Jeff Rydberg-Cox | University of Missouri Kansas City (original) (raw)
Papers by Jeff Rydberg-Cox
Classical World, 2013
This article describes a hybrid approach to Ancient Greek that combines online tutorial exercises... more This article describes a hybrid approach to Ancient Greek that combines online tutorial exercises with fl exible face-to-face meetings and assessment within the Blackboard Course Management System. The goal of this system is to enable the Classics program at the University of Missouri-Kansas City to offer its three-course beginning Greek sequence concurrently so that students begin in any semester, work independently online while receiving any necessary help in a tutorial environment from the professor or a peer tutor, and continue their Greek studies at any time during their academic career without being constrained by a rigid three-semester rotation.
DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals), 2022
Pliny's Natural History, a large-scale encyclopedia containing more than 1.1 million words from t... more Pliny's Natural History, a large-scale encyclopedia containing more than 1.1 million words from the first century CE, provides a snapshot of scientific knowledge in the Roman Empire with sections devoted to topics such as geography, geology, zoology, botany, anthropology, minerology and an important overview of the history of Greek art. While scholars have used the Natural History as an ad hoc source for investigations about specific aspects of scientific knowledge in the Roman Empire, it is much more difficult to define the broader models that unify the work's disparate parts because of its size and scope. Quantitative and computational text technologies provide a methodology that help us understand the nature of this monumental compendium of scientific knowledge from the Roman Empire and allow us to answer specific questions such as the nature of sources that were used, the interrelations of the topics covered in the text, and the ways that these topics have been adopted or reflected in the publication history of the work. This paper explores the ways that other scholars and editors have tried to make this massive work more manageable, and then talk about the ways that network analysis and other quantitative approaches can help us understand the sources that Pliny used when writing his work. L'Historia Naturalis di Plinio, un'enciclopedia su larga scala del I secolo d.C. contenente più di 1,1 milioni di parole, fornisce un'istantanea della conoscenza scientifica nell'Impero Romano con sezioni dedicate ad argomenti come geografia, geologia, zoologia, botanica, antropologia, mineralogia e un'importante panoramica della storia dell'arte greca. Mentre gli studiosi hanno utilizzato l'Historia Naturalis come fonte ad hoc per indagini su aspetti specifici della conoscenza scientifica nell'Impero Romano, è molto più difficile definire i modelli più ampi che uniscono le parti disparate dell'opera a causa delle sue dimensioni e portata. Le tecnologie testuali quantitative e computazionali forniscono una metodologia che ci aiuta a comprendere la natura di questo monumentale compendio del sapere scientifico dell'Impero Romano e ci permette di rispondere a domande specifiche come la natura delle fonti utilizzate, le interrelazioni tra gli argomenti trattati nel testo e i modi in cui questi argomenti sono stati adottati o riflessi nella storia di pubblicazione dell'opera. Questo articolo esplora i modi in cui altri studiosi ed editori hanno cercato di rendere più gestibile questo enorme lavoro, quindi parla dei modi in cui l'analisi Umanistica Digitale
Using the linguistic dependency treebanks and digitized texts created by the Perseus Digital Libr... more Using the linguistic dependency treebanks and digitized texts created by the Perseus Digital Library, we are creating social networks for a collection of Greek tragedies that allow users to visualize the interactions between characters in the plays. Because the number of characters who appear on stage in Greek tragedy is limited, most of these social network diagrams fall into a few basic types. The most interesting aspect of these networks are, therefore, the edges that connect the nodes within the graphs. The linguistic data used to label or even create these edges becomes the jumping off point for visualizing and exploring the language of Greek tragedy.
