Patrick J. Burns

pjb311@nyu.edu

ORCID 0000-0003-2158-866X

Curriculum Vitae
March 2024

Academic Employment

• 2022-present. Associate Research Scholar: Digital Projects. Institute for the Study of the Ancient World Library.
• 2022. Research Associate. Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University.
• 2019-2021. Postdoctoral Fellow. Quantitative Criticism Lab, University of Texas at Austin.
• 2016-2019. Assistant Research Scholar: Digital and Special Projects. Institute for the Study of the Ancient World Library.

Academic Appointments

• 2019-2022. Research Associate. Institute for the Study of the Ancient World.

Education

• 2016. Ph.D., 2012. M.A. Classics. Fordham University.
• 1998. B.A. English Textual Studies & Magazine Journalism. Syracuse University.

Dissertation

• Amor Belli: Elegiac Diction and the Theme of Love in Lucan’s Bellum Civile. Directed by Prof. Matthew McGowan, Fordham University, Classics. [abstract]

Research Interests

• Computational philology, digital humanities, Latin poetry, Classics pedagogy

Publications

Articles

• 2022. “Senecan Trimeter and Humanist Tragedy,” American Journal of Philology 143: 475-503. [abstract]
• 2022. “Tesserae Intertext Service,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 16(1). [article]
• 2020. “Ensemble Lemmatization with the Classical Language Toolkit,” Studi e Saggi Linguistici 58(1): 157-176. https://doi.org/10.4454/ssl.v58i1.273 [abstract] [article]
• 2019. “The Future of Ancient Literacy: Classical Language Toolkit and Google Summer of Code,” Classics@ 17, special issue on ancient literacies. Co-written with K. Johnson and L. Hollis. [full text] [abstract]
• 2018. “Creating Stoplists for Historical Languages,” Digital Classics Online 4(2):4-20. [article]
• 2017. “Measuring and Mapping Intergeneric Allusion in Latin Poetry using Tesserae,” Journal of Data Mining and Digital Humanities. Special Issue on Computer-Aided Processing of Intertextuality in Ancient Languages. [article]

Papers

• 2021. “The Classical Language Toolkit: An NLP Framework for Pre-Modern Languages,” at The Joint Conference of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (ACL-IJCNLP 2021). Co-authored with K.P. Johnson, John Stewart, Todd Cook, Clément Besnier, and William Mattingly. [paper]
• 2021. “Profiling of Intertextuality in Latin Literature Using Word Embeddings,” in Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies. Co-authored with J.A. Brofos, K. Li, P. Chaudhuri, and J.P. Dexter. [paper]

Data papers

• 2024. “A Database of Intertexts in Valerius Flaccus’ Argonautica 1: A Benchmarking Resource for the Evaluation of Computational Intertextual Search of Latin Corpora,” Journal of Open Humanities Data in Special Collection: Representing the Ancient World through Data. Co-authored with J.P. Dexter, P. Chaudhuri, E.D. Adams, T.J. Bolt, A. Cásarez, J.H. Flynt, K. Li, J.F. Patterson, A. Schwartz, and S. Shumway. [paper] a

Preprints

• 2023. “LatinCy: Synthetic Trained Pipelines for Latin NLP.” arxiv:2305.04365 [cs.CL]. [abstract] [preprint]
• 2020. “Latin BERT: A Contextual Language Model for Classical Philology.” arXiv:2009.10053 [cs.CL]. Co-written with D. Bamman. [abstract] [preprint]

Chapters

• 2023. “Language is Not a Default Setting: Countering DH’s English Problem,” chapter in Debates in the Digital Humanities 2023, ed. M.K. Gold and L.F. Klein. U. Minnesota Press. Co-written with Q. Dombrowski.
• 2020. “Autodidacts and the ‘Promise’ of Digital Classics,” chapter in Digital Approaches to Teaching the Ancient Mediterranean, ed. W. Caraher and S. Heath. Digital Press at U. North Dakota: 83-95. [chapter] [abstract]
• 2019. “Building a Text Analysis Pipeline for Classical Languages,” chapter in Digital Classical Philology, ed. M. Berti. DeGruyter: 159-176. [chapter]

