Participatory Philology: Computational Linguistics and the Future of Historical Language Education

Abstract

This brief contributes to the proceedings of the Citizen Cyberscience Summit 2014 with a summary of the presentation given by the Open Philology Project on its goals, work, and collaborators. With a focus on the interface between 21st-century philology and citizen science, this paper reviews the data we collect, why we gather that data, and the cohort that we engage for assistance with data production. The paper presents the work of the Historical Languages eLearning Project and the incorporation of pedagogy into resources for participatory philology, as well as briefly reviews a case study of a class at Tufts University that supports the viability of our approach. Above all, we seek to demonstrate the deep similarities of technical infrastructure and research processes between participatory philology and citizen science, despite fundamental differences in a humanistic versus a scientific approach to the subject matter. In so doing, we hope to help lay the foundation for increasing contribution by the humanities to the fields of citizen science and human computation.