Dissertation by Christine Roughan
(Dissertation: New York University), 2023
This dissertation examines the transmission of two astronomical curricula: the Little Astronomy o... more This dissertation examines the transmission of two astronomical curricula: the Little Astronomy of Greek late antiquity and the Middle Books of the medieval Islamicate world. The Little Astronomy is usually understood to have comprised a group of approximately nine ancient Greek texts: Theodosius’s Sphaerica, Autolycus’s On the Moving Sphere, Euclid’s Optics, Euclid’s Phaenomena, Theodosius’s On Habitations, Theodosius’s On Days and Nights, Aristarchus’s On Sizes and Distances, Autolycus’s On Risings and Settings, and Hypsicles’s Anaphoricus. All of these treatises were translated into Arabic by the end of the ninth century CE, and these translations came to serve as the core of the Middle Books – a grouping named as such because they were the books to be read between Euclid’s Elements and Ptolemy’s Almagest. The existence of a collection called the Middle Books is well-attested by contemporary sources; that of the Little Astronomy is less so. This dissertation therefore sets out to establish the evidence for these respective groupings, examining when they existed, what form they took, and how they developed over time. It determines that the Little Astronomy and Middle Books both comprised a persistent core series of treatises set out in a logically ordered arrangement, sometimes accompanied by other treatises at different points in time. The dissertation then turns to philological analyses to establish the influence of the curricular context on the transmission of the component texts. I argue that many of the changes introduced into these texts by late antique and medieval editors can be identified as motivated by the didactic use of these curricula, and that these contributions speak to how copyists, teachers, and editors in different contexts perceived of their own relationship to a long-lived astronomical tradition.
Papers by Christine Roughan
Mediterranea. International Journal on the Transfer of Knowledge, 2022
This paper examines the context for the Greek translations and adaptions of Islamic astronomical ... more This paper examines the context for the Greek translations and adaptions of Islamic astronomical works which came out of Maragha and Tabriz at the end of the thirteenth century. It discusses the observation programs and the teaching activities of astronomers at the Maragha Observatory in order to shed light on the relation of the translated texts to the intellectual activities at the observatory and to the broader picture of education in the astral sciences in these two cities. The paper argues that astronomical education in these centers drew from a combination of more established teaching texts and of newer works by the astronomers and teachers at the observatory, and that the selection of sources that received translations and adaptions in Greek was motivated by the particular needs of the Byzantine student or students in question.
Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, 2018
From October 2016 to April 2017, the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW) at New Y... more From October 2016 to April 2017, the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW) at New York University was the venue for the exhibition Time and Cosmos in Greco-Roman Antiquity. Among the objects on display were ancient sundials, some of which were accompanied by digital animations that illustrated how such devices worked. The purpose of the current article is to place these digital resources in the context of the collaborative environment that created them and to show how they can continue to be effective in communicating the sometimes complicated operation of ancient sundials, including examples that were not on display in the gallery due to size constraints. After an introduction to the workings of the objects themselves, we discuss the role of this digital content in the visitor's experience and as a museum education resource for docents. Figure 1: Installation view of a visitor and the Roofed Spherical Sundial with Greek Inscription with an animation running at its side, 2016. The operation of this sundial is discussed and illustrated with animation in the text.
Manuscript Studies, 2016
We describe a hierarchical approach to modeling text that allows machine-actionable canonical cit... more We describe a hierarchical approach to modeling text that allows machine-actionable canonical citation of text at many levels of specificity. This model address the problem of overlapping or mutually exclusive analyses. In turn, this flexibility in citation allows rich linking of textual transcriptions and other data to regions-of-interest on digital images, of particular value to codicological and paleographic study. Our examples are from work on Byzantine manuscripts containing Greek epic poetry and scholarly commentary, but our approach can apply to any image-based project in documenting books, manuscripts, inscriptions or other text-bearing surfaces.
Articles:
Dariya Rafiyenko:
Gicht im Altgriechischen. Eine korpus-basierte Studie
Christine Rou... more Articles:
Dariya Rafiyenko:
Gicht im Altgriechischen. Eine korpus-basierte Studie
Christine Roughan:
Digital Texts and Diagrams: Representing the Transmission of Euclid’s Elements
Friedrich Meins:
Digitale Editionen für die Altertumswissenschaften:
Eine Auseinandersetzung mit P. Sahles Kritik kritischer Texteditionen
Leif Scheuermann:
Die Abgrenzung der digitalen Geisteswissenschaften
Charlotte Schubert:
Die Visualisierung von Quellennetzwerken am Beispiel Plutarchs
Projektankündigungen:
Reinhold Scholl:
Mehrsprachiges Online Wörterbuch zum Fachwortschatz der Verwaltungssprache des
griechisch-römisch-byzantinischen Ägypten
Christopher Blackwell / Charlotte Schubert:
Annotating and Editing with Canonical Text Services (CTS) Project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation: 2016-2017
Conference Presentations by Christine Roughan
3rd Annual Edinburgh International Graduate Conference in Late Antique, Islamic, and Byzantine Studies: Historical Inertia: Continuity in the Face of Change 500-1500 CE, 2019
In modern scholarship, the name "Little Astronomy" has been applied to a group of Hellenistic mat... more In modern scholarship, the name "Little Astronomy" has been applied to a group of Hellenistic mathematical works which were taught together in Late Antiquity as an astronomical corpus. These texts were translated during the ninth century into Arabic, in which language they retained this pedagogical function. There they came to be known as the "Middle Books" (al-Mutawassiṭāt), that is, books to be read between Euclid's Elements and Ptolemy's Almagest. Their wide diffusion in Arabic led to translations into Latin and Hebrew in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Modern scholarship sometimes blurs the lines between the Greek Little Astronomy and the Arabic Middle Books, acknowledging the link between the two but failing to disentangle what features remained stable and what features changed or were introduced. This paper will examine both the central corpus, which persisted from at least the fourth century CE onwards, and the changes that were made to the curriculum. In the former case, not only did the texts survive the transition to a new language and new empire, but their role in an astronomical curriculum did so as well — the curriculum may even have proceeded in the same order. In the latter case, the evolution of the corpus was caused by the continuing use by teachers and scholars, who shaped both the curriculum and the texts. Thus the mathematician al-Nasawī (11th century) noted that the "moderns" (al-muḥdathūna) had added a work to the Middle Books because they found its contents mathematically useful, while Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī (13th century) produced the expanded and subsequently canonical edition of the Middle Books. This study examines how the educational inertia of the astronomical curriculum kept these texts in use, and how pedagogical goals shaped the Little Astronomy and the Middle Books over time.