Reviews

• 2018. “Permanent Like Achilles.” University Bookman. Review of R.F. Thomas, Why Bob Dylan Matters. (HarperCollins, 2017). [link]
• 2017. Review of “Opera Latina”. Society for Classical Studies Blog. [link]
• 2017. “Latin Einstein on the Beach.” University Bookman. Review of R.T. Foster and D.P. McCarthy, Ossa Latinitatis Sola, or, The Mere Bones of Latin according to the Thought & System of Reginald. (Catholic University of American Press, 2016). [link]
• 2017. Classical World 110.2. Review of B.Walters, Lucan: Civil War and S. Lombardo, Statius: Achilleid. (Hackett Publishing Company, 2015). DOI 10.1353/clw.2017.0016. [link] [pdf]
• 2012. Classical Outlook 89.2. Review of P.L. Chambers, The Natural Histories of Pliny the Elder. (Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 2012). [jstor] [sample]

Academic Development

NLP Resources

• 2023. LatinCy v3.7.2 (la_core_web_sm, la_core_web_md, la_core_web_lg, la_core_web_trf); Latin language model for spaCy. [model] [project]

Conferences

• 2019. Digital Humanities Beyond Modern English. Co-organizer with Pramit Chaudhuri and Joseph Dexter. Dartmouth College. April 23-25. [site]
• 2018. Future Philologies: Digital Directions in Text for Historical Languages. Organizer. Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. April 20. [site]

Conference Panels

• 2024. “Future Most Vivid: Creating the Conditions for Human-AI Collaboration in Classical Studies.” Co-organizer with Clifford Robinson. Annual Meeting of the Society of Classical Studies, Chicago, IL. January 5.
• 2019. “Computational Tools & the Cross-Cultural Study of Literature.” Panelist with Tanya Clement, Grace Fong, and Carrie Schroeder; moderated by Jacqueline Wernimont. Digital Humanities Beyond Modern English. Dartmouth College. April 25.

Conference Sessions

• 2019. “Ancient Makerspaces: Digital Classics Workshop.” Co-organizer with David Ratzan. Annual Meeting of the Society of Classical Studies, Boston, MA. January 6. [site]
• 2018. “Ancient Makerspaces: Digital Classics Workshop.” Co-organizer with David Ratzan. Annual Meeting of the Society of Classical Studies, Boston, MA. January 6. [site]
• 2017. “Digital Approaches to Latin Vocabulary Acquisition.” Co-organizer with John Muccigrosso. Classical Association of the Atlantic States Annual Meeting, New York City, NY. October 6.
• 2017. “Ancient Makerspaces: Digital Classics Workshop.” Co-organizer with David Ratzan, panel moderator. Annual Meeting of the Society of Classical Studies, Toronto, Ont. [site]

