Annotating figurative language: another perspective for digital Altertumswissenschaften

Whereas past and current digital projects in ancient language studies have been concerned with the annotation of linguistic elements and metadata, there is now an increased interest in the annotation of elements above the linguistic level that are determined by context – like figurative language. Such projects bring their own set of problems (the automatisation of annotation is more difficult, for instance), but also allow us to develop new ways of examining the data. For this reason, we have attempted to take an already annotated database of Ancient Egyptian texts and develop a complementary tagging layer rather than starting from scratch with a new database. In this paper, we present our work in developing a metaphor annotation layer for the Late Egyptian text database of Projet Ramsès (Université de Liège) and in so doing address more general questions: 1) How to ‚tailor-make’ annotation layers to fit other databases? (Workflow) 2) How to make annotations that are flexible enough to be altered in the course of the annotation process? (Project design) 3) What kind of potential do such layers have for integration with existing and future annotations? (Sustainability