by Aristotelis Nayfa, Philip Harrison, Anna Stockhammer, Kyle B . Brunner, Fraser Reed, Christine Roughan, Aslisho Qurboniev, Ewan Short, George Robert Luff, Matteo G Randazzo, Tim Penn, Alice van den Bosch, and Samuel Nwokoro 2019 Conference Program
In this paper, the Archimedes Project at the College of the Holy Cross presents an approach to di... more In this paper, the Archimedes Project at the College of the Holy Cross presents an approach to digital, diplomatic renditions of Greek mathematical diagrams as preserved in ancient and medieval sources. The team creates XML-based vector images from scalable vector graphics (SVGs). The resulting tracings are composed of data on the geometric shapes that make up the diagram, the textual labels that accompany them, citable identifiers, and editorial annotations. The relationships between the diplomatic diagram and the diplomatic text and images of the physical manuscript are modeled with the CITE architecture developed by the Homer Multitext project (http://www.homermultitext.org/hmt-doc/cite/index.html).
This approach creates machine-actionable data out of raster images provided by digital photography. The team shows how they have applied this method to diagrams from Codex Bodmer 8 (16th century) and Codex C (10th century and preserved in the Archimedes Palimpsest).
Open Access Writing by Christine Roughan
The Digital Orientalist, 2019
Book Reviews by Christine Roughan
Die Welt des Islams, 2021
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Dissertation by Christine Roughan
Papers by Christine Roughan
Dariya Rafiyenko:
Gicht im Altgriechischen. Eine korpus-basierte Studie
Christine Roughan:
Digital Texts and Diagrams: Representing the Transmission of Euclid’s Elements
Friedrich Meins:
Digitale Editionen für die Altertumswissenschaften:
Eine Auseinandersetzung mit P. Sahles Kritik kritischer Texteditionen
Leif Scheuermann:
Die Abgrenzung der digitalen Geisteswissenschaften
Charlotte Schubert:
Die Visualisierung von Quellennetzwerken am Beispiel Plutarchs
Projektankündigungen:
Reinhold Scholl:
Mehrsprachiges Online Wörterbuch zum Fachwortschatz der Verwaltungssprache des
griechisch-römisch-byzantinischen Ägypten
Christopher Blackwell / Charlotte Schubert:
Annotating and Editing with Canonical Text Services (CTS) Project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation: 2016-2017
Conference Presentations by Christine Roughan
This approach creates machine-actionable data out of raster images provided by digital photography. The team shows how they have applied this method to diagrams from Codex Bodmer 8 (16th century) and Codex C (10th century and preserved in the Archimedes Palimpsest).
We show how, by exposing the resulting RDF graph to the internet from a SPARQL endpoint, we can integrate material from multiple projects. We illustrate this with examples using separately collected paleographic observations to relate independent and separately conceived digital editions of Greek manuscripts with literary content (Homeric manuscript with scholia) and mathematical subject matter (including the famous Archimedes palimpsest).
Open Access Writing by Christine Roughan
Book Reviews by Christine Roughan
Dariya Rafiyenko:
Gicht im Altgriechischen. Eine korpus-basierte Studie
Christine Roughan:
Digital Texts and Diagrams: Representing the Transmission of Euclid’s Elements
Friedrich Meins:
Digitale Editionen für die Altertumswissenschaften:
Eine Auseinandersetzung mit P. Sahles Kritik kritischer Texteditionen
Leif Scheuermann:
Die Abgrenzung der digitalen Geisteswissenschaften
Charlotte Schubert:
Die Visualisierung von Quellennetzwerken am Beispiel Plutarchs
Projektankündigungen:
Reinhold Scholl:
Mehrsprachiges Online Wörterbuch zum Fachwortschatz der Verwaltungssprache des
griechisch-römisch-byzantinischen Ägypten
Christopher Blackwell / Charlotte Schubert:
Annotating and Editing with Canonical Text Services (CTS) Project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation: 2016-2017
This approach creates machine-actionable data out of raster images provided by digital photography. The team shows how they have applied this method to diagrams from Codex Bodmer 8 (16th century) and Codex C (10th century and preserved in the Archimedes Palimpsest).
We show how, by exposing the resulting RDF graph to the internet from a SPARQL endpoint, we can integrate material from multiple projects. We illustrate this with examples using separately collected paleographic observations to relate independent and separately conceived digital editions of Greek manuscripts with literary content (Homeric manuscript with scholia) and mathematical subject matter (including the famous Archimedes palimpsest).