A digital annotated parallel corpus of Athonite text types: Gospel of Matthew

Authors: Kvirkvelia, Eka / Kalkhitashvili, Tamar

Date: Friday, 8 September 2023, 9:15am to 10:45am

Location: Main Campus, L 1.202 <campus:note>

Abstract

The paper aims to present the results of the ongoing research project “Digital edition of an annotated parallel corpus of Giorgi Athonite’s recension of the Gospel of Matthew” (2021-2023) funded by Shota Rustaveli National Science Foundation (YS-21-1562). The project is carried out on the technical base of the host institution: Ilia State University (Tbilisi, Georgia).

The translation of the New Testament and generally biblical texts into Georgian is supposed to have been made since the 4th-5th centuries. The Georgian translation of the four Gospels takes into consideration different traditions. Hence, the manuscripts of the four Gospels that have come down to us preserve non-homogeneous, diverse texts, namely: Pre-Athonite text types (Adishi, Opiza (the same Jrutchi-Parkali) and mixed); Athonite text types (so-called Ekvtimiseuli (belonging to Euthymius) and Giorgi Athonite’s recension) and the Hellenophilic text type.

Within the project, we are in the process of preparing a parallel digital edition of Athonite text types of Matthew Gospel: a) the final recension of George the Athonite (1009-1065); b) the text reflecting the intermediate stage of George the Athonite’s work; c) and the text of the Gospel preserved in John Chrysostom’s Commentary of the Gospel of Matthew translated by Euthymius the Athonite (955-1028), as well as the English and Greek (Byzantine type) texts. Among the Athonite text types Giorgi the Athonite’s final recension has the most significance, as it is established in the Georgian Church up to these days. Due to this reason, within the current project this text was chosen for annotation. A digital annotated parallel corpus of Athonite text types is based on the theoretical research provided within my doctoral thesis.1

The digital edition of Georgian medieval manuscripts based on the TEI has been an ongoing project at Ilia State University since 2009. Dr. Irina Lobzhanidze has been instrumental in digitizing Georgian medieval manuscripts, particularly the Typicon of the Georgian Monastery of the Holy Cross Near Jerusalem, which was published using eXist-db and TEI Publisher (Lobzhanidze 2021)2, employing IIIf manifests of the manuscripts.

The technical team of the current project experimented with exist-DB, but due to limited time and funds from a young researcher grant, they decided to create a flexible platform with a graphical interface for annotating texts. The main goal was to reflect the findings of the doctoral research and publish texts online. The platform (http://ogb.iliauni.edu.ge/) features a user-friendly annotation tool built using standard HTML, CSS, and Javascript, connected to a PostgreSQL database. Researchers can annotate specific manuscript texts, with updates simultaneously reflected in the database and displayed on the OGB webpage alongside parallel annotated texts. Hovering over the texts reveals the annotation records. The platform also allows users to download annotated texts in XML format, with an eye on future collaboration for reusing TEI XMLs of Georgian medieval texts and creating a TEI schema.

Here is the result of the annotation for one of the files:

</teiHeader>
    <text>
        <body>
            <div type="edition" xml:space="preserve">
            <div type="chapter" xml:id="cha.1">
                <l n="cha.1.1">
                    <seg xml:lang="ka">წიგნი შობისა იესუ ქრისტესი, ძისა დავითისი, ძისა აბრაჰამისი.</seg>
                    <seg xml:lang="grc">Βίβλος γενέσεως Ἰησοῦ χριστοῦ, υἱοῦ Δαυίδ, υἱοῦ Ἀβραάμ.</seg>
                </l>
                <entry xml:id="w.0.cha.1.1">
                    <form type="lemma">წიგნ
                        <lbl xml:lang="grc">βίβλος</lbl>
                        <lbl xml:lang="arm">Գիրք</lbl>
                        <lbl xml:lang="en">book</lbl>
                    </form>
                    <gramGrp>
                        <gram type="pos">N.Nom.Sg</gram>
                    </gramGrp>
                </entry>
                <entry xml:id="w.1.cha.1.1">
                    <form type="lemma">შობა
                        <lbl xml:lang="grc">γενέσεως</lbl>
                        <lbl xml:lang="arm">ծննդեան</lbl>
                        <lbl xml:lang="en">birth</lbl>
                    </form>
                    <gramGrp>
                        <gram type="pos">N.Gen.Sg</gram>
                    </gramGrp>
                </entry>

The aim of the project is to create a high-quality digital edition that will serve as a model for the digital publication of other Gospels (of Mark, Luke, and John), as well as other books of the New and Old Testaments based on textological research. Regretfully, however, we do not yet have either a Scholarly edition of the Georgian translations of the four Gospels or an annotated parallel corpus of a digital edition, due to which various text types of Georgian translations of the four Gospels remain inaccessible to foreign scholars. For this reason, the Georgian text is not included in any digital editions of the Greek Gospels and their translations. In such circumstances, an annotated parallel corpus of the Gospel of Matthew has special importance for further research.

