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Digital Humanities (DH) within Coptic Studies, an emerging field of development, will be much aided by the digitization of large quantities of typeset Coptic texts. Until recently, the only Optical Character Recognition (OCR) analysis of printed Coptic texts had been executed by Moheb S. Mekhaiel, who used the Tesseract program to create a text model for liturgical books in the Bohairic dialect of Coptic. However, this model is not suitable for the many scholarly editions of texts in the Sahidic dialect of Coptic which use noticeably different fonts. In the current study, DH and Coptological projects based in Göttingen, Germany, collaborated to develop a new Coptic OCR pipeline suitable for use with all Coptic dialects. The objective of the study was to generate a model which can facilitate digital Coptic Studies and produce Coptic corpora from existing printed texts. First, we compared the two available OCR programs that can recognize Coptic: Tesseract and Ocropy. The results indicated that the neural network model, i.e. Ocropy, performed better at recognizing the letters with supralinear strokes that characterize the published Sahidic texts. After training Ocropy for Coptic using artificial neural networks, the team achieved an accuracy rate of >91% for the OCR analysis of Coptic typeset. We subsequently compared the efficiency of Ocropy to that of manual transcribing and concluded that the use of Ocropy to extract Coptic from digital images of printed texts is highly beneficial to Coptic DH. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Text re-use has been in the humanist's interest for centuries. Collecting parallel texts implies giving a certain information, e.g. a moral statement or report on wars and conflicts, a kind of witness. The more independent parallel texts are collected, the more feasible the information is. The contribution reported here is on automatic detection of text re-use and the usage of a text re-use network to derive a Cultural Heritage Aware PageRank technique given ancient text re-uses like quotations, paraphrases, and allusions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]