Human-in-the-Loop has been receiving special attention from the data science and machine learning... more Human-in-the-Loop has been receiving special attention from the data science and machine learning community. It is essential to realize the advantages of human feedback and the pressing need for manual annotation to improve machine learning performance. Recent advancements in natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning have created unique challenges and opportunities for digital humanities research. In particular, there are ample opportunities for NLP and machine learning researchers to analyze data from literary texts and use these complex source texts to broaden our understanding of human sentiment using the human-in-the-loop approach. This paper presents our understanding of how human annotators differ from machine annotators in sentiment analysis tasks and how these differences can contribute to designing systems for the "human in the loop" sentiment analysis in complex, unstructured texts. We further explore the challenges and benefits of the human-machine collaboration for sentiment analysis using a case study in Greek tragedy and address some open questions about collaborative annotation for sentiments in literary texts. We focus primarily on (i) an analysis of the challenges in sentiment analysis tasks for humans and machines, and (ii) whether consistent annotation results are generated from multiple human annotators and multiple machine annotators. For human annotators, we have used a survey-based approach with about 60 college students. We have selected six popular sentiment analysis tools for machine annotators, including VADER, CoreNLP's sentiment annotator, TextBlob, LIME, Glove+LSTM, and RoBERTa. We have conducted a qualitative and quantitative evaluation with the human-in-the-loop approach and confirmed our observations on sentiment tasks using the Greek tragedy case study.
Technical Report Submitted to the Luce Foundation for the grant project "Analyzing Turki Manuscripts from the Jarring Collection Online (ATMO-2)" , 2022
Libraries and archives contain many examples of miscellany documents that bring together disparat... more Libraries and archives contain many examples of miscellany documents that bring together disparate works such as anthologies of poetry, collections of essays, recipe books, gatherings of folk wisdom, and collections of practical advice about subjects such as farming, building, painting, and medicine. These anthologies provide historians and literary scholars with valuable insights into the nature of a broad range of cultural and historical practices. While scholars often mine these compendia ad hoc for individual quotes about specific practices, it is much more difficult to form a picture of the conceptual worlds that tie these seemingly disparate nuggets of wisdom together. Metrics from network analysis can offer more substantial insights into the range of topics covered in these collections than other quantitative or qualitative methodologies. In particular, the network metrics of modularity and centrality can help scholars identify and explore the range of topics and interrelationships in these sorts of collections.
As part of the Annotated Turki Manuscripts from the Jarring Collection Online (ATMO-1) and the Analyzing Turki Manuscripts from the Jarring Collection Online (ATMO-2) projects (Dwyer et al., 2015–2022), we have applied lessons that we have learned from a study of Pliny the Elder’s large encyclopedia of the natural world from the Roman Empire to explore an early 20th- century medical manuscript from Eastern Turkistan (Rydberg-Cox, 2022).
Pliny';s Natural History, a large-scale encyclopedia containing more than 1.1 million words from ... more Pliny';s Natural History, a large-scale encyclopedia containing more than 1.1 million words from the first century CE, provides a snapshot of scientific knowledge in the Roman Empire with sections devoted to topics such as geography, geology, zoology, botany, anthropology, minerology and an important overview of the history of Greek art. While scholars have used the Natural History as an ad hoc source for investigations about specific aspects of scientific knowledge in the Roman Empire, it is much more difficult to define the broader models that unify the work's disparate parts because of its size and scope. Quantitative and computational text technologies provide a methodology that help us understand the nature of this monumental compendium of scientific knowledge from the Roman Empire and allow us to answer specific questions such as the nature of sources that were used, the interrelations of the topics covered in the text, and the ways that these topics have been adopted o...
Literary and Linguistic Computing, 2005
This paper explores the Greek participle and its use in the works of Lysias. I will argue that in... more This paper explores the Greek participle and its use in the works of Lysias. I will argue that in Lysias' works, narrative descriptions of violence are characterized by the unusually frequent use of the participle. I will further show that the association of high participle density and narratives about violence are a subset of a larger pattern relating to use of the participle in Lysias' works. In this pattern, Lysias uses unusually large numbers of participles: (1) only within the narrative and argumentative sections of the speeches; (2) to structure the work and mark the conclusion of narrative arcs and lines of argument; (3) in their role as a structuring device, these passages also provide immediacy and momentum to the argument or narrative descriptions of events; and (4) to mark a return in subject matter to the case at hand and to focus the attention of the jury on the question that is before them.
