Determining a ‘Cultural Literacy Quotient’ for Latin Readability

Abstract for poster DH2024

Abstract

Over two decades ago, Latinist Kenneth Kitchell Jr. proposed the idea of a “cultural literacy quotient” (CLQ) for better gauging the relative difficulty of passages of Latin for intermediate students. The quotient amounts more or less to a ratio of Latin text to supporting notes, specifically notes meant to gloss not vocabulary or grammar but rather to provide background information on the “cultural information which informs the text, and without which it might make little or, sometimes, no sense” (Kitchell 2000: 213). While there has been much attention in recent years to assessing the difficulty of Latin texts, especially for beginning and intermediate students, research in this area has focused primarily on measures of vocabulary distribution (e.g. Keeline & Kirby 2023) and “lexical complexity” (e.g. Gruber-Miller & Mulligan 2022) as determinants of Latin readability. This poster takes up Kitchell’s idea of CLQ as an additional readability measure by taking advantage of recent advances in computational text analysis for Latin; specifically, it leverages improved named entity recognition (NER) for the language through the LatinCy trained pipelines (Burns 2023). By using NER annotations as a proxy for at least certain types of information—and at present the LatinCy tagger supports annotations of the names of people (e.g. Catullus), the names of locations (e.g. Roma, “Rome”), and the names of groups of people (e.g. Romani, “the Romans”)—that make culturally-specific demands on readers, we are now in a position to compare Latin sentences by their density of NER-tagged words.

Works Cited

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