Chiara Palladino (Furman University)
The fragile link: Semantic Annotation and the study of the past

Abstract
Semantic annotation is one of the most powerful tools of current digital scholarship. With the raise of machine learning and increasingly customizable language models, the ability to design and evaluate semantically classified datasets has become essential to the critical understanding of complex documents from the past. Yet, the study of the ancient world challenges semantic annotation at the very foundations. This talk explores the complexities of classifying and annotating ancient spatial documents, as an example of sources that often defy modern conceptual frameworks. The uncertainty and ambiguity of ancient geographical information, the fluidity of semantic categories over time, and the problematic alignment of ancient and modern lexicon represent some of the key challenges to the creation of semantically classified data from ancient spatial corpora.
Current research gravitates towards project-specific annotations to carry the interpretation and discursive analysis of ancient documents. However, we also need some level of interoperability through disambiguation and linking to digitized lexica, indices, and gazetteers. In fact, the specificity of the digital study of antiquity lies in the very fragile nature of the links we establish: between annotations and authorities, but also between ancient categories and modern classifications. While ontologies provide a framework for semantic annotation, the lack of documented correspondence between modern and ancient categories risks leading to data loss, but also to lack of understanding of what lies outside the standard. We argue for a theory of semantic annotation that uncovers the epistemological implications of this task, embracing fragility and ambiguity, and treating special cases not as outliers, but as tools to emphasize the inconsistencies of our knowledge systems.