History Commons^™

The Digital Humanities As Cultural Capital: Implications For Biblical And Religious Studies, Caroline T. Schroeder

Caroline Schroeder

Although the study of the Bible was central to early Humanities Computing efforts, now Biblical Studies and Religious Studies are marginal disciplines in the emerging field known as Digital Humanities (English, History, Library Science, for example, are much more influential in DH.) This paper explores two questions: First, what does it mean for Biblical Studies to be marginal to the Digital Humanities when DH is increasingly seen as the locus of as transformation in the humanities? Second, how can our expertise in Biblical Studies influence and shape Digital Humanities for the better? Digital Humanities, I argue, constitutes a powerful emerging …

Review Of Nicola Denzey, The Bone Gatherers: The Lost Worlds Of Early Christian Women (Boston: Beacon Press, 2007), Caroline T. Schroeder

Caroline Schroeder

No abstract provided.

Review Of Ewa Wipszycka, Moines Et Communautés Monastiques En Égypte (Ive-Viie Siècles), Caroline T. Schroeder

Caroline Schroeder

No abstract provided.

Review Of Andrew T. Crislip, From Monastery To Hospital: Christian Monasticism And The Transformation Of Healthcare In Late Antiquity (Ann Arbor: University Of Michigan Press, 2005), Caroline T. Schroeder

Caroline Schroeder

No abstract provided.

Review Of Arietta Papaconstantinou And Alice-Mary Talbot, Ed., Becoming Byzantine: Children And Childhood In Byzantium, Caroline T. Schroeder

Caroline Schroeder

No abstract provided.

Raiders Of The Lost Corpus, Caroline T. Schroeder, Amir Zeldes

Caroline Schroeder

Coptic represents the last phase of the Egyptian language and is pivotal for a wide range of disciplines, such as linguistics, biblical studies, the history of Christianity, Egyptology, and ancient history. It was also essential for "cracking the code" of the Egyptian hieroglyphs. Although digital humanities has been hailed as distinctly interdisciplinary, enabling new forms of knowledge by combining multiple forms of disciplinary investigation, technical obtacles exist for creating a resource useful to both linguists and historians, for example. The nature of the language (outside of the Indo-European family) also requires its own approach. This paper will present some of …

Prophecy And Porneia In Shenoute's Letters: The Rhetoric Of Sexuality In A Late Antique Egyptian Monastery, Caroline T. Schroeder

Caroline Schroeder

The writer examines the apparently ubiquitous sexual references in the first surviving letters of Shenoute. Shenoute's references to sexuality constitute one aspect of his self-representation as his community's prophet. His textual performance as a prophet in these texts indicates that his sexual rhetoric served not only to condemn sexual activity among ascetics but also to help construct a relationship between God and the monastic community that is based on the relationship between God and the people in the Christian Old Testament. The sins of the monastery, as understood by Shenoute, like those of Israel or the nations in the prophetic …

Computational Methods For Coptic: Developing And Using Part-Of-Speech Tagging For Digital Scholarship In The Humanities, Caroline T. Schroeder, Amir Zeldes

Caroline Schroeder

This article motivates and details the first implementation of a freely available part of speech tag set and tagger for Coptic. Coptic is the last phase of the Egyptian language family and a descendant of the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt. Unlike classical Greek and Latin, few resources for digital and computational work have existed for ancient Egyptian language and literature until now. We evaluate our tag set in an inter-annotator agreement experiment and examine some of the difficulties in tagging Coptic data. Using an existing digital lexicon and a small training corpus taken from several genres of literary Sahidic Coptic …

Conference Report On Cosmopolitan Alexandria: A Symposium, Cornell University, October 20-21, 2002, Caroline T. Schroeder

Caroline Schroeder

No abstract provided.

Child Sacrifice In Egyptian Monastic Culture: From Familial Renunciation To Jephthah's Lost Daughter, Caroline T. Schroeder

Caroline Schroeder

The Apophthegmata Patrum tells the story of a man who, wishing to join a monastery, reenacts Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac by proceeding to throw his son in the Nile River on the command of the monastic father. Like Isaac, the boy is spared. This account of extreme familial renunciation in the service of the ascetic life is not the only account of a child killing or attempted killing in monastic literature. Nor does the biblical prefigurement of ascetic renunciation exhaust these narratives' significance. This essay examines accounts of child killings in Egyptian monastic culture through the lens of various textual …

Ancient Egyptian Religion On The Silver Screen: Modern Anxieties About Race, Ethnicity, And Religion, Caroline T. Schroeder

Caroline Schroeder

This essay examines the depiction of religion, race, and ethnicity in four films: The Mummy, Stargate, The Ten Commandments, and Prince of Egypt. Each film - explicitly or implicitly, deliberately or not - uses ancient Egyptian religion as a foil to dramatize American concerns about race and ethnicity. The foil is the mysterious, and often false, religiosity of an often Orientalized religious and ethnic "other."

Applying The Canonical Text Services Model To The Coptic Scriptorium, Bridget Almas, Caroline T. Schroeder

Caroline Schroeder

Coptic SCRIPTORIUM is a platform for interdisciplinary and computational research in Coptic texts and linguistics. The purpose of this project was to research and implement a system of stable identification for the texts and linguistic data objects in Coptic SCRIPTORIUM to facilitate their citation and reuse. We began the project with a preferred solution, the Canonical Text Services URN model, which we validated for suitability for the corpus and compared it to other approaches, including HTTP URLs and Handles. The process of applying the CTS model to Coptic SCRIPTORIUM required an in-depth analysis that took into account the domain-specific scholarly …

Religion And The Anzac Legend On Screen, Daniel Reynaud

Daniel Reynaud

This article explores the (non)relationship between religion and the Anzac story in Australian cinema and television dramas. It draws parallels between the absence of religious discussion in written literature and popular memory and the same absences in Anzac cinema. Anzac cinema has idealised and glorified the Anzac soldier, relocating spirituality from a religious force to a secular nationalism. The rare productions that show an engagement between religion and Anzac portray religion as a spent force in comparison to the new spirit of secular Anzac.

“Did Jesus Die In Outer Space? Evaluating A Key Claim In Richard Carrier’S On The Historicity Of Jesus, James F. Mcgrath

James F. McGrath

The attempt to use later sources, interpreted in ways that are at best open to dispute, in an attempt to argue against what generations of skeptical scholars have concluded to be likely with respect to the early Christian sources, is never going to make mythicism seem more probable than the hard-earned and intensely-researched consensus of historians and scholars, namely that there was a historical Jesus of Nazareth.

Polemic, Redaction, And History In The Mandaean Book Of John: The Case Of The Lightworld Visitors To Jerusalem, James F. Mcgrath

James F. McGrath

It is unclear whether there is anything of historical usefulness that can be gleaned from the details of the depictions of figures such as John the Baptist, Miriai, and Jesus in the Mandaean Book of John. This does not mean, however, that the text cannot provide useful information about the history of the Mandaeans, and of their interactions with other religious communities. By analyzing the evidence for redaction in certain key sections, and by distinguishing between core elements and peripheral additions to the stories recorded in it, it is possible to draw conclusions about the tradition history of the material, …

Bibliography Of Books On Muslims And Islam In The United States (1970-2015), Sahar Aziz, Cynthia Burress

Cynthia Burress

The Catholic Enlightenment. The Forgotten History Of A Global Movement, Ulrich Lehner

Ulrich L. Lehner

No abstract provided.

Haunted Histories And Ambiguous Burial Grounds In Iraqi Kurdistan, Nahro Zagros, Tyler Fisher, Muslih Mustafa

Tyler Fisher