In Memoriam: James K. Aitken (1968-2023)
By Srecko Koralija It was with great sadness that I received the news that on Friday the 7th of April my PhD supervisor and professor James Aitken passed away after his second major heart attack. He was widely recognized as an outstanding scholar. He studied at the...
Could robots be religious?
On 12 December 2022 the Faculty of Religion and Theology of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and the research institute and CLUE+ organized a workshop centered around the provocative question: could robots be religious? The timing couldn’t be more appropriate: about...
Impressions of the Tenth Meeting of the International Organization for Targumic Studies
By Eveline van Staalduine-Sulman In July 2022 the International Organization for Targum Studies (IOTS) held its tenth meeting in Salzburg. There were, of course, some of the usual participants, but also surprisingly many new ones. We especially welcomed those from the...
Applying Log-likelihood Computations to Pattern Recognition Results of Colibri-Core.
In this third and final blogpost for the PaTraCoSy project (for the previous blogposts, click here or here), we delve deeper into the possibilities of the Colibri Core (CC) infrastructure to study the translation patterns between Hebrew and Syriac versions of the...
Morphological Parser for Inflectional Languages Using Deep Learning (Part II)
Willem van Peursen, Martijn Naaijer, Constantijn Sikkel, Mathias Coeckelbergs Encoded text as strings In our previous blogpost, we explained how the ETCBC morphological encoding results in a concisely structured string. We concluded that blogpost by observing that...
Morphological Parser for Inflectional Languages Using Deep Learning (Part I)
Willem van Peursen, Martijn Naaijer, Constantijn Sikkel, Mathias Coeckelbergs[1] “How can we make a Machine Learning (ML) based parser for the morphology of inflectional languages?” This question was the starting point for the project “Morphological Parser for...
Dhammapada Latine
Bee Scherer (project lead) Dirk Roorda (text fabric) Yvon Mattaar (Pāli input) Willem van Peursen (DAST lead) The Eep Talstra Centre for Bible and Computer (ETCBC) is linked to the research group Digital Approaches to Sacred Texts (DAST) at the Faculty of Religion and...
Tracing Patterns across Translations. Applying Colibri Core Techniques to the Peshitta.
This second blogpost for the PaTraCoSy project brings us to a first discussion of the translation patterns from the Hebrew Bible into the Peshitta. Before we can address the results, we briefly describe how we constructed the model. After installation of Colibri Core,...
Aligning Hebrew and Syriac Genesis. Initial Results of the PaTraCoSy Project.
This very first blogpost seeks to report on our advancements in the PaTraCoSy (PAtterns in TRAnslation: Using COlibriCore for the Hebrew Bible corpus and its SYriac translation) project, which is funded by CLARIAH. The overall goal of this project is to use the...
Using the ETCBC database for exploring social networks in Biblical law
The Mosaic laws of the Torah are quite unusual, embedded as they are in the narrative of the Torah. Thus, they are not only commands and prohibitions but relate intrinsically to the grand storyline of Torah extending from creation to the impending conquest of...
