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Summer2019 Session10

Monica Berti edited this page Jun 10, 2019 · 36 revisions

Sunoikisis Digital Classics, Summer 2019

Session 10. Digital Representations of Ancient Dates

Thursday June 6, 17:00 - 18:15 CEST

Convenors: Monica Berti (Universität Leipzig), Gabriel Bodard (Institute of Classical Studies London), Frank Grieshaber (Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities), Tamara Kalkhitashvili (Ilia State University)

YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naQE34_er1s

Slides

Session outline

In this session we shall discuss issues of dating and date expressions in the ancient world, and editorial and digital approaches to finding, interpreting, encoding and exploiting these dates. We shall begin with a few case studies from different ancient cultures and disciplines, and then discuss in a bit more details a few digital approaches, including text encoding, named entity recognition, and ontologies and vocabularies for date and time.

  • Introduction: Chronology and dating in ancient world
  • Case-study: Prosopography
  • Case-study: Epigraphy
  • Case-study: Textual Sources
  • Text encoding: TEI custom date
  • NER for date expressions
  • Date ontologies: GODOT

Seminar readings

Further reading

  • M. Brosset. 1868. Etudes de chronologie technique. St. Pétersbourg. Available: https://reader.digitale-sammlungen.de/de/fs1/object/display/bsb10500793_00001.html
  • M. Tarxnisvili. 1955. Geschichte der kirchlichen georgischen Literatur auf Grund des ersten Bandes der georgischen Literaturgeschichte von K[orneli] Kekelidze bearbeitet von P. Michael Tarchnisvili in Verbindung mit Dr. Julius Aßfalg (= Studi e testi 185). Città del Vaticano, p. 31
  • A.E. Samuel. 1972. Greek and Roman Chronology. Calendars and Years in Classical Antiquity. München: C.H. Beck (preface)
  • C.H. George. 2014. Expressions of Time in Ancient Greece. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (introduction)
  • M. Berti (ed.). 2017. Epigraphy Edit-a-thon. Editing chronological and geographic data in ancient inscriptions (University of Leipzig, April 20-22, 2016). Available: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bsz:15-qucosa-220763
  • S. Štuhec. 2019. "DEFC chronology and PeriodO. Defining and linking archaeological periods." Digitizing Early Farming Cultures (posted on May 22, 2019). Available: https://defc.acdh.oeaw.ac.at/blog/post05/

Essay title

  • tba

Exercise

  1. Try to encode in TEI XML the following date expressions, and bring to discuss with your seminar group:
  • Throughout the reign of Constantine the Great
  • Inscription probably dates to the latter half of the reign of Tiberius
  • Dated xx37, but we don’t know which century. Probably within last 200 years.
  • In the year 6960 since the creation of the World.
  • In the Georgian dating system, Indiction 13, year რპდ (184). (Where the indiction is a 532 year cycle, and time is measured from the creation of the world in 5604 BCE.)
Expand this for the Gregorian year if you need help 964 C.E.
  1. Find the exercise for Godot at this link.
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