Abstract
uBIQUity is a project that aims to develop a machine learning search engine for identifying references to the Bible and the Qur’an in ancient commentaries. The tool will be designed to search through two large corpora: Christian and Islamic commentaries. It will be able to identify both explicit and non-explicit quotations and allusions to the Bible and the Qur’an with a high degree of accuracy. The source material for the tool will be all edited commentaries on the Bible composed from the Patristic age until the Late Byzantine period in Greek and Latin, and all edited classical commentaries on the Qur’an composed in Arabic from the rise of Islam until the 15th century. The tool will have a number of features, including the ability to cross-reference among commentaries, use n-grams, provide statistics, and perform morphological and semantic analysis of words. It is intended to be a more comprehensive and accurate tool than those currently available for searching for references to the Bible and Qur’an in commentaries.
Staffing
The WP8 leader is Fabrizio D’Avenia and the product owner is Anna MAMBELLI.
As the WP8 leader, Fabrizio D’Avenia is responsible for overseeing the overall direction and progress of the work package.
As the product owner, Anna MAMBELLI is responsible for defining the features and requirements for the product being developed in WP8. They work with the development team to prioritize and refine the product backlog, ensuring that the work being done aligns with the overall goals of the project. They also act as the primary point of contact for stakeholders, communicating the progress and status of the product to the rest of the team and to external parties.
Steps
- Identify relevant texts (published and/or unpublished).
- Discuss technical and scientific requirements with digital humanists and informatic engineers and merge with user needs from domain-specific experts and users.
- Prepare technical, scientific, and user-related requirements and identify the most adequate software tools for implementing uBIQUity.
- Develop guidelines for corpus pre-processing.
- Validate the status and adequacy of the identified texts.
- Apply corpus pre-processing guidelines to the use-case corpora.
- Identify spaces and places in Bible and Qur’anic texts and commentaries and link them to existing or once-existing spaces and places.
- Finalize all work validated in the analysis and prototyping phase and scientific preparation phase, including optimizing algorithms for citation recognition and producing a list of possible allusions, and integrating visualization and analysis tools.
- Test the software on the use-case corpora.
- Disseminate the results and software through presentations, publications, and an online platform.
Outcomes
- Provide full set of digitized commentaries on the Bible and Qur’an written in a specific chronological frame, to be made available to the scientific community through two databases
- Allow researchers to quickly and accurately identify quotations and allusions in ancient commentaries on the Bible and Qur’an
- Provide additional functions such as n-grams, statistics, morphological analysis, and vocabulary tools
- Allow users to group quotations/allusions found in commentaries according to their possible variant readings
- Use semantic computational analysis to produce new research acquisitions and reconstruct submerged textual traditions of the Bible
- Create a shared research instrument to fill the gap resulting from the lack of a standard scientific approach
- Help visually reconstruct the Biblical or Qur’anic library of an author by identifying the range of quotations and allusions present in their work