Conference Papers

• 2024. “Latin in an Environment of Infinite Extensive Reading,” Classical Association of New England Annual Meeting (CANE2024). Durham, NH. March 22. [abstract]
• 2023. “Intertextuality and Latin Language Models, or a Grammar of Subword Allusion,” Classical Texts in Digital Media. U. of Patras. Patras, Greece. September 2.
• 2023. “Dialogism in Ancient Greek and Latin Epic,” Digital Approaches to Direct Speech Representation in Greek and Latin Epic. Mount Allison University. Sackville, New Brunswick. May 31.
• 2023. “The Future Is Collaborative: Historical Psychology in Latin Texts,” Humanities Forward. Oxford University. Oxford, UK. May 16. Co-written with Jennifer Devereaux, Mohammad Atari, Joseph P. Dexter, and Pramit Chaudhuri.
• 2023. “How Much Latin Does ChatGPT ‘Know’?” Classical Association of New England Annual Meeting (CANE2023). Needham, MA. March 17. [abstract]
• 2023. “Measuring Emotional Content in Historical Text through Classification and Lexicon Construction,” Historical Psychology pre-conference workshop, SPSP2023. Atlanta, GA. [abstract]
• 2023. “Streamlining historical-language text processing with CLTK Readers,” Ancient Makerspaces, Society of Classical Studies Annual Meeting (SCS2023). New Orleans, LA. January 7. [abstract]
• 2022. “Exploring Poeticness and Synonymy in Epic Speech with Latin Language Models,” Digital Approaches to Direct Speech Representation in Greek and Latin Epic. Universität Rostock. Rostock, Germany. July 1.
• 2022. “An ‘Exploratory’ Approach to Latin Readability,” American Classical League Institute, Panel on “Evaluating Latin Readability: Methods and Future Directions”. June 26.
• 2022. “Error, Scale, and the Computational Redefinition of Philology,” Digital Humanities Beyond Modern English. University of Texas at Austin. Austin, TX. April 7. [abstract]
• 2022. “Toward a Data-driven Latin Prose Composition Course,” Society of Classical Studies Annual Meeting. San Francisco. January 8.
• 2021. “Latin Literary Acrostics as Information Technology,” Classical Association of the Atlantic States Annual Meeting. New Brunswick, NJ. October 14.
• 2021. “Sequitur, Non Sequitur: Word Prediction in the Latin Classroom,” American Classical League Institute. Online. June 21.
• 2021. “Conversational Agents from the Neo-Latin Colloquia to ChatterBot,” Neo-Latin Studies and Digital Humanities. Online. April 15.
• 2021. “Metaformalism, or Setting a Baseline for Detecting Anagrammatic Play in Ovid’s Metamorphoses,” Society of Classical Studies Annual Meeting. Washington, D.C. January 4. [abstract]
• 2020. “‘Poeticness’ as a Continuous Variable: Rethinking Prosaism in Horace’s Odes 4.9,” Society of Classical Studies Annual Meeting. Washington, D.C. January 4. [abstract]
• 2019. “Hacking Multi-word Named Entity Recognition on HathiTrust Extracted Features Data,” at ACH2019. Pittsburgh, Pa. July 23. [abstract] [slides]
• 2019. “Crowdsourcing Open Educational Resources for Classics,” at American Classical League Institute. New York, NY. June 29.
• 2019. “Multiplex Lemmatization with the Classical Language Toolkit,” at the First LiLa Workshop: Linguistic Resources & NLP Tools for Latin. Milan, Italy. June 3. [abstract]
• 2019. “Object-Oriented Philology,” at Digital Classics Association session on Reconnecting the Classics. Society of Classical Studies Annual Meeting. San Diego, Ca. January 5.
