In the fall of 2017, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), through its Digital Humanities Advancement program, funded a $74,808 grant submitted by Herodotos Project co-PIs Christopher Brown, Micha Elsner, Marie Catherine de Marneffe, and Brian Joseph. The award (#HAA-256078-17) was for “Named Entity Recognition for the Classical Languages for the Building of a Catalogue Of Ancient Peoples”, and funds the NER development phase of the Project for 2017-2018. The NEH support has been extended to cover the project through December 31, 2020.
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Co-PIs Joseph and Brown attended the 10th anniversary of NEH’s Office of Digital Humanities Project Directors meeting on Friday, February 9, 2018, where they met and interacted with other Digital Humanities grantees for the past year, and during the “Lightning Round” presentations (maximum of 3 minutes and no more than 3 slides) presented the Herodotos Project, on behalf of all the co-PIs; click here for the slides and the text of the presentation: NEHspiel(Complete)+Slides-2hidcx6.
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As of September 2018, two new faces and one old face joined (re-joined in the case of the old face) the Project: new to us were undergraduate Computer Science and Engineering majors Benjamin Allen and Yukun “Jesse” Feng, and rejoining the team was Alex Erdmann, an OSU Ph.D. candidate in Linguistics specializing in computational linguistics and digital humanities applications, and the developer of our Latin NER system. Alex was with us through early January and has now returned to work he is doing on a computational project in Abu Dhabi, but he worked in the fall on perfecting the Latin system and adapting it so as to create an NER system for Greek. Ben and Jesse are advising the annotation team on how their decisions about annotation interact with the technical side of the NER system, and they assisted Alex with his tasks while learning the project’s computational ropes from him. The computational implementation of the Greek system is now in their capable hands.
We are pleased too that Dr. Rex Wallace, emeritus professor of Classics from the University of Massachusetts and an OSU Classics MA (1979) and Linguistics PhD (1984), has joined the Herodotos Project in an advisory role. Rex is one of the world’s leading authorities on the languages and peoples of ancient Italy, and thus adds an important dimension to our team.
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Members of the Herodotos team presented a paper at the annual meeting of the American Name Society in New York, on January 4 (2019); the title of the paper is “What’s in a Name? Issues in Named Entity Recognition“. The slides for the presentation and the handout.
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The Herodotos Project was featured in an article “The Herodotos Project: Towards an ethnohistory of the ancient world” in the Winter 2018 (published December 2018) issue of PATHWAYS. A Publication of Ohio Humanities (described on its website as “the state-based partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities” (http://www.ohiohumanities.org/)). For a pdf of the article, see item #4 on the Publications page.
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In May 2021, the Herodotos Project was awarded an OSU Arts and Humanities Larger Grant: Collaborative Completion Grant, providing $9994.73 for undergraduate and graduate research assistants to work from Autumn 2021 – Summer 2022 on the next phase of the project involving data collection from the internet on ancient groups identified by he NER system.