Stacks Xchange: Filed Notes – Point Processes and Spatiotemporal Modeling of Alphabet Spread in Ancient Italy
12:00 pm – 1:30 pm PDT
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Title: Point Processes and Spatiotemporal Modeling of Alphabet Spread in Ancient Italy
Description: In this presentation, Tom Francis, UCLA PhD candidate, explores a data-driven approach for disentangling the convoluted history of alphabet development in 1st millennium BCE Italy (a process which set the stage for the development of many modern alphabets, including the alphabet used for English). After Phoenician and Greek alphabets were adopted by other language speakers in 8th century BCE Italy, more than 30 distinct alphabets developed over the next several hundred years. To track these developments a new dataset consisting of 20,000+ inscriptions was curated and spatiotemporal point process models were fitted on these data. This presentation covers the implementation and results of these models as well as methods and problems in the data collection process itself, including thorny issues of dating, archaeological context, and distinguishing between alphabets derived from one another.
Bio: Tom Francis is a PhD candidate in Classics with a graduate certificate in Indo-European Studies. His dissertation involves the creation of a new and interdisciplinary dataset tracking archaeological, epigraphic, linguistic, and historical features across inscriptions in 1st millennium BCE Italy. This dataset is employed in variety of computational analyses (especially network analyses) to study the extant inscriptional record in ancient Italy. These analyses reevaluate observable interactions between sites and groups as seen in the spread of material, epigraphic, and linguistic practices throughout ancient Italy and provide new insights into diffusion and community interactions in 1st millennium BCE Italy.