A digital humanities dissertation project documenting and analyzing the productive literary reception of the ancient Greek poet Sappho across more than 1,000 German-language texts from the 15th to the 21st century — using Linked Data and formal ontologies.
For a full project description, see the project website (built with DSE-Static-Cookiecutter). If the website is unavailable, an archived version can be accessed via the Wayback Machine.
⚠️ This repository is under active development.
Laura Untner: Sappho Digital. Die literarische Sappho-Rezeption im deutschsprachigen Raum. Berlin/Vienna 2024–[2027], https://sappho-digital.com.
BibTeX
@dataset{untner_sappho_digital_2024,
author = {Untner, Laura},
title = {Sappho Digital. Die literarische Sappho-Rezeption im deutschsprachigen Raum},
year = {2024},
url = {https://sappho-digital.com},
note = {Berlin/Vienna, 2024--[2027]}
}A machine-readable citation is also available in CITATION.cff.
The reception testimonies listed were compiled over several years of research in national bibliographies, newspaper and periodical databases, digital text corpora, fanfiction platforms, and scholarly secondary literature, and recorded in a spreadsheet with core bibliographic data. Using OpenRefine, entries were semi-automatically linked to Wikidata, and a Python script then converted the spreadsheet into TEI/XML files.
The RDF data adds a further, more granular layer for an exemplary subcorpus: 197 Sappho fragments and 99 reception testimonies. Intertextual phenomena — motifs, topics, plots, rhetorical topoi, characters, and references to persons, places, and works — were manually annotated in XML through repeated close-reading passes, using a custom tagset. Six successive Python scripts then convert this annotated XML, together with the bibliographic lists, into RDF triples — covering author data, work data, fragment data, analysis data, and intertextual data, followed by a final merge and a reasoning pass with the Java-based reasoner HermiT — yielding 600,000+ triples. The data model is documented as an ontology built on CIDOC CRM, LRMoo, and INTRO (see below and alignments to further ontologies); recurring phenomena are defined in a SKOS vocabulary of 400+ concepts, developed inductively from the annotations in the LOD editor VocBench.
- XML/TEI files – Lists of German-language testimonies of the productive literary reception of Sappho.
- RDF/XML, Turtle, and JSON-LD files — Structured information about reception testimonies: authors, works, intertextual features in exemplary texts, and their relationships to each other and to Sappho’s own work. The
sappho-receptionfile combines all of these.
| Resource | URI | Website |
|---|---|---|
| Ontology (OWL) | w3id.org/sappho-digital/ontology/ | sappho-digital.com/ontology.html |
| Vocabulary (SKOS) | w3id.org/sappho-digital/vocab/ | sappho-digital.com/vocab.html |
| Alignments | w3id.org/sappho-digital/alignments/ | sappho-digital.com/alignments.html |
Ontology versions used in developing the Sappho Digital Ontology:
Additional documentation of the applied data model is in the /documentation folder, including SHACL shapes configuring the visual query builder (Sparnatural) on the query page.
For the data model in action, see also the companion repository wikidata-to-cidoc-crm.
- XSLT, JavaScript, and Python — Scripts for data transformation and statistics.
- Java — Reasoner program using HermiT.
- Code for the project website.
AI disclosure: Much of the code was created or refined with the help of Claude Code.
Clone the repository and run the following from the project root:
ant
To also build the site search index (with Pagefind), run this afterwards (requires Node.js):
npx pagefind --site html
This project is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
This repository also includes Saxon-HE, licensed separately under the Mozilla Public License, Version 2.0 (MPL 2.0).
For questions, suggestions, or error reports, feel free to reach out at laura.untner@fu-berlin.de or open an issue.
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