Digital Classics Outside the Echo-Chamber: Teaching, Knowledge Exchange & Public Engagement, 2016
For the past three years, I have been developing an open online digital tutorial for Ancient Gree... more For the past three years, I have been developing an open online digital tutorial for Ancient Greek designed for beginners with no previous knowledge of the language. This tutorial is available online at http://daedalus.umkc.edu/ FirstGreekBook. The drill and practice exercises in this tutorial are designed to engage a broad public audience both inside and outside traditional university classroom settings. The techniques and approaches used for syntactic annotation and translation alignment that are discussed in the articles about the Perseids Platform and the Treebanking environment elsewhere in this volume have informed the pedagogical approach of this tutorial. In calendar year 2014, there were 15,178 unique visitors who viewed tutorial pages some 58,137 times. This chapter will explore patterns of data usage and describe the audiences that have been using the tutorial. Digital tutorial programs for other languages such as Duolingo or Rosetta Stone successfully engage large audiences outside of traditional academic environments while most resources for the study of Ancient Greek are designed for use within traditional classrooms. An understanding of the usage patterns for this one digital tutorial will help illuminate ways that pedagogical materials can be crafted in order to engage with broader audiences.
Using the linguistic dependency treebanks and digitized texts created by the Perseus Digital Libr... more Using the linguistic dependency treebanks and digitized texts created by the Perseus Digital Library, we are creating social networks for a collection of Greek tragedies that allow users to visualize the interactions between characters in the plays. Because the number of characters who appear on stage in Greek tragedy is limited, most of these social network diagrams fall into a few basic types. The most interesting aspect of these networks are, therefore, the edges that connect the nodes within the graphs. The linguistic data used to label or even create these edges becomes the jumping off point for visualizing and exploring the language of Greek tragedy.
Recent advancements in NLP and machine learning have created unique challenges and opportunities ... more Recent advancements in NLP and machine learning have created unique challenges and opportunities for digital humanities research. In particular, there are ample opportunities for NLP and machine learning researchers to analyze data from literary texts and to broaden our understanding of human sentiment in classical Greek tragedy. In this paper, we will explore the challenges and benefits from the human and machine collaboration for sentiment analysis in Greek tragedy and address some open questions related to the collaborative annotation for the sentiments in literary texts. We focus primarily on (i) an analysis of the challenges in sentiment analysis tasks for humans and machines, and (ii) whether consistent annotation results are generated from the multiple human annotators and multiple machine annotators. For human annotators, we have used a survey-based approach with about 60 college students. We have selected three popular sentiment analysis tools for machine annotators, includ...
Cultural Heritage Language Technologies 1 , a project jointly sponsored by the US National Scienc... more Cultural Heritage Language Technologies 1 , a project jointly sponsored by the US National Science Foundation and the European Commission Directorate of Information, Science and Technology FP5 (2003-2005), was originally conceived as a way of bringing together researchers from eight institutions in the US and Europe, 2 working across the humanities and computer science in the broad field of digital library research, to investigate the most effective ways of applying technologies from the fields of computational linguistics, natural language processing, and information retrieval, to the challenges faced by students and scholars working on texts in Ancient Greek, Medieval and Early Modern Latin, and Old Norse. Three important developments had a significant impact on the trajectory of CHLT research and results that could not have been anticipated from the beginning of the project: 3 (a) the convergence of Web Services and GRID technologies has brought advances in distributed network sy...
Classical World, 2013
This article describes a hybrid approach to Ancient Greek that combines online tutorial exercises... more This article describes a hybrid approach to Ancient Greek that combines online tutorial exercises with fl exible face-to-face meetings and assessment within the Blackboard Course Management System. The goal of this system is to enable the Classics program at the University of Missouri-Kansas City to offer its three-course beginning Greek sequence concurrently so that students begin in any semester, work independently online while receiving any necessary help in a tutorial environment from the professor or a peer tutor, and continue their Greek studies at any time during their academic career without being constrained by a rigid three-semester rotation.
Book Reviews by Jeff Rydberg-Cox
Bryn Mawr Classical Review, 2022
A Review of the book Modern Odysseys: Cavafy, Woolf, Césaire, and a Poetics of Indirection by Mic... more A Review of the book Modern Odysseys: Cavafy, Woolf, Césaire, and a Poetics of Indirection by Michelle Zerba.
