At the International Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, Amsterdam, 29 July –1 August 2024, the Peshitta Institute Progress report was read. Part of this report was an update of our projects related to the Peshitta and Digital Humanities. That part of the report is presented below in this blog post.
The electronic text project of the Peshitta Institute is an ongoing project involved in preparation and analysis of a digital version of the OT Peshitta. This project involves the creation of an electronic version of the Leiden Peshitta edition, known as the Vetus Testamentum Syriace. This electronic version has become available in 2022. An update, including the introductions to all the volumes in the printed editions, was published in 2023. It is available in the Brill Peshitta Online. If your institution or library doesn’t have it yet, make sure to suggest this wonderful tool to them!
The Brill portal includes the complete critical apparatus and introductions found in the printed Peshitta edition. Hannes Vlaardingerbroek developed OCR techniques for the digitization of the printed edition. For the few books that have not yet been published yet in the Leiden Peshitta edition, the text of manuscript 7a1 is used. The main text of the Peshitta edition without the critical apparatus is publicly availabe on GitHub.
DH projects based on the electronic edition carried out by the Eep Talstra Centre for Bible and Computer (ETCBC) include PaTraCoSy: Patterns in Translation: Using Colibri Core for the Syriac Bible This project was resently concluded. In this project, funded by the CLARIAH Fellowship programme. In this fellowship Mathias Coeckelbergs investigated to what extent can linguistically uninformed features help us in tracing divergent patterns in an ancient Syriac Bible translation and its Hebrew source text. He used the programme Colibri Core, developed by Maarten van Gompel. This tool, developed for machine translation, served well to analyse an ancient exisiting translation. Initial results of this project were presented at the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC) 2022 (full text here) and the IOSOT conference in Zürich in 2022. Its final deliverable will very soon be published in the forthcoming volume in the PLAL series edited by Lisa Agaiby Charbel El-Khaissi and Godwin M. Mushayabasa
Currently, we are working on the morphological analysis of the Peshitta OT. We aim at an analysis that not only identifies lexemes, but also includes all linguistic information that can be derived from word forms, such as number, gender, verbal stem, tense. The data will be open source and open access, so that it allows all kinds of linguistic and literary analysis. Our experiences with the Biblica Hebraica Stuttgartensia Amstelodamensis (BHSA) taught us that people want to analyze the data with their own tools, such as the widely used Python packages.
In the second half of the twentieth century, the morphological analysis of the Hebrew Bible took decades. We cannot afford spending another decade in preparing a analysed text of the Peshitta. We can speed up the process by using AI. In the project “Morphological Parser for Inflectional Languages Using Deep Learning” we developed methods for the automatic morphological analysis of Syriac. This project was generously supported by the Dutch eScience Center. Its deliverables include this conference paper.
One of its spin-offs of this project is the Qoroyo platform. This platform was developed by Yusuf Çelik. Qoroyo is a linguistic and hermeneutical tool that facilitates multilingual presentation and annotation of textual data and the application of computational analytical methods. Currently we use Qoroyo for the morphological encoding of the Peshitta as well as of the Syro-Hexaplaric Psalter in cooperation with the Editio critica maior of the Greek Psalter project.
Although the accurracy rates of the AI-generated analysis are promising, we still need human supervision to correct mistakes in the generated analysis. This is done by Matthias Benabdellah and Gegham Bdoyan. The project is made possible by the generous support of the Peshitta foundation and Brill publishers.
In addition to the people just mentioned, Martijn Naaijer, Constantijn Sikkel and Willem van Peursen are involved in this project.
