The project Storyworlds in Transition: Coptic Apocrypha in Changing Contexts in the Byzantine and Early Islamic Periods (APOCRYPHA) has an important digital humanities component incorporating a PostgreSQL relational database and network analysis using Gephi.
Professor Hugo Lundhaug's talk will focus on the design of the database and the ways in which it facilitates teamwork as well as analyses and conceptualizations that would have been impossible using traditional methods.
Welcome!
About the project
The ERC-financed project Storyworlds in Transition: Coptic Apocrypha in Changing Contexts in the Byzantine and Early Islamic Periods (APOCRYPHA) constitutes the first systematic study of Coptic apocrypha covering the entire timespan of Coptic literary production.
Defining apocrypha as texts and traditions that develop or expand upon characters and events of the biblical storyworld, the project approaches Coptic apocrypha as transnarrative, transmedial, and transauthorial products of Egyptian Christianity. In addition to a solid foundation in Coptology, the project employs theories and methods inspired by a combination of material philology, literary and media studies perspectives, cognitive science, and systems theory. In contrast with more traditional approaches to apocrypha, this project treats Coptic apocrypha as major contributors to dynamic and ongoing processes of literary world-building, extending and developing the biblical storyworld in ways that were profoundly coupled with, and which had important ramifications for, the beliefs and practices of Egyptian Christians over a thousand-year period stretching from late antique and Byzantine times until the early Islamic period, thus spanning the entire period of Coptic literary production. With a strong emphasis on the material carriers of the apocrypha, the project focuses on the contexts of production and use of the manuscripts in which this literature has been preserved and the fluid processes of textual transmission.
DH forum - an open lecture series for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences
Digital Humanities and Social Sciences emphasize using digital methods, research activities and tools in humanities and social science research. Though the term Digital Humanities was only coined in 2004, as a field of research, it has been practiced and taught in Norway for nearly forty years.