“The thing is mine”: Extracting the terminology of the Roman law of “ownership” from Justinian’s Digest
Marton Ribary (Surrey) and Barbara McGillivray (Alan Turing Institute & Cambridge)
Digital Classicist London seminar 2020
Friday June 19th at 16:30, online from the Institute of Classical Studies.
Livecast at Digital Classicist London YouTube channel.
Our paper investigates the evolution of the concept of ownership in Roman law using computational semantic methods. The selected corpus is Justinian’s Digest (533 CE) which provides exclusive access to more than twenty thousand text units from thousands of otherwise lost legal works. The Digest is arguably the most important legal compendium ever created which provided the mould for most modern European legal systems. While Roman jurists strived to identify general principles in particular law cases, they showed little interest in law as a geometrical science (Leibniz). For this reason, the reconstruction of fundamental concepts like “ownership” remains a bottom-up exercise which faces the challenge of handling both the enormous size and the peculiar thematic arrangement of the Digest.
We use computational methods for terminology extraction and distributional semantic word representations to show how the semantic landscape associated with “ownership” changed over time. Our work is based on a relational database of the Digest which is being developed in a Python environment and shared on GitHub (mribary/pyDigest). The point of departure for terminology extraction is the limited but highly valuable ancient evidence present in the thematic sections of the Digest, the glossary at the end of the work (D.50.16-17) and the formulaic language of “ownership” (res meum esse - “the thing is mine”). We calculate tf-idf (term frequency-inverse document frequency) scores to identify the most distinctive keywords associated with each theme. We also use vectorized representation of text units of the Digest to discover further textual evidence for the internal conceptual history of “ownership”.
Our investigation contributes to the contemporary debate in legal scholarship about what it means to “own” and how rules need to be rewritten to limit internal conceptual inconsistency. Our proposed method also benefits digital classicists studying the terminological language of ancient authors and texts at scale.
ALL WELCOME