TheSu XML

**Daniele Morrone on TheSu XML: Bridging Ancient Philosophy and Digital Humanities**

By Isabel Inzunza Gomez
and Guillermo Ruz Troncoso

In an intersection between traditional scholarship and digital technology, Daniele Morrone presents TheSu XML, an innovative tool for the analysis of historical texts. He studied at Sapienza University of Rome and holds a PhD from the University of Bologna, defending a thesis entitled Plutarch’s Chemistry of Stones and Metals: Conceptions and Explanations. With an Appendix on TheSu XML Annotation Scheme, which led him to develop a unique tool in the field of digital humanities. The tool, initially conceptualized and tested for his Master’s thesis, was largely developed during his PhD and first postdoctoral appointments. Named TheSu XML (standing for Thesis-Support), it is designed to facilitate the study of philosophical and scientific texts through digital means. Morrone is currently a research fellow at KU Leuven, where he continues to bridge the historical divide between traditional scholarly research and innovative digital analysis.

TheSu (Thesis-Support) is designed to digitally index and map ideas providing an XML annotation scheme to navigate through enunciates (Theses) and their associated explanations, justifications, and refutations (Supports). To achieve this, rather than relying on automated extraction, TheSu is human-centered, depending on human interpreters to abstract theses from any given philosophical/scientific text. The tool help the interpreter to prioritize individual theses (Claims), which are then connected to textual supports. Thus, TheSu allows for mapping of an author’s ideas in its textual production by exploring the coherence and justification of its main claims.

In this way TheSu promises to be an invaluable tool for the historian of ideas/philosophy/science in its research, facilitating the identification of trends, cohesion, and evolution within an author’s work. Moreover, TheSu also allows the creation of databases which ultimately generate visualizations of networks of ideas, which make more comprehensible the aforementioned networks of ideas. TheSu is tailored for the historians task of seeking philological precision, as a versatile scheme of analysis and indexing theses, providing an accessible presentation of the discourses they are embedded in. Moreover, TheSu has the potential of achieving greater understanding of an author’s ideas by encouraging collaboration through the reusability and sharing of datasets.

This interview seeks to explore the origins of TheSu XML, detailing its development and the potential it holds for the history of ideas, philosophy and science in Antiquity. Morrone also explains the skills he learned to create TheSu XML, and how TheSu facilitates a more nuanced and integrated approach for textual analysis methodologies.

About Daniele Morrone

After graduating in Philosophy at Sapienza University of Rome (BA 2016, MA 2018), Daniele Morrone received his PhD in Philosophy, Science, Cognition and Semiotics (PSCS – subfield History of Science and Technology) at the University of Bologna (2022), with a thesis titled “Plutarch’s chemistry of stones and metals: conceptions and explanations. With an appendix on the TheSu XML annotation scheme”. His PhD was part of the ERC project AlchemEast, in the frame of which he was also a Postdoctoral Fellow (2022). In 2021 Daniele was a visiting scholar at KU Leuven. He returned to Leuven in November 2022, and since then Daniele have been a Postdoctoral Fellow in the ERC Project PlatoViaAristotle. His research, blending traditional historical-philological methods with digital annotation and argumentation analysis, focuses on ancient natural philosophy – mainly Middle Platonist and Aristotelian – and ‘proto-chemical’ theories and practices. Daniele is especially interested in the impact of analogical and metaphorical thinking on philosophical/scientific constructions and beliefs.

The Interview

Interviewers: Could you explain what is the history behind the conception of TheSu XML?

Daniele Morrone: It came from my own research needs: I felt it was a necessary tool for me to reach some historical conclusions with sufficient grounding. The crucial experience was in 2016, when I wrote my bachelor’s thesis in ancient philosophy. Strongly inspired by G.E.R. Lloyd’s classic monograph Polarity and Analogy (1966), the thesis’s purpose was to assess the impact of biological metaphors and, more in general, vitalistic thinking, on the ancient philosophers’ cosmologies and astro-meteorological theories. For example, consider the testimony according to which Anaximander explained the genesis of the sun, moon, and stars as coming from the rupture of a sphere of flame that had “grown around” the air around the earth “like bark around the tree” (fragment 12 A12 in Diels-Kranz). One would perhaps expect a scientific cosmogony, even if archaic, to be built upon empirical observations and deductive reasoning, but what we see here is a direct application of a botanical model to cosmogony, as though the acceptability of the projection were given for granted. Of course, early Greek philosophy was not born in a vacuum, but in a culture whose sapiential literature, mythology, and religion constantly associated heavenly bodies, natural phenomena, and even abstract concepts such as Love with deities or divine powers. Most plainly, the origin of the world was already accounted for biologically in Hesiod’s and Homer’s poems in genealogical terms, as a succession of generations of gods. If we consider this, we should not be too surprised to see even the alleged father of Greek natural philosophy, Thales, being credited with the somewhat religious view that “everything is full of gods” (fragment 11 A22 in Diels-Kranz), implying to some degree that all matter could be animated, and any of his direct and indirect followers looking at the physical world with vitalistic assumptions. So, I considered it fundamental to always look at the philosopher’s theories and arguments in their cultural contexts, without which it would be impossible to trace any impact that traditional ways of thinking and worldviews may have had over them. For this reason, it was a requirement for me to also analyze all descriptions of natural phenomena of astro-meteorological and cosmological pertinence in literary works – including the epic poems – from the same or preceding periods as those of the philosophers’ reflections and compare them with the latter – even documentary and iconographic evidence should be added to the mix, to have a fuller and more reliable picture! As one can imagine, managing such an extensive corpus could only be overwhelming for a bachelor’s student preparing a thesis in less than a year, but would also be so for an advanced researcher with a suitable background and twice the available time, if not by limiting the corpus by significantly restricting its timeframe.

