This project is part of a thesis for a Master of English Language and Literature at Signum University.
Old English poetry has been a fascination for hundreds of years and it’s a pity the Germans got to it first. Signum has a strong Old English language and literature program, something that has become harder and harder to find in these days of restricting humanities budgets, trimming department sizes, and emphasizing professional training over the value of human thought and experiences that are preserved, curated, and taught in humanities departments. In the modern era, it would be foolish to waste the plethora of digital tools that allow for richer, more thorough study of texts. The goal of this project would be to select a single Old English poem in its normalized form, use TEI XML markup to tag the text linguistically and stylistically, use some of the myriad of tools (such as Lexos and the Classical Language Toolkit) and resources (like the York-Toronto Parsed Corpus of Old English Poetry and the Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus) to produce a rich markup and render a publishable aligned-translation that would benefit students and scholars working on the language and literature of the Anglo-Saxons.
It is well known that the Classics, which generally means Greek and Latin language materials, are much more advanced in digital scholarship and resources than Germanic languages. While an enormous amount of material exists online to allow research into Biblical and Classical Greek text, for instance, there is relatively little available for the Germanic languages, including Old English. Signum is peculiarly placed in relation to the Perseus Digital Library through their digital humanities software development that it would be possible to begin to create a useful, searchable, and well-annotated corpus of Old English texts in the latest version of their Scaife Viewer.
The goal of this project is to prototype the process and result of a translation and alignment with lemmatization, tagging, a glossary, and the ability to process the poem through analytical tools. What are the challenges and requirements that arise and how are they best overcome for the desired result of incorporating into the latest Scaife Viewer? Can this be used to generate vocabulary lists on a case-by-case basis to help students quickly gain competency with Old English particularly for the works they want to study? How can a well-annotated text improve our ability to do linguistic analysis? Finally, what inspiration for future work does this project provide, especially with an eye to future work in creating a large, consistent, accessible corpus of Old English/Modern English aligned texts?
By incorporating Old English texts with their aligned translations, linguistic tagging, and many more possible features, not only would access to the literature be improved, but Named Entity Recognition software and geotagging would allow for greater historical research possibilities, and tagged linguistic features would benefit linguistic scholarship. A rich reading environment and vocabulary tools would greatly assist non-specialists, students, and language-learners to approach these texts both in translation and in their original language.
While the bulk of the project will be translating and marking up (in XML and in accordance with the latest Text Encoding Initiative guidelines) a single poem, the analysis and paper will be written with an eye for current practices in corpus linguistics and creating digital texts for open access research. The translation work will have to consider the latest research in syntax and morphology of Old English as well as the context of the selected poem (currently considering “Widsith”) in its historical setting and the manuscript. The current pipeline is to go from an existing normalized setting to translation and tagging for various features, preparing an aligned view of both the Old English text and the modern translation, and then, time permitting, align with the manuscript so that you can see the text in all three views at once.
TEI Consortium, eds. TEI P5: Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange. v4.7.0. 16 November 2023. TEI Consortium. http://www.tei-c.org/Guidelines/P5/ Accessed 13 March 2024.
Kleinman, S., LeBlanc, M.D., Drout, M., and Feng, W. (2019). Lexos. v4.0 https://github.com/WheatonCS/Lexos/. doi:10.5281/zenodo.1403869.
Crane, Gregory, et al. 2023. “Beyond Translation: Engaging with Foreign Languages in a Digital Library.” International Journal on Digital Libraries, vol. 24, no. 3, pp. 163–76, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00799-023-00349-2.
Birnbaum, David J., et al. 2017. “The Digital Middle Ages: An Introduction.” Speculum, vol. 92, no. S1, pp. S1–38. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26583703. Accessed 13 Mar. 2024.
University of Oxford. 1993. Anglo-Saxon poetic records, Oxford Text Archive, http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12024/3009.
Martín Arista, Javier (ed.), Sara Domínguez Barragán, Luisa Fidalgo Allo, Laura García Fernández, Yosra Hamdoun Bghiyel, Miguel Lacalle Palacios, Raquel Mateo Mendaza, Carmen Novo Urraca, Ana Elvira Ojanguren López, Esaúl Ruíz Narbona, Roberto Torre Alonso, Marta Tío Sáenz & Raquel Vea Escarza. 2024. Nerthusv5. Interface of textual, lexicographical and secondary sources of Old English. Nerthus Project, Universidad de La Rioja, www.nerthusproject.com.
Martín Arista, Javier. 2024. “Toward a Universal Dependencies Treebank of Old English: Representing the Morphological Relatedness of Un-Derivatives” Languages 9, (3), 76. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages9030076
Taylor, Ann, Anthony Warner, Susan Pintzuk, and Frank Beths. 2003. The York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose. York: Department of Language and Linguistic Science, University of York.
Pintzuk, Susan, and Lendert Plug. 2001. The York-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Poetry. York: Department of Language and Linguistic Science, University of York.
Metola Rodríguez, Darío. 2017. On the applicability of the dictionaries of Old English to linguistic research. Journal of English Studies 15: 173–91.
Ultimately because the corpus is so small, it is not hopeless to someday have a complete, or nearly so, library of these richly-annotated and translation-aligned texts that are openly available. The potential benefit to scholarship in various fields is undeniable, and improved accessibility of the literature could only move the fields of Old English language and literature forward. Signum can and should be a leading force in the future of Germanic language digital humanities, and this thesis aims to be a step in that direction. As stated in the research question, this is a test case with the goal of opening doors to creating a much larger and more thorough corpus of open-access, high quality Old English texts.