Classical World, 2013
This article describes a hybrid approach to Ancient Greek that combines online tutorial exercises... more This article describes a hybrid approach to Ancient Greek that combines online tutorial exercises with fl exible face-to-face meetings and assessment within the Blackboard Course Management System. The goal of this system is to enable the Classics program at the University of Missouri-Kansas City to offer its three-course beginning Greek sequence concurrently so that students begin in any semester, work independently online while receiving any necessary help in a tutorial environment from the professor or a peer tutor, and continue their Greek studies at any time during their academic career without being constrained by a rigid three-semester rotation.
DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals), 2022
Pliny's Natural History, a large-scale encyclopedia containing more than 1.1 million words from t... more Pliny's Natural History, a large-scale encyclopedia containing more than 1.1 million words from the first century CE, provides a snapshot of scientific knowledge in the Roman Empire with sections devoted to topics such as geography, geology, zoology, botany, anthropology, minerology and an important overview of the history of Greek art. While scholars have used the Natural History as an ad hoc source for investigations about specific aspects of scientific knowledge in the Roman Empire, it is much more difficult to define the broader models that unify the work's disparate parts because of its size and scope. Quantitative and computational text technologies provide a methodology that help us understand the nature of this monumental compendium of scientific knowledge from the Roman Empire and allow us to answer specific questions such as the nature of sources that were used, the interrelations of the topics covered in the text, and the ways that these topics have been adopted or reflected in the publication history of the work. This paper explores the ways that other scholars and editors have tried to make this massive work more manageable, and then talk about the ways that network analysis and other quantitative approaches can help us understand the sources that Pliny used when writing his work. L'Historia Naturalis di Plinio, un'enciclopedia su larga scala del I secolo d.C. contenente più di 1,1 milioni di parole, fornisce un'istantanea della conoscenza scientifica nell'Impero Romano con sezioni dedicate ad argomenti come geografia, geologia, zoologia, botanica, antropologia, mineralogia e un'importante panoramica della storia dell'arte greca. Mentre gli studiosi hanno utilizzato l'Historia Naturalis come fonte ad hoc per indagini su aspetti specifici della conoscenza scientifica nell'Impero Romano, è molto più difficile definire i modelli più ampi che uniscono le parti disparate dell'opera a causa delle sue dimensioni e portata. Le tecnologie testuali quantitative e computazionali forniscono una metodologia che ci aiuta a comprendere la natura di questo monumentale compendio del sapere scientifico dell'Impero Romano e ci permette di rispondere a domande specifiche come la natura delle fonti utilizzate, le interrelazioni tra gli argomenti trattati nel testo e i modi in cui questi argomenti sono stati adottati o riflessi nella storia di pubblicazione dell'opera. Questo articolo esplora i modi in cui altri studiosi ed editori hanno cercato di rendere più gestibile questo enorme lavoro, quindi parla dei modi in cui l'analisi Umanistica Digitale
Using the linguistic dependency treebanks and digitized texts created by the Perseus Digital Libr... more Using the linguistic dependency treebanks and digitized texts created by the Perseus Digital Library, we are creating social networks for a collection of Greek tragedies that allow users to visualize the interactions between characters in the plays. Because the number of characters who appear on stage in Greek tragedy is limited, most of these social network diagrams fall into a few basic types. The most interesting aspect of these networks are, therefore, the edges that connect the nodes within the graphs. The linguistic data used to label or even create these edges becomes the jumping off point for visualizing and exploring the language of Greek tragedy.
