Francesco Mambrini

Storytelling and Digital Epigraphy-Based Narratives in Linked Open Data

Carefully curated digital collections, structured with rich metadata sets and accessible via search engines and APIs, are not enough for users anymore. Multimedia narratives on the web and other digital “wayfindings” help a wider audience access the content of digital collections and also familiarize them with the research products that are published online. Digital humanists, then, face a twofold challenge: how to create scientific-oriented resources that serve the need of both scholars and general users and how to introduce nonspecialists to the digital collections produced by academics. The case of epigraphy is interesting, as there are already several examples of how niche content can be introduced to a wider public using multiple tools. This chapter illustrates the effort made by the Europeana network of Ancient Greek and Latin Epigraphy (EAGLE) in both integrating the largest collections of digitized inscriptions in Europe in a single database and providing users with tools for research, interaction, and fact finding. In particular, we will focus on the web-based storytelling tools that help users build engaging multimedia narrative based on inscriptions and ancient monuments and on a virtual exhibition that showcases some of the most spectacular items in the EAGLE collection.

Subject-Verb Agreement with Coordinated Subjects in Ancient Greek. A Treebank-based Study

In Ancient Greek, as well as in other languages, whenever agreement is triggered by two or more coordinated phrases, two different constructions are allowed: either the agreement can be controlled by the coordinated phrase as a whole, or it can be triggered by just one of the coordinated words. In spite of the amount of information that can be read on this topic in grammars of Ancient Greek, much is still to be known even at a general descriptive level. More importantly, the data still lack a convincing explanation. In this paper, we focus on a special domain of agreement (subject and verb agreement) and on one morphological feature that is expected to covary (number). We discuss the agreement in number for conjoined phrases, by revising some of the modern hypotheses with the support of the empirical evidence that can be collected from the available syntactically annotated corpora of Ancient Greek (treebanks). Results are interpreted according to syntactic features, cognitive factors and semantic properties of the coordinated phrases.