Over the last two decades, Digital Classics – the application of computational methods and technologies to the study of the ancient world – has emerged as both a research area within digital humanities and as a community of practice, with its dedicated journals, online discussion forums, and seminar series.
At UNIL and EPFL, Digital Classics are showing strong potential in terms of scientific exchange between scholars from the two institutions. Researchers are introducing digital tools and computational methods in their research and teaching (see e.g. #ASAnumerica), and developing a substantial number of methods and tools (see Digital Humanities Laboratory DHLAB) — particularly in the realm of text and image processing — that can be applied to the study of sources on the ancient world (manuscripts, editions, archaeological reconstructions, etc.).
In the past few years, ad hoc Digital Classics-related initiatives involving researchers from both institutions have been developed, namely in the teaching of social and human sciences.
The program “Digital Classics/Numérique et monde antique” aims to take a further step in this direction. Its goals are to strengthen the knowledge exchange between researchers of the field by involving PhD students, post-docs, early-career research engineers, and professors to spark future activities and collaborations — including joint grant proposals, interdisciplinary research seminars, and teaching activities — and to foster a dynamic and collaborative research community.
Topics of interest:
What follows is a preliminary, non-exhaustive list of research topics that are of interest to members of the program:
- Gaming and virtual reconstructions of the past/cultural heritage
- Pedagogy: using digital tools/methods in the classroom
- Optical Character and Layout Recognition (OCR, OLR) for historical texts
- HTR (Handwritten Text Recognition) for ancient sources (papyri, manuscripts, inscriptions)
- Text encoding strategies for archival documents, manuscripts, digital editions
- Text mining, information extraction from historical texts
- Linguistic annotations: morphology, syntax
- Technology & language teaching/learning
Contact person: Matteo Romanello, email: matteo [dot] romanello [at] unil [dot] ch