About the authors

Dr Eka Kvirkvelia – Research Associate at the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (CSMC), the University of Hamburg, team member of the project “The Development of Literacy in the Caucasian Territories (DeLiCaTe)” led by Prof. Dr. Jost Gippert. https://www.csmc.uni-hamburg.de/research/current-projects/delicate.html

Eka Kvirkvelia defended a PhD thesis titled “Codicological and Textological Analysis of 11th-Century Georgian Manuscripts of the Gospel and the History of Formation of Giorgi Athonite’s Recension of the Four Gospels” at Tbilisi State University (Georgia). The research aimed to conduct a palaeographical, codicological, and textual analysis of 11th-century manuscripts containing the Georgian translation of the Gospels which reflect the editorial work of George the Athonite.

Eka Kvirkvelia is a head of the ongoing research project for young scientists “Digital edition of an annotated parallel corpus of Giorgi Athonite’s recension of the Gospel of Matthew” (2021-2023), funded by Shota Rustaveli National Science Foundation (Georgia). The project is carried out on the technical base of the host institution: Ilia State University (Tbilisi, Georgia), under the guidance of Prof. Nino Doborjginidze, and by consulting Prof. Darejan Tvaltvadze (Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University).

Eka Kvirkvelia was a team member of the Project “The Epigraphic Corpus of Georgia (Standardized digital edition)” (2017-2020), which implied preparing a standardized bilingual digital edition of the rich epigraphic evidence discovered or preserved in Georgia (Georgian, Greek, Armenian, Aramaic, Hebrew), encoding inscriptions according to the standards of EpiDoc. Her responsibility in this project was encoding the Georgian inscriptions, and preparing XML files in Oxygen XML Editor. For the online publication of inscription’s texts is used EpiDoc Front-End Services (EFES) platform. https://epigraphy.iliauni.edu.ge/en/

Eka Kvirkvelia’s research areas are Georgian Palaeography and Codicology, Old Georgian Language, History of the Georgian Literary Language, Georgian Epigraphy, Digital Epigraphy, Textual criticism of the Georgian Four Gospels, Digital edition of biblical texts, Georgian Hymnography.

Dr Tamar Kalkhitashvili – Researcher at The Institute of Linguistic Studies of Ilia State University.

Tamar Kalkhitashvili was the coordinator of the “The Epigraphic Corpus of Georgia (Standardized digital edition)” (2017-2020) funded by Shota Rustaveli National Science Foundation, her main responsibility, besides managing the project, was editing XMLs of multilingual inscriptions according to EpiDoc guidelines and building the corpus in EFES.

Tamar Kalkhitashvili was a team member of the projects “Multilingual Parallel Corpus of the Book of Tobit” (books.tobit.iliauni.edu.ge, the paper “Multilingual Annotated Electronic Parallel Corpus-based Edition of the Georgian translation of the Book of Tobit” has been accepted for publishing in the journal Le Muséon (2023)) and “Digital edition of an annotated parallel corpus of Giorgi Athonite’s recension of the Gospel of Matthew” (http://ogb.iliauni.edu.ge/), where she was responsible for coordinating the technical team.

Main research interest areas of Tamar Kalkhitashvili are Digital Humanities, Digital Epigraphy, Corpus Linguistics and digital publication of literary and historical texts in underdescribed languages.

Notes

  1. Eka Kvirkvelia defended the doctoral thesis titled “Codicological and Textological Analysis of 11th-Century Georgian Manuscripts of the Gospel and the History of Formation of George the Athonite’s Recension of the Four Gospels” for Ph.D. in Philology at the Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University (Tbilisi, 2019), link: http://press.tsu.ge/data/image_db_innova/Eka Kvirkvelia.pdf. ↩

  2. Irina Lobzhanidze. 2021, Georgian Medieval Manuscripts and the Digital Edition of the Typicon of the Georgian Monastery of the Holy Cross near Jerusalem. In: Le Muséon: 134, pp. 325-352 (3-4). ↩

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