Reading the Spiritual Meadow with AI with Dr. Kyle Sanders
"What does this text reveal when you can finally read it as a collection?"
What students do
Over five weeks, students take scanned pages of the Spiritual Meadow and produce three things that did not exist before. First, a clean, machine-readable version of the Greek text, built using digital humanities methods in combination with AI tools that can read scanned pages of Ancient Greek; this process is then carefully edited by the student. Second, a list of every saint, place name, and figure mentioned across the stories will be extracted from the cleaned text and matched against a major database of ancient world geography. This work will produce a working map showing where in the ancient world these stories take place, while also tagging them with attributes for more granular categorization. Finally, students will use these maps in combination with digital humanities methods to analyze the collection as a whole, thinking critically about the relationship between traditional close reading of individual stories (seeing the trees, as it were) alongside the patterns that emerge with a machine-assisted, bird's-eye perspective of the whole text.
The deliverables would generate interest in several humanistic disciplines (Classics, Byzantine Studies, history of religion) and hold significant promise for future study. Dr. Sanders has identified scholarly venues where this kind of work belongs, including digital humanities workshops at major academic conferences.
About the mentor
Dr. Kyle Sanders is a classicist who studies how ancient texts create relationships with the non-human world and has taught the Spiritual Meadow to intermediate Greek students at the secondary and university level for several years. This summer his students will use AI to produce the first clean digital edition of a 7th-century Greek manuscript, map where its stories take place, and analyze the collection as a whole for the first time.