Growing Corpora. Byzantine Books Epigrams and Online Text Collections, Ghent University, June 24–25, 2020
Since 2010, the Database of Byzantine Book Epigrams team have been growing an online corpus of metrical paratexts, several of which were previously unpublished or unknown altogether, and made them freely available to the scholarly community.
A new version of our database was launched in June 2019. Exactly one year later, we are organising a two-day conference. Together with anyone interested in this particular genre of Byzantine poetry, we want to celebrate and reflect on what we have achieved so far and look ahead at what is – hopefully! – yet to come. Moreover, we want to stimulate communication and collaboration with other projects that are growing online corpora of texts.
You can partake in two different types of sessions.
In our demo sessions you can present your project and discuss your experiences in growing your online corpus (10-15 minutes). We are confident this will lead to a lively discussion on challenges we all face, such as data presentation, interoperability, and sustainability.
In our thematic sessions you can present your research on Byzantine book epigrams (20 minutes). Possible topics include:
- editing book epigrams;
- theoretical reflections on the concept of book epigrams and other metrical paratexts;
- book epigrams as a way to study the history of manuscripts;
- visual aspects of book epigrams;
- literary texts that function (or may have functioned) as book epigrams;
- metre and language of book epigrams;
- book epigrams in languages other than Greek.
We especially welcome contributions inspired by the Database of Byzantine Book Epigrams.