KELLIA: Koptische/Coptic Electronic Language and Literature International Alliance

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Heike Behlmer
• Term: from 2015 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 273503199

KELLIA (Koptische/Coptic Electronic Language and Literature International Alliance) will promote interdisciplinary collaborations across the Digital Humanities and international standards in Coptic Studies. Coptic, the last phase of the Egyptian language, flourished in the Roman and early Islamic periods of Egypt. It reflects over a millennium of history of a multicultural and multilingual Near Eastern society. Coptic texts are fundamental primary sources for a wide range of scholarly fields, e.g. Linguistics, History, Theology/Religious Studies, Classics, Papyrology, Biblical Studies. Virtually all Digital Humanities research in Coptic is conducted by projects anchored in the United States or Germany. KELLIA will bring together partners conducting pioneering work in the field:• Germany: two major digital manuscript-based editorial projects: the digital edition of the Coptic Old Testament in Göttingen and the New Testament Virtual Manuscript Room (which includes Greek and Coptic manuscripts) in Münster.• United States: Coptic SCRIPTORIUM has pioneered corpus linguistics methods for computational multi-disciplinary research, at Georgetown University (Washington, DC) and the University of the Pacific (Stockton, CA) A collaboration between these teams will enable advances not only in Coptic Studies but in other fields that use corpus linguistics methods or produce digital text editions.The collaboration will produce five major outcomes:1. Models and standards for data curation, data management, and linked data for digital Coptic, crucial to establish internationally.2. A server-based, batch conversion tool to dynamically convert well-structured digital text data and meta-data to and from existing digital formats used by academic disciplines.3. The integration of corpus linguistics tools and methods and tools to produce collaborative digital editions. This integration will further interdisciplinary research beyond Coptic studies by combining methods from different DH fields.4. The development of a web-based, multi-layer annotation tool for collaborative text annotations in stand-off markup. This tool will be deployed in projects beyond Coptic and thus will contribute to corpus linguistics as a whole.5. Sharing of text corpora to advance digital and computational research into Coptic linguistics and literature that would not otherwise be possible for outcomes such as linked data standards and research into text-reuse (citations and quotations). These shared corpora will be used to develop models and case studies for the first four outcomes, and complement efforts for other languages that attest some of the same texts and topics.These outcomes are possible only through interdisciplinary and international collaboration. They will be achieved through collaborative software development, as well as workshops and meetings attended by project participants, and open to participation by other interested scholars.

• DFG Programme: Research data and software (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)
• International Connection: USA
• Partner Organisation: National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)
• Cooperation Partner: Caroline Schroeder