Patrick J. Burns

Research Associate at Harvard Human Evolutionary Biology | Formerly Quantitative Criticism Lab, ISAW Library | Fordham PhD, Classics | CLTK contributor

Hello κόσμε: Philology at the Command Line

Abstract for Stanford Humanities Center workshop talk on The Future of the Past: Classics & Technology
April 1, 2022. Stanford University. Palo Alto, CA.

Abstract

Where should historical-language researchers get started with computational analysis of the texts they work on? Which programming language? Which formats? Which tools? In this talk, discussing my latest project “Exploratory Philology,” I argue that the place to start is with the (digitized) texts themselves. Building on Nick Montfort’s exploratory paradigm of learning “how to think with computation” in the humanities, I show how working through a series of constrained philological problems—anything from counting Greek color terms to searching for acrostics to generating random Latin text—can at the same time help us use code to learn about the languages and to use the languages to help us learn to code. The talk in particular focuses on my development work with the Classical Language Toolkit as well as another recent project, CLTK Readers, which makes getting started with “exploratory” philology all the more straightforward by offering users single-line access to philologically familiar units of text like documents, paragraphs, sentences, and words. By way of conclusion, I will briefly discuss strategies for incorporating computational philology into graduate and undergraduate curricula.