The Latin Text Archive. A Platform for Historical Semantics and Text Mining
A long-term Project as Part of the Text Archive Series at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BBAW)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.60923/issn.2532-8816/23548Keywords:
Text Mining, Corpus Building, Historial Semantics, Ancient Latin, Lemmatization, Medieval LatinAbstract
The Latin Text Archive (LTA) is an online platform hosted by the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences (BBAW) since 2020 (https://LTA.bbaw.de). Its primary objective is to facilitate computer-assisted semantic analysis of Latin texts and corpora spanning various epochs and genres. The LTA collaborates with prominent text providers and related projects in this field. Its core activities center on post-philological editorial text preparation, which is essential for implementing text mining techniques in corpus-based historical semantics. The archive lemmatizes and stores Latin texts, augments them with relevant metadata, and organizes them within thematic or genre-specific corpora. These texts can be also read online and downloaded in various formats. Currently in a beta version, the LTA offers already 12,960 curated texts authored by 1,280 identified individuals, amounting to 54 million words. Furthermore, the LTA supplies access to its morphological lexicon, which supports the lemmatization process. Through the 'Latin Universe', users may also access additional texts not yet fully curated. Both texts and corpora are searchable via third-party tools such as 'Voyant-Tools' or through integrated functionalities like the 'Time series query' — which allows for diachronic comparison of keywords and lemmas — and 'Diacollo', which analyses co-occurring lemmas over time.
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