BAM

Digital Cicero builds on data collected by Caitlin Marley for her University of Iowa Dissertation, “Sentiments, Networks, Literary Biography: Towards a Mesoanalysis of Cicero’s Corpus” (2018).  The first component of Digital Cicero is a network based on data gathered from the Epistulae ad Familiares, including the names of Cicero’s correspondents, the dates of the letters, their geographic origin, their destinations, the people who were mentioned in every letter, and the places mentioned. The resulting visualization shows the exchange of letters in the ad Familiares. The size of the node corresponds with the amount of exchanged between the correspondents:

http://bam.lib.uiowa.edu/digitalcicero/

Terra Biblica

The first test text for Terra Biblica is the Gospel of Luke. Our material on the Gospel of Luke makes use of a dataset on the literary character networks in that Gospel compiled by University of Iowa graduate student Cory Taylor for his dissertation.  The pairs of characters you see represent what we call a co-appearance network: that is, these two characters are inferred to appear together in a given scene, based on the narrative progression of the text.  This human entered information is a vast improvement on the alternative of automated network extraction based on Named Entity Recognition.  Cory is compiling similar data for all the Gospels, and is also studying other kinds of literary character networks, including dialogue networks.

As we read, use, and apply various articles, books, and volume chapters, we will post their bibliographic details to our Zotero group.!

The Iowa Canon of Ancient Authors and Works, currently under development, will feature a database that aims to record all known Greek and Latin authors and their writings, including fragmentary and lost texts, from the earliest period through the seventh century CE.  It will provide extensive metadata for each work, including the date and place of its composition; its status as pseudepigraphic or disputed; its status as complete, fragmentary, or lost; its status as a translation or original Latin composition; its status as Christian or non-Christian; attested abbreviations for the work; a genre designation based on the project’s genre typology; and cross references to other canonical ids (such as the Perseus Catalog, digilibLT, the Packard Latin Canon, and VIAF).  The Canon’s metadata will be available through multi-faceted search and browse in a map-centered interface which visualizes user-selected works according to the location of their author.  A beta version, to be released in Spring 2021, will focus on the Latin Canon, with some Greek entries.  The subsequent phase of the project will be the integration of the Latin Canon with the Greek Canon through their shared metadata categories. 

Paul Dilley is the PI of the Iowa Canon of Ancient Authors and Works, Ryan Horne is the lead developer.  A number of undergraduate and graduate students have contributed: Ed Keogh, Noah Anderson, and Spencer Schmalz (developers); Kenneth Elliot, Elijah Fleming, Tyler Fyotek, Sarah Hales, Caitlin Marley, Peter Miller, Bob Morley, Daniel Munn, Echo Smith, Dana Spyridakos, Jeremy Swist, Ryan Tribble, Jonathan Young, and Wenxuan Xu (data research).