Analytical developments for the Homer Multitext: palaeography, orthography, morphology, prosody, semantics

Abstract

We describe ongoing development for The Homer Multitext focusing on the interlocking challenges of automated analysis of diplomatic manuscript transcriptions. With the goal of lexical and morphological analysis of prose and poetry texts, and metrical analysis of poetic texts (and quotations thereof), we face the challenge of working generically across languages and across multiple possible orthographies in each language. In the case of Greek, our working dataset includes Greek following the conventions of Attica before 404 BCE, the conventions of “standard” literary polytonic Greek, and the particular conventions found in Byzantine codex manuscripts of Greek epic poetry with accompanying commentary. The latest work involves re-implementing existing CITE Architecture libraries in the Julia language, with documentation in the form of runnable code notebooks using the Pluto.jl framework. The Homer Multitext has been a work in progress for two decades. Because of the project’s emphasis on simple data formats (plain text, very simple XML, tabular lists), our data remain valid even as we gain understanding of the challenges posed by our source-material, particularly the 10th and 11th Century manuscripts of Greek epic poetry with accompanying ancient commentary that, within themselves, represent over a thousand years of linguistic evolution. The work outlined here represents the latest shift in our development tools, a flexibility likewise made possible by the separation of concerns that has been a central value in the project.