Upcoming Conference Papers
Shmuel D. Clark (09/2023) “‘I exercised authority…I eradicated the lands’: Comparing Perceptions of Southern Babylonia in Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian Sources”. EAA 2023, Belfast, Ireland 30 August-2 Septmber 2023, session: What Makes a Settlement? Comparative Perspectives on Settlement Structures and Patterns from Neolithic to Iron Age.
Stav Klein and Shai Gordin (07/2023) “In Search of Lost Time – Restoring Chronologies of Individuals from Broken Cuneiform Resources”. GrapHNR 2023, Mainz, Germany 18-21 July 2023, session: Computational Modeling.
Shai Gordin and Luis Sáenz (07/2023) “eAkkadian: a coursebook for doing Assyriology digitally”. RAI 68, Leiden, Netherlands 17-20 July 2023. Workshop: Equality of Access to Mesopotamia: Outreach and Pedagogy.
Shai Gordin and Orly Lewis (07/2023) “Machine learning of Ancient Scripts and Languages through Collaboration”. DH 2023, Graz, Austria 10-14 July 2023. Panel: The Pelagios Network: Collaboration as a Community of Practice.
Shai Gordin and Avital Romach (07/2023) “Layers of Authorship in Cuneiform Texts”. DH 2023, Graz, Austria 10-14 July 2023. Workshop: SIG-DLS Seven Years on.
Past Conference Papers
Shai Gordin (11/2022) “When Networks Matter: Interpreting Patterns in Social and Geographical Networks of First Millennium BCE Babylonia”. SBL 2022 Annual Meeting, session: Literature and History of the Persian Period.
Shai Gordin and Avital Romach (07/2022) “Optical Character Recognition for Complex Scripts: A Case-study in Cuneiform”. DH 2022, Tokyo, Japan 25-29 July 2022. long paper.
Shai Gordin (06/2022) “Neo-Babylonian Scribal Habits from a Stylometric Perspective”. Invited lecture, Archival Scribes and Archival Literacy in Babylonia: Theory and Practice, 1-2 June 2022, Leiden University, the Netherlands.
Shai Gordin (12/2021) “The Babylonian Engine: Studying ancient Babylonia using OCR, NLP and ML”. Journal of Electornic Imaging Webinar - Deep Learning: Applications and Recent Directions, Bar-Ilan University. See recorded lecture
Shai Gordin and Samuel Clark (06/2021) “MAPA: A Linked Open Data Gazetteer of ancient Babylonia”. Conference poster, Digital Humanities Summer Institute – Online Edition, 7-11, 14-18 June 2021, University of Victoria, Canada.
Shai Gordin (04/2021) “Walking among the orchards of Gilgamesh: the role of spatial memory in and around the Neo-Babylonian City”. Transcultural Mobilities and Memories, Minho University, Portugal.
Shai Gordin and Ethan Fetaya (11/2020) “The Babylonian Engine: Human-Machine collaboration for restoring ancient Mesopotamian heritage”. CHNT 25: Conference on Cultural Heritage and New Technologies, Vienna.
Shai Gordin (11/2020) “Mesopotamian Ancient Place-names Almanac: Doing Historical Geography in the Age of Linked Open Data Spatial Data”. Metadata in Assyriology: Spatial Analysis, and Historical Geography, Uppsala University, Sweden.
Upcoming Events of the DigPasts Lab
ALP2023：First Workshop on Ancient Language Processing (Varna, Bulgaria, 7 Sep 2023)
Co-oragnisers: Adam Anderson (UC Berkeley); Bin Li (Nanjing Normal University); Yudong Liu (Western Washington University); Marco C. Passarotti (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore)
Co-located with RANLP 2023, the workshop on Ancient Language Processing aims to focus specifically on ancient languages and scripts from the emergence of writing in Mesopotamia and Egypt c. 3000 BCE to the entire world up till 800 AD. We wish to provide a recognized forum to further advance this subfield of NLP, where researchers and practitioners can meet and discuss their latest work, and exchange ideas in addressing shared epigraphical challenges in language processing across various ancient languages, such as non-Latin and non-alphabetic scripts, Right-to-Left, transliteration conventions and fragmentary texts. In addition, we propose shared tasks on Machine Translation for Ancient Chinese and Akkadian, respectively, to provide an opportunity to address the unique challenges faced by ancient language machine translation.
Papers and contributions are encouraged for any work related to Natural Language Processing of Ancient Languages. Deadline for submission is until July 3, 2023, for submission guidelines see link.
ALT2023：Ancient Language Translation Workshop (Macau SAR, China, 4 Sep 2023)
Link to Cuneiform Machine Translation Task website
Co-oragnisers: Bin Li (Nanjing Normal University)
As a co-located event with MT Summit 2023, this workshop will provide an opportunity to learn about the challenges and latest developments in the field of machine translation for ancient languages. Participants will engage in discussions and hands-on activities to develop a deeper understanding of the field and the techniques used to address the unique challenges posed by translating texts written in ancient languages. The workshop will conclude with a discussion of the results of the hands-on activities and a summary of the key takeaways from the workshop. Participants will leave the workshop with a deeper understanding of the field of ancient language machine translation and the tools and techniques used to address its unique challenges.
In this year’s workshop, we propose shared tasks on Machine Translation for Ancient Chinese and Mesopotamian languages (i.e. Akkadian and Sumerian), respectively, to provide an opportunity to address the unique challenges faced by ancient language machine translation. The technique reports are required to submit after the evaluation. All papers will be reviewed, and will be selected to appear on ACL Anthology.
Past Events of the DigPasts Lab
Digital Ancient Near Eastern Studies (19-21 Feb 2023)
Link to the conference website; 
Co-oragnisers: Hubert Mara (eHumanities, MLU Halle-Wittenberg); Gabriel Stanovsky (Computer Science, Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
In recent decades, the rich cultural heritage of the Near East is undergoing a digital revolution. Comprehensive online repositories have made the digital publishing of artefacts in 2D images, interactive 3D models, as well as text editions, a more sustainable common practice. Furthermore, computational analyses of ancient Near Eastern artefacts, texts and art, are starting to become more prevalent, applying quantitative analyses, natural language processing (NLP) or machine learning (ML), to answer questions about these complex ancient civilizations.
The conference, Computational Perspectives on Ancient Near Eastern Literature, Art and Material Culture, established a professional network for Digital Ancient Near Eastern Studies (DANES). The first working groups in the networks will consolidate the successes of recent initiatives led by different research centres, and discuss how best to integrate computational approaches and digital humanities research for ancient Near Eastern texts, art and artefacts.
Human - Machine Cooperation in Archaeology, Epigraphy and Ancient History (19-20 Feb 2020)
The conference and workshop Human-Machine Cooperation in Archaeology, Epigraphy and Ancient History was devoted to the application of digital tools in projects related to ancient history, material culture, and texts. This approach assumes that the application of digital tools to the study of ancient times shares similar challenges, and the output of such projects may be of interest to all participants in the workshop. We brought together international and Israeli scholars of archaeology, epigraphy, biblical studies, ancient history, computer science, digital humanities, and members of the Israeli high-tech industry in order to investigate the following issues:
- Presentation of specific projects, their challenges, paths taken to accomplish them, and possible outcomes.
- The application of newly developed algorithms and technologies.
- Interaction between teams and technologies – making technology a member of the ancient history and archaeology community.
- Technology in the service of scholarship – what can technology teach us that we cannot learn without it?
- The intended users (scholarly community, the general public, others).
- Databases vs. TEI, and choosing the right conventions.
- Copyrights vs. opening and sharing our sources.
- Intensive small learning workshops on the implementation of digital humanities tools.
We would like to thank all participants for their fascinating talks and workshop sessions. A summary of the talks and workshops with abstracts can be viewed in the following link.