Celebrate with us! ORAEC is one year old.

One year ago we published our first blog post. We take the opportunity to look back and take stock. What have we done? Did we live up to the standards we set?

We plan to deliver small gifts from next week until Christmas: Annotation guidelines, stable IDs, open linked data, etc. (https://oraec.github.io/2022/09/19/happy-birthday-egyptology.html)

and

We want to create a metasearch engine that searches the hieroglyphic writing of various digital projects. We want to publish a construction kit for a search interface of our ORAEC data. We want to provide a text analysis tool for the ORAEC data. (https://oraec.github.io/2023/05/05/roadmap-and-preliminary-work-for-a-hieroglyphic-metasearch-engine.html)

These are the things we promised in our blog. Besides, our name already says it all; the acronym stands for “Open Richly Annotated Egyptian Corpus”. Let’s go through the points.

Annotation guidelines

The first item, “Annotation guidelines”, is something we are most proud of and most important to us. We have formulated guidelines as to which Unicode signs should and should not be used to annotate hieroglyphs. This is due to the big mess that Unicode offers in the block with hieroglyphs, both signs and bare characters. The guidelines are already being used by others, which shows some acceptance. The guidelines can be found here. Our blog about this is https://oraec.github.io/2022/09/28/recommendations-encoding-hieroglyphs.html.

Stable IDs

For many Egyptian texts we have introduced IDs that are stable and easy to remember. This has made it easier to cite in the digital environment. Here is our blog entry: https://oraec.github.io/2022/10/18/stable-ids-for-egyptian-texts.html Other IDs, e.g. for lexical entries, are reused from other projects.

Open linked data

We link data to other open projects such as Trismegistos https://oraec.github.io/2022/12/04/oraec-and-trismegistos.html, Wikidata https://oraec.github.io/2023/01/20/oraec-and-wikidata.html and VÉgA https://oraec.github.io/2023/07/25/oraec-and-vega.html.

ORAEC

We have a text corpus that provides Egyptian texts in transcription and translation. Individual word forms are annotated with hieroglyphic, semantic, morphological and grammatical information. https://oraec.github.io/2022/10/23/hooray-our-text-corpus-is-online.html

Metasearch engine

Well, we don’t just have one metasearch engine, we have two! You can search for hieroglyphs and for hieroglyphic word forms in various digital projects: https://oraec.github.io/2023/05/10/metasearch-engine-for-egyptian-hieroglyphs.html

Search interface

Actually not planned at all, we now have a search interface that makes our corpus accessible: https://oraec.github.io/2023/06/22/oraec-search.html

Text analysis tool

We do not have a tool of our own. Rather, we blogged about how to analyze the ORAEC data in Voyant. https://oraec.github.io/2023/07/08/oraec-and-voyant.html

Thank God, we kept our promise. What else do we have?

Services

We have a service that converts MdC to Unicode: https://oraec.github.io/corpus/mdc_to_unicode_converter.html

Data analysis

We provide collocations, a cooccurrence network, sign frequency, text statistics, TTR, TF-IDF, chronological distribution of demotic.

Reviews

Finally, a word cloud of our blog posts, created with Voyant:

Stay tuned!

This work is marked with CC0 1.0 Universal

Review of hieroglyphs.ai

Automatic Transliteration of Hieroglyphs