Ultimately, that bachelor’s thesis taught me a very important lesson on the manageability of research scopes, but also left me with a strong desire to find a way to make my original plan possible, without renouncing any of its philological requirements and methodological rigor. Lloyd’s Polarity and Analogy provided us with an incredible blueprint for studying analogical reasoning and the relationship between science and tradition, or demonstrative and “pre-logical” thinking, but beyond its wide-ranging analyses and broad conclusions it left many sources yet to be examined and deconstructed with much finer detail: how could I make this operation feasible? Asking myself this question, I figured that it would be extremely convenient to have a digital tool that allows to catalogue claims and descriptions in texts and quickly compare them with each other. Something by which I could tag a passage in a poem as implying, for instance, that “the sun is a living being”, and compare it with any other passage with similar assumptions from other sources, philosophical and not; something that would allow me to tag keywords in these passages (like “sun”) and associate each claim with their authors or reported speakers, also allowing me to specify whether these spoke in earnest or in jest, or advanced their claims merely as reporters, as hypotheses, or objecting to them; and something that would allow me to specify whether the passages contained deliberate metaphors or symbols or were to be taken literally… The list goes on.

Since I found no such tool to be available on the web, I decided to make my own: here came TheSu XML, to which I dedicated my entire master’s thesis (2016). For this thesis, I designed a first prototype of the model without planning to transform it into shareable software, only wanting to use it for my own research, but it later became clear to me that it had the potential to become a new standard in digital annotation, and a software that could help many other researchers. Therefore, I decided to keep developing it during my PhD years (2016-2018), starting such a long-term project that I’m still working on it today, in parallel with my historical research conducted with more traditional methods. This is part of the reason why I joined Jan Opsomer’s ERC project PlatoViaAristotle in 2022. Just imagine how helpful TheSu could be to a history of ancient philosophy centered on tracing all the explicit and implicit references to Aristotle or Aristotelian philosopher in works of the Platonist tradition: surely not an easy task, without the aid of dedicated digital tools!

Is: Okay, the reason why you designed the model to annotate Theses is clear, but what about the Supports?

DM: To explain why I chose to construct TheSu not only as a tool for cataloguing theses, but also, and especially, for connecting them to their contexts; that is, to any part of the discourse that targets them as an argumentative premise or a clarification, or even as a simple introduction (Supports), I want to bring attention to an analogy used by Plutarch in his dialogue On the Apparent Face in the Orb of the Moon. Thanks to its beautiful imagery, brilliant discussion, and rich scientific, cosmological, and religious content – all intertwined –, this has been for many years my favorite work of ancient literature. Consider that in my master’s thesis, rather than simply designing the conceptual framework and digital infrastructure of TheSu, I decided to test it directly through a comprehensive digital annotation of the claims and arguments in this work. The analogy I want to mention is brought up in the dialogue by Plutarch’s spokesperson Lamprias, when he wants to show that it is likely that the world is rationally arranged rather than simply shaped by mechanical motions. After positing that “the cosmos is a living being”, he draws a parallel between the world and the human body (15, 928a-c): the stars are like eyes, the sun spreads heat and light as a heart spreads blood and breath, the earth and seas function as the world’s bowel and bladder, and the moon, like a liver, transmits the sun’s heat to the region below it and from this region receives exhalations that it sends above, after refining them by a sort of purification. Such a strikingly biological take on how the world functions is probably not to be taken as a serious tenet in Plutarch’s natural philosophy, but rather as a flattering concession to the Stoics, clear polemical targets of the dialogue whose theories Plutarch intends to reframe in Platonic philosophy, perhaps aiming at converting some of their followers (with this interpretation, I fully agree with P. Donini). Such rhetorical functions would already be easier to recognize if all the claims in the dialogue were fully tagged digitally with their details and mapped to their contexts of presentation, all linked to the conclusions they support and to the considerations prompting them in the dialogue.

But let us assume for a moment that Plutarch meant his cosmobiology to be taken seriously: would we thus be immediately justified in inferring that he, in order to explain the arrangement and workings of the cosmos, took inspiration from human physiology? Probably not, as he might well have had other reasons, logically prior or more scientific, for supposing such arrangements and functions, and might have decided to explain them in biological terms only for the sake of clarity, or stylistic elaboration. In fact, not all analogies and examples contribute to reasoning or argumentation: some are rather meant for clarification or embellishment. So, in analyzing Plutarch’s philosophical and scientific thought, how can we decide whether a claim such as “the cosmos is rationally arranged” relies structurally on an analogy with the human body or rather on other arguments, including logical or empirical demonstrations? Well, only by checking all instances of the claim in Plutarch’s works – or in works from which he learned – and comparing the ways they are presented and justified in their varying contexts. TheSu can help precisely in such comparative analyses: through digital annotation, it can be easy to reach a bird’s eye view on all the discourses featuring the claim, and determine whether a biological analogy is the only argument supporting it or coexists with logical demonstrations, empirical considerations, or appeals to authorities. If any of the latter exist, it is surely unwarranted to conclude that Plutarch applied biological thinking to his understanding of the cosmos, at least in this specific case. Think of my project for the bachelor’s thesis: with TheSu, as you see, it could finally find an affordable basis for hypothesis falsification, and thus a firmer methodