Coptic SCRIPTORIUM:A Corpus, Tools, and Methods for Corpus Linguistics and Computational Historical Research in Ancient Egypt

Coptic, having evolved from the language of the hieroglyphs of the pharaonic era, represents the last phase of the Egyptian language and is pivotal for a wide range of disciplines, such as linguistics, biblical studies, the history of Christianity, Egyptology, and ancient history. Coptic SCRIPTORIUM provides the first open-source technologies for computational and digital research across the disciplines as applied to Egyptian texts. The project is developing a digitized corpus of Coptic texts available in multiple formats and visualizations (including TEI XML), tools to analyze and process the language (e.g., the first Coptic part-of-speech tagger), a database with search and visualization capabilities, and a collaborative platform for scholars to contribute texts and annotations and to conduct research. The technologies and corpus will function as a collaborative environment for digital research by any scholars working in Coptic.