Daidalos#
AI for Latin and Ancient Greek texts#
The Daidalos project is developing a digital research infrastructure specifically tailored to the needs of Classical Philology and related disciplines, with a focus on Latin and Ancient Greek texts. On this page, you can learn more about our work and discover how Daidalos can support your research.
Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) offer a wide range of possibilities that can expand the methodological repertoire of Classical Philology. Digital methods are intended to support philological and literary scholarship and to enable innovative approaches to interpretation.
Daidalos is primarily aimed at:
Classical philologists who wish to analyze ancient texts using digital methods
Researchers from related disciplines, such as history, linguistics, theology, and philosophy, who pursue text-based research questions
Scholars in the Digital Humanities who work with Latin or Ancient Greek texts
The project pursues one central goal: to make the exploration of Latin and Ancient Greek texts using NLP methods accessible to all scholars. This allows researchers with no prior programming experience to become familiar with relevant tools and to acquire the knowledge needed to apply even complex NLP methods. At the same time, the infrastructure enables more advanced forms of digital text processing by gradually introducing users to the adaptation of programming code. Depending on the research question, different methods—or their individual customisation—are required.
Daidalos is therefore of interest to anyone working on ancient texts, regardless of whether they already have experience with digital text analysis or have so far worked primarily with analog methods or close reading. The NLP methods presented on our homepage demonstrate, by way of example, how AI-supported research can enrich engagement with ancient literature.
In order to provide all interested researchers with access to digital methods and to the scholarly use of Artificial Intelligence, Daidalos offers both intuitive elements that require no technical prior knowledge (NLP Tools on the homepage) and Jupyter Notebooks (under Try Out NLP) for those who wish to familiarize themselves with programming for their research. In addition, the Daidalos NLP guide (under NLP Explained) enables users to independently take their first steps in digital text processing and to become acquainted with so-called distant reading.
As the Daidalos project aims to foster broad networking among researchers who work on Latin or Ancient Greek texts and are interested in the potential of digital methods, we also provide an overview of useful tools and their respective applications (under Resources).
In addition to several research tandems (Research with Daidalos), the Daidalos project team has already conducted three workshops in Germany. On the one hand, this helps us to build a community of researchers in Classics (including Medieval and Neo-Latin as well as Byzantine Studies); on the other hand, feedback from Classicists is directly incorporated into the ongoing improvement of the platform.
These activities have resulted in illustrative case studies that show how research with NLP methods is carried out in practice. On the blog Lucretia tells, we invite you to read about what collaborative research with Daidalos can look like. A wide range of perspectives is represented: a professor of Latin and Ancient Greek combines a historiographical research question with narratological methodology, applying Named Entity Recognition and sentiment analysis; a Classicist PhD student analyzes mourning in Greek epitaphs by examining specific co-occurrences and drawing on word embeddings; a Latinist studies medieval supplication letters addressed to the Pope, aiming to automatically categorize a large corpus of letters through text classification.
Finally, we are pleased to highlight our many publications available on Zenodo.
We also share news and useful information via social media:
The Daidalos team will be happy to assist you if you have any questions.