The Diphilos workstation: a computational system for digital philology

Abstract - Digital technology development and the conversion of ancient source documents in digital format allows to design software tools for philological disciplines. The Philological Workstation is able to: 1) manage images and texts; 2) perform an automatic link between each word of the manually transcribed manuscripts and the image-zones where the words are located; 3) associate annotations and variants to the text or to the image; 4) prepare indexes and concordances. A special module is also available to record the critical apparatus information allowing the user to evaluate the different typology each variant is dealing with. A multidimensional scaling algorithm shows the dependence between the collated sources in a 3D space. With regard to the ancient printed books, the workstation is able to train a specific neural system for automatic interpretation and transcription of the text, which, for the Latin language, is verified and corrected by a linguistic spelling checker.