The main interests of CoPhiLab members are focused on the formalization of theoretical models involved in the domain of Collaborative Philology, the creation of digital resources and the design and development of digital tools, in particular for classical languages.
Formalization of Theoretical Models
CoPhiLab first goal deals with the formal modelling of entities and relations studied in the field of Philology, also taking into account the development of the sector in the digital age.
The attention of CoPhiLab members is directed in particular to the text, its variants and the annotations associated to it.
The processing is as follows: (i) the text is meant as the product of a historical process; (ii) the variants of a text are considered in relation to their social, spatial and temporal coordinates; (iii) the annotations associated to a text with variants can be processed in many different ways (for instance, as part of a linguistic or philological analysis or as part of a historical or philosophical commentary).
The formalization of entities and relations involved in the domain of Collaborative Philology requires historical, philological, linguistic, engineering and logical-mathematical skills.
This (theoretical) aspect of research carried out at CoPhiLab is aimed at modelling the domain, regardless of the limits imposed by current technologies, in order to provide robust and long-term frameworks, released from specific projects.
Creation of Digital Resources
The creation of digital resources focuses on the historical languages that allowed the transmission of knowledge in the Ancient, Medieval and Renaissance Mediterranean world – in particular Greek, Latin, Arabic and Hebrew – as well as on Italian and its dialects.
The main resources created by CoPhiLab members include: (i) collections of images and three-dimensional models of text bearing objects; (ii) collections of texts based on reference editions without critical apparatus (corpora); (iii) collections of original texts with parallel translations (parallel corpora); (iv) diplomatic and critical digital editions; (v) repertories of variants; (vi) repertories of conjectures; (vii) morpho-syntactic databases (treebanks); (viii) lexical-semantic databases (e.g. wordnets); (ix) metrical and thematic analyses; (x) annotations in natural language, linked to the digital copies of the primary sources.
The aforementioned resources can be generated automatically, semi-automatically or manually.
Design and Development of Digital Tools
CoPhiLab design and implementation of software components aims at creating and maintaining software libraries based on well-known design patterns, in order to ensure the extendibility and reuse of the components themselves.
Following the object oriented programming paradigm, libraries are designed with language-independent modelling systems and implemented in at least two programming languages (e.g. Java and Python), in order that they can be useful for multiple communities.
The general framework is oriented towards the management (i.e. editing, visualization, classification, retrieval etc.) of data structures that are suitable for the complex needs of the philological domain (e.g. retrieval of textual variants or editing of multiple interpretations based on multiple variants of the same textual chunk).