Human-in-the-Loop has been receiving special attention from the data science and machine learning... more Human-in-the-Loop has been receiving special attention from the data science and machine learning community. It is essential to realize the advantages of human feedback and the pressing need for manual annotation to improve machine learning performance. Recent advancements in natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning have created unique challenges and opportunities for digital humanities research. In particular, there are ample opportunities for NLP and machine learning researchers to analyze data from literary texts and use these complex source texts to broaden our understanding of human sentiment using the human-in-the-loop approach. This paper presents our understanding of how human annotators differ from machine annotators in sentiment analysis tasks and how these differences can contribute to designing systems for the "human in the loop" sentiment analysis in complex, unstructured texts. We further explore the challenges and benefits of the human-machine collaboration for sentiment analysis using a case study in Greek tragedy and address some open questions about collaborative annotation for sentiments in literary texts. We focus primarily on (i) an analysis of the challenges in sentiment analysis tasks for humans and machines, and (ii) whether consistent annotation results are generated from multiple human annotators and multiple machine annotators. For human annotators, we have used a survey-based approach with about 60 college students. We have selected six popular sentiment analysis tools for machine annotators, including VADER, CoreNLP's sentiment annotator, TextBlob, LIME, Glove+LSTM, and RoBERTa. We have conducted a qualitative and quantitative evaluation with the human-in-the-loop approach and confirmed our observations on sentiment tasks using the Greek tragedy case study.
Technical Report Submitted to the Luce Foundation for the grant project "Analyzing Turki Manuscripts from the Jarring Collection Online (ATMO-2)" , 2022
Libraries and archives contain many examples of miscellany documents that bring together disparat... more Libraries and archives contain many examples of miscellany documents that bring together disparate works such as anthologies of poetry, collections of essays, recipe books, gatherings of folk wisdom, and collections of practical advice about subjects such as farming, building, painting, and medicine. These anthologies provide historians and literary scholars with valuable insights into the nature of a broad range of cultural and historical practices. While scholars often mine these compendia ad hoc for individual quotes about specific practices, it is much more difficult to form a picture of the conceptual worlds that tie these seemingly disparate nuggets of wisdom together. Metrics from network analysis can offer more substantial insights into the range of topics covered in these collections than other quantitative or qualitative methodologies. In particular, the network metrics of modularity and centrality can help scholars identify and explore the range of topics and interrelationships in these sorts of collections.
As part of the Annotated Turki Manuscripts from the Jarring Collection Online (ATMO-1) and the Analyzing Turki Manuscripts from the Jarring Collection Online (ATMO-2) projects (Dwyer et al., 2015–2022), we have applied lessons that we have learned from a study of Pliny the Elder’s large encyclopedia of the natural world from the Roman Empire to explore an early 20th- century medical manuscript from Eastern Turkistan (Rydberg-Cox, 2022).
Pliny';s Natural History, a large-scale encyclopedia containing more than 1.1 million words from ... more Pliny';s Natural History, a large-scale encyclopedia containing more than 1.1 million words from the first century CE, provides a snapshot of scientific knowledge in the Roman Empire with sections devoted to topics such as geography, geology, zoology, botany, anthropology, minerology and an important overview of the history of Greek art. While scholars have used the Natural History as an ad hoc source for investigations about specific aspects of scientific knowledge in the Roman Empire, it is much more difficult to define the broader models that unify the work's disparate parts because of its size and scope. Quantitative and computational text technologies provide a methodology that help us understand the nature of this monumental compendium of scientific knowledge from the Roman Empire and allow us to answer specific questions such as the nature of sources that were used, the interrelations of the topics covered in the text, and the ways that these topics have been adopted o...
Literary and Linguistic Computing, 2005
This paper explores the Greek participle and its use in the works of Lysias. I will argue that in... more This paper explores the Greek participle and its use in the works of Lysias. I will argue that in Lysias' works, narrative descriptions of violence are characterized by the unusually frequent use of the participle. I will further show that the association of high participle density and narratives about violence are a subset of a larger pattern relating to use of the participle in Lysias' works. In this pattern, Lysias uses unusually large numbers of participles: (1) only within the narrative and argumentative sections of the speeches; (2) to structure the work and mark the conclusion of narrative arcs and lines of argument; (3) in their role as a structuring device, these passages also provide immediacy and momentum to the argument or narrative descriptions of events; and (4) to mark a return in subject matter to the case at hand and to focus the attention of the jury on the question that is before them.