• 2018. “Lucan’s tres libri: A reconsideration of arrangement and argument in the Bellum Civile,” Classical Association of the Atlantic States Annual Meeting. Philadelphia, Pa. October 4.
• 2018. “Carpe DM: Twitter and the Rise of the Social Media Scholiast,” 5000 Years of Comments: The Development of Commentary from Ancient Mesopotamia to the Age of Information, Center for Hellenic Studies. August 7.
• 2018. “Backoff Tagging as a Philological Method,” DH2018. Mexico City, Mex. June 26. [abstract]
• 2017. “Mapping Library Subject Headings with the HathiTrust Extracted Features Dataset.” Digital Publication in Mediterranean Archaeology, Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. October 20.
• 2017. “Creating Stopword Lists for Historical Languages.” Global Philology: Big Corpora of Historical Text, Universität Leipzig. July 10. [abstract]
• 2017. “Virgil’s Hardest Sentence?: Measuring Readability in Latin Poetry.” Midwest Classical Literature Consortium, Ohio University. April 22. [abstract]
• 2017. “Classical Language Toolkit and Measuring Readability in Latin Literature.” Global Philology Open Conference, Universität Leipzig. February 22. [slides]
• 2016. “Erotic Distraction in Lucan’s Bellum Civile.” Annual Meeting of the Society of Classical Studies, San Francisco, Ca. January 9. [abstract]
• 2015. “Caesar Captivus: Elegiac Enrichment in Lucan’s Bellum Civile.” CAAS 2015 Annual Meeting, Wilmington, De. October 9. [abstract]
• 2014. “Carpe Iter: A Case for Latin-themed Field Trips.” CAAS 2014 Annual Meeting, Washington, D.C. October 10. [abstract]
• 2014. “Latin for the Hearing-Impaired.” Investigating Inequalities, Graduate School Association Conference, Fordham University. April 5.
• 2014. “Digital Directions for a Concordance of Hellenistic Philosophy.” (Co-presented with Brian Johnson, Fordham University.) Publishing Text for a Digital Age, Tufts University. March 28.
• 2013. “Lucian’s Ekphrasis of the Visible and the Invisible in Imagines.” CAMWS 2013 Annual Meeting, Iowa City, Ia. April 20. [abstract]
• 2013. “Distant Reading Alliteration in Latin Poetry.” Word, Space, Time: Digital Perspectives on the Classical World, University at Buffalo. April 6. [abstract] [code]
• 2013. “Pessime Planudes: Scaliger’s Cato and the Polemics of Retranslation.” Beyond Words: Translation and the Classical World, CUNY Graduate Center. March 8. [abstract]
• 2013. “A Non-Latin Script in the Digital Archive: Greek OCR and Google Books.” Remembering, Forgetting, Imagining: The Practices of Memory, Digital Humanities roundtable, Fordham University. March 2.
• 2012. “Laudatio, Lineage and Legacy in Cicero’s Brutus.” Exegi Monumentum Aere Perennius: Self-Promotion in the Ancient World, University at Buffalo. October 20. [abstract]
• 2012. “The Poet Who Dreamt He Was a Poet: Lucretius and the Problem of Inspiration.” And Now for Something Completely Different: Transformation and Transcendence in Antiquity, University of Wisconsin-Madison. October 13. [abstract]
• 2011. “Short on Erotics: Eros as Epic Hero in Apollonius Rhodius’ Argonautica 3.275-298.” Desire: From Eros to Eroticism, CUNY Graduate Center, Department of Comparative Literature. November 11. [abstract]
• 2011. “Dice Play and Wordplay in Apollonius Rhodius’ Argonautica 3.111-128.” Why So Serious?: The Past and Its Diversions, University of Michigan. April 16. [abstract]
• 2010. “The Hyper-Alexandrianism of Virgilian Centos and Girl Talk’s Mashups.” All Roads Lead From Rome, Rutgers University. April 9. [abstract]

Conference Posters

• 2019. “Bringing a Shadow Library Into the Light: Soviet-Era Scholarship on Central Asia and 21st Century Digital Collections.” ACRL 2019, Cleveland, OH. April 11. Co-written with G. Mckee and M. Naunton.
• 2017. “Mapping Linked Data Subject Headings in the Library Catalog.” DH2017, Montreal, Quebec. August 11. Co-written with D. Ratzan, T. Elliot, and G. Mckee. [abstract]
• 2014. “Distant Reading Alliteration in Latin Literature.” Annual Meeting of the American Philological Association, Chicago, Il. January 4. [abstract]

Conference Roundtables

• 2019. “Apollo vs. Python3: What Can Classics Learn from Computer Science (and Vice Versa)?” at American Classical League Institute. New York, NY. June 29.

Invited Talks

• 2024. “Paradigms Shift: What Artificial Intelligence Can Teach Students About Latin,” New Hampshire Classical Association, Classics Day for Teachers. Manchester, NH. April 11.
• 2024. “How to Read Latin like a Computer: A Case Study of Latin Noun Chunking with spaCy,” Digital Classicist Seminar Berlin, Berliner Antike-Kolleg. January 16.
• 2022. “Coding as an Intellectual Craft,” Trinity University Collaborative for Teaching and Learning. October 28. [abstract]
• 2022. “Hello κόσμε: Philology at the Command Line,” Stanford Humanities Center The Future of the Past: Classics & Technology workshop series. April 1. [abstract]
• 2021. “‘Pragmatic’ Scholarship: What Coding Has Taught Me about Humanities Research,” Washington and Lee University. March 25.
• 2019. “ELIZA, ELIZAE: The Absurdity and (Absurd) Practicality of Latin Chatbots.” MIT Programs in Digital Humanities Seminar. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. October 24. [abstract]
• 2019. “Reassessing Poeticness and Synonymity in Latin Poetry.” University of California, Los Angeles. January 10.
• 2018. “What is an ‘Unpoetic’ Word?: Reassessing Latin Literary Criticism with Digital Methods.” University of Texas at Austin. November 29.
• 2018. “Backoff Lemmatization for Ancient Greek with the Classical Language Toolkit,” 2018 Digital Classicist London Seminars Series. Institute of Classical Studies. London, England. July 27.
• 2018. “What is an ‘Unpoetic’ Word?: Reassessing Latin Literary Criticism with Digital Methods.” University of Oklahoma. April 5.
• 2018. “Becoming a Digital Humanist in Graduate School.” Deconstructing the Open Greek and Latin Project: The First Thousand Years of Greek, Tufts University. January 3.
• 2017. “Latin in Unexpected Places.” Paideia Outreach in the CAAS Region, CAAS 2017 Annual Meeting, New York, NY. October 8. [abstract]
• 2017. “Exploring Diction and Topics in Latin Love Elegy.” Digital Propertius Project, Department of Classics, Yale University. May 18.
• 2016. “Cicero’s Hardest Sentence?: Measuring Readability in Latin Literature”. Drew University Classics Department. December 1. [abstract] [code]

Digital Humanities Workshops

• 2024. “Training NLP Pipelines for Historical Languages: Some Considerations,” Digital Classicist Seminar Berlin, Berliner Antike-Kolleg. January 16-17.
• 2023. “Dickinson Digital Latin Workshop,” Dickinson College. July 12-15.
• 2022. “Salve munde: Philology at the Command Line (or an “exploratory” approach to Latin),” Trinity University. October 27. [abstract]
• 2022. “Exploratory Text Analysis for Philologists,” Universität Rostock. July 11-12. [abstract]
  

Digital Humanities Projects

• 2023-present. LatinCy. Developer. [link]
• 2015-present. The Classical Language Toolkit (CLTK). Core member. [link].
• 2016-present. ISAW Library Titles Map. Developer.
• 2016-present. Digital Central Asian Archaeology collection. Developer. [link].
• 2018-present. Digital South Caucasus collection. Developer.

Open Access Writing

Editorials

• 2017. “The Ancient Case Against Programming ‘Languages’” Eidolon April 24. [link].

Blog Posts

• 2023. “How Much Latin Does ChatGPT ‘Know’?” Society for Classical Studies Blog. July 31. [link].
• 2020. “Evaluating Classics in Social Media from Twitter to Facebook and Beyond,” Society for Classical Studies Blog. May 1. [link].

Open Access Reviewing

• 2019. Reviewer, “Introduction to Jupyter Notebooks.” The Programming Historian.
• 2013. Technical reviewer, “Understanding Regular Expressions.” The Programming Historian 2.
• 2013. Technical reviewer, “Cleaning Data with OpenRefine.” The Programming Historian 2. Technical Reviewer.

Service

• 2023-present. Editorial Board member for Journal of Open Humanities Data.
• 2021-present. Advisory Board member. The Bridge, Haverford College.
• 2020. Program Committee, reviewer. Language Technologies for Historical and Ancient Languages (LT4HALA).
• 2019. Program Committee, reviewer. DH2020.
• 2017-present. Reviewer for DSH: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities.
• 2017-2018. Google Summer of Code mentor for Classical Language Toolkit.
• 2016-present. Committee for Public Information and Media Relations. Society for Classical Studies.
• 2016. Program Committee, reviewer. Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society 30th International Conference, special track for “Natural Language Processing of Ancient and other Low-resource Languages.”
• 2016-present. Graduate Student Award selection committee. NYC Digital Humanities.
• 2016-present. Steering Group. NYC Digital Humanities.
• 2015-present. Steering Committee. Digital Classics Association.

Grants, Awards and Honors

• 2022. Center for Hellenic Studies fellowship for writing and developing Exploratory Philology: Learning About Ancient Greek through Computer Programming. April and June residencies.
• 2019. Society for Classical Studies Classics Everywhere grant supporting public programming for local political philosophy reading group.
• 2018. DH2018 ADHO Bursary.
• 2016. Google Summer of Code stipend for development on “Latin/Greek Backoff Lemmatizer” for the Classical Language Toolkit.
• 2013. HASTAC Scholar.
• 2012. National Endowment for the Humanities/Tufts University. Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities grant.
• 2011. New York Classical Club. American School of Classical Studies at Athens Summer Scholarship.

Teaching Experience

Instructor, Institute for the Study of the Ancient World

• Text Analysis for Historical Language Research (Fall 2023)
• Introduction to Digital Humanities for the Ancient World (Fall 2017, Fall 2016)

Instructor, Fordham University

• Latin Prose Composition (Graduate Seminar, Spring 2021)
  
  
• Introduction to Digital Literary Studies (Graduate Seminar, Fall 2020)
  
  
• Introduction to Latin I (Fall 2013, Fall 2010, Fall 2009); Textbooks: Learn to Read Latin; Wheelock’s Latin.
• Introduction to Latin II (Spring 2014, Spring 2010); Textbooks: Wheelock’s Latin; Latin via Ovid.
• Intermediate Latin (Fall 2019, Fall 2013, Fall 2012)
• Latin Language & Literature (Spring 2014, Spring 2010: Curriculum Authors; Spring 2013: Ovid)
  
  
• Introduction to Greek I (Fall 2011); Textbook: Greek: An Intensive Course.
• Introduction to Greek II (Spring 2011) Textbook: Greek: An Intensive Course.
• Greek Language & Literature (Spring 2011)
• Readings in Greek (Fall 2011: Thucydides)
• Greek Tutorial: Selections from the Greek Philosophers (Spring 2009)
  
  
• Texts and Contexts: Myth in Greco-Roman Literature (Spring 2013)
  
  
• Understanding Historical Change: Ancient Rome (Spring 2012)
  
  

Library and Scholarly Publication Experience

Special Collections Work

• 2017-present. Digital South Caucasus Collection. Developer.
• 2016-present. Digital Central Asian Archaeology Collection. Developer. [site]

Editorial Work

• 2016. Markup coding. Bagnall, R. et al. Oasis City. NYU Press, 2015. [link]
• 2010. Proofreading Latin and Greek citations. Peppard, M. The Son of God in the Roman World: Divine Sonship in Its Social and Political Context. Oxford, 2011. [site]
• 2008. Proofreading, compiling index locorum, checking references and bibliography. McGowan, M. Ovid in Exile: Power and Poetic Redress in the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto. Brill, 2009. [site]

Professional Activities

• 2015-2016. Participant in Sunoikisis Greek & Latin Seminars at Center for Hellenic Studies; leader of common sessions on Hellenistic and Neronian/Flavian literature.
• 2012-2014. Founder and co-director of the Fordham Graduate Students Digital Humanities Group.

Professional Organizations

• Society for Classical Studies (SCS)
• Classical Association of the Atlantic States (CAAS)
• Classical Association of New England (CANE)
• Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO)
• Forum for Classical Librarians and Scholarly Communications (FCLSC)
• New York City Digital Humanities (NYCDH)

Computer skills

• Programming: Python (esp. spaCy, Transformers, NLTK, Gensim, Pandas/scikit-learn), Jupyter notebooks/Binder; R; regular expressions.
• Relational database design: SQL, Postgresql.
• Markup: XML, TEI.
• Web development: HTML 5, CSS3, Javascript/jQuery (esp. Leaflet.js); Jekyll; Flask, Jinja2; Heroku; React.
• Open source development: Git/GitHub, TravisCI.
• Bibliographic support: CSL; Zotero translator development and automation (via pyZotero)
• Layout: LaTeX; Overleaf.
• Content management: Wordpress; Omeka; DSpace (via NYU Faculty Digital Archive), including working with Simple Archive Format.