Schedule

Unit 1: What is Ancient Language Processing?

Date	Topic	Assignment	Materials
09/04/25	Brushing-up on your Python character encoding; regex; pandas; parsing; functions	Choose one ancient language dataset: familiarize yourself with the data model, consider how this data model fits with the datasets presented in class. Remodel your data accordingly. Do not forget collecting metadata as defined in the class examples.	Tutorials: How to define a function List comprehensions Load, parse and extract data from ORACC json files RegEx101.com
23/04/25	Doing Computational Philology: the (ideal) pipeline research questions; microscope vs macroscope; quantification; large language models	Explore your dataset: upload the data into Voyant (or similar programs) or into an LLM and describe it based on distant reading techniques (i.e. quantification). Following this analysis decide where close reading would be necessary.	Reading: Rockwell & Sinclair (2016); Sommerschield et al. (2023) Tools: Voyant Tools AntConc LLM (ChatGPT, Claude, Olmoe etc.)

09/04/25

Brushing-up on your Python

character encoding; regex; pandas; parsing; functions

Choose one ancient language dataset: familiarize yourself with the data model, consider how this data model fits with the datasets presented in class. Remodel your data accordingly. Do not forget collecting metadata as defined in the class examples.

Tutorials:

23/04/25

Doing Computational Philology: the (ideal) pipeline

research questions; microscope vs macroscope; quantification; large language models

Explore your dataset: upload the data into Voyant (or similar programs) or into an LLM and describe it based on distant reading techniques (i.e. quantification). Following this analysis decide where close reading would be necessary.

Reading:

Rockwell & Sinclair (2016); Sommerschield et al. (2023)

Tools:

Voyant Tools
AntConc
LLM (ChatGPT, Claude, Olmoe etc.)

Unit 2: Digitization and Annotation

Date	Topic	Assignment	Materials
30/04/25	Pipeline I: Optical / Handwritten Character Recognition OCR, HTR, layout analysis, line segmentation, transcribing		Gordin, Alper et al. (2024); Lincke (2021); Chauhan’s blogpost (2022)
07/05/25	Pipeline II: Annotation Lemmatization, PoS-Tagging, Treebanking		Ong & Gordin (2024); Sahala & Lincke (2024); Farsi et al. (2025)

30/04/25

Pipeline I: Optical / Handwritten Character Recognition

OCR, HTR, layout analysis, line segmentation, transcribing

Gordin, Alper et al. (2024); Lincke (2021); Chauhan’s blogpost (2022)

07/05/25

Pipeline II: Annotation

Lemmatization, PoS-Tagging, Treebanking

Ong & Gordin (2024); Sahala & Lincke (2024); Farsi et al. (2025)

Unit 3: Operationalization and the Vector Space

Date	Topic	Assignment	Materials
14/05/25	No Class
21/05/25	Pipeline III: Operationalization of words I - the vector space		Tutorials: Playing with Neural Networks Reading: Riemenschneider (2025); Gordin et al. (2025)
28/05/25	Pipeline IV: Operationalization of words II - measuring distances	Process your data and measure distances: Data model using cuneiform data from ORACC with metadata can be found in the ALP 2024 course repository	Tutorials: Coding the past: understand TF-IDF in python Programming Historian: analyzing documents with TF-IDF Karsdorp, Kestemont, & Riddell 2021 Literature connector: textual similarity notebook Reading: Gavin (2020); Bennett & Sahala (2023); Schweitzer (2023); Jurafsky & Martin (2024)

14/05/25

No Class

21/05/25

Pipeline III: Operationalization of words I - the vector space

Tutorials:

Playing with Neural Networks

Reading:

Riemenschneider (2025); Gordin et al. (2025)

28/05/25

Pipeline IV: Operationalization of words II - measuring distances

Process your data and measure distances: Data model using cuneiform data from ORACC with metadata can be found in the ALP 2024 course repository

Tutorials:

Reading:

Gavin (2020); Bennett & Sahala (2023); Schweitzer (2023); Jurafsky & Martin (2024)

Unit 4: Network Analysis and Visualization

Date	Topic	Assignment	Materials
04/06/25	Pipeline V: Visualization I - Graph theory
11/06/25	Pipeline VI: Visualization II - Network metrics
18/06/25	Presentation of class projects and feedback