Digital Classics Outside the Echo-Chamber: Teaching, Knowledge Exchange & Public Engagement, 2016
For the past three years, I have been developing an open online digital tutorial for Ancient Gree... more For the past three years, I have been developing an open online digital tutorial for Ancient Greek designed for beginners with no previous knowledge of the language. This tutorial is available online at http://daedalus.umkc.edu/ FirstGreekBook. The drill and practice exercises in this tutorial are designed to engage a broad public audience both inside and outside traditional university classroom settings. The techniques and approaches used for syntactic annotation and translation alignment that are discussed in the articles about the Perseids Platform and the Treebanking environment elsewhere in this volume have informed the pedagogical approach of this tutorial. In calendar year 2014, there were 15,178 unique visitors who viewed tutorial pages some 58,137 times. This chapter will explore patterns of data usage and describe the audiences that have been using the tutorial. Digital tutorial programs for other languages such as Duolingo or Rosetta Stone successfully engage large audiences outside of traditional academic environments while most resources for the study of Ancient Greek are designed for use within traditional classrooms. An understanding of the usage patterns for this one digital tutorial will help illuminate ways that pedagogical materials can be crafted in order to engage with broader audiences.
Using the linguistic dependency treebanks and digitized texts created by the Perseus Digital Libr... more Using the linguistic dependency treebanks and digitized texts created by the Perseus Digital Library, we are creating social networks for a collection of Greek tragedies that allow users to visualize the interactions between characters in the plays. Because the number of characters who appear on stage in Greek tragedy is limited, most of these social network diagrams fall into a few basic types. The most interesting aspect of these networks are, therefore, the edges that connect the nodes within the graphs. The linguistic data used to label or even create these edges becomes the jumping off point for visualizing and exploring the language of Greek tragedy.
Recent advancements in NLP and machine learning have created unique challenges and opportunities ... more Recent advancements in NLP and machine learning have created unique challenges and opportunities for digital humanities research. In particular, there are ample opportunities for NLP and machine learning researchers to analyze data from literary texts and to broaden our understanding of human sentiment in classical Greek tragedy. In this paper, we will explore the challenges and benefits from the human and machine collaboration for sentiment analysis in Greek tragedy and address some open questions related to the collaborative annotation for the sentiments in literary texts. We focus primarily on (i) an analysis of the challenges in sentiment analysis tasks for humans and machines, and (ii) whether consistent annotation results are generated from the multiple human annotators and multiple machine annotators. For human annotators, we have used a survey-based approach with about 60 college students. We have selected three popular sentiment analysis tools for machine annotators, includ...
Cultural Heritage Language Technologies 1 , a project jointly sponsored by the US National Scienc... more Cultural Heritage Language Technologies 1 , a project jointly sponsored by the US National Science Foundation and the European Commission Directorate of Information, Science and Technology FP5 (2003-2005), was originally conceived as a way of bringing together researchers from eight institutions in the US and Europe, 2 working across the humanities and computer science in the broad field of digital library research, to investigate the most effective ways of applying technologies from the fields of computational linguistics, natural language processing, and information retrieval, to the challenges faced by students and scholars working on texts in Ancient Greek, Medieval and Early Modern Latin, and Old Norse. Three important developments had a significant impact on the trajectory of CHLT research and results that could not have been anticipated from the beginning of the project: 3 (a) the convergence of Web Services and GRID technologies has brought advances in distributed network sy...
Classical World, 2013
This article describes a hybrid approach to Ancient Greek that combines online tutorial exercises... more This article describes a hybrid approach to Ancient Greek that combines online tutorial exercises with fl exible face-to-face meetings and assessment within the Blackboard Course Management System. The goal of this system is to enable the Classics program at the University of Missouri-Kansas City to offer its three-course beginning Greek sequence concurrently so that students begin in any semester, work independently online while receiving any necessary help in a tutorial environment from the professor or a peer tutor, and continue their Greek studies at any time during their academic career without being constrained by a rigid three-semester rotation.
Bryn Mawr Classical Review, 2022
A Review of the book Modern Odysseys: Cavafy, Woolf, Césaire, and a Poetics of Indirection by Mic... more A Review of the book Modern Odysseys: Cavafy, Woolf, Césaire, and a Poetics of Indirection by Michelle Zerba.