Ancient Greek Historians in the Digital Age

Ein Beitrag zur Digital History 2023: Digitale Methoden in der geschichtswissenschaftlichen Praxis: Fachliche Transformationen und ihre epistemologischen Konsequenzen, Berlin, 23.-26.5.2023.

Abstract: This paper presents results of ongoing digital projects on ancient Greek historians. The research question is the analysis of the language used by ancient sources to refer to historians and cite their works with a particular reference to lost historians (the so-called fragmentary authors). If a lot of scholarship has been devoted to collect fragments of many different genres and try to reconstruct the texts from which they were taken, less effort has been spent on collecting data pertaining to the language used by ancient authors to refer to them and their works. The paper discusses the use of Computational Linguistics techniques and Named Entity Recognition to extract and annotate information about ancient Greek historians and their works from the sources where they are preserved. Morevoer, the paper describes a new catalog of ancient Greek authors and works based on the extraction and annotation of references to them in ancient sources.