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Welcome to the Representing Women Authorship in the Latin Treebanks (RWALT) project. RWALT is a text data curation and annotation project led by Patrick J. Burns and David M. Ratzan at NYU’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World Library. The project seeks to annotate syntactic and morphological features of Latin texts written by women with the goal of collecting these texts into a Universal Dependencies-compatible treebank. While the existing Latin UD treebanks cover a range of time periods, geographic areas, authors, works, and genres, there is significant progress to be made with the number of sentences in the treebanks that can be attributed to women. RWALT aims to redress this imbalance in the data. The project uses the LatinCy pretrained NLP pipelines developed by Burns to annotate Latin written by women authors. The project began in October 2024. So far our annotation efforts include such authors as Sulpicia, Proba, Luisa Sigea, and Anna Maria van Schurman, with more to come.

Cover image: Proba via Wikimedia Commons. Based on this manuscript of Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris (BNF, Français 599).