a sentence and describes this in a machine-readable way. By combining the structured text with syntactic parsers we can gain new insights into the distant reading of the penitentiary documents. As a result, we can learn about the high and low ranks of medieval society and develop understanding of language history computationally and define variation in Latin in numbers. The talk can easily be followed with no prior knowledge of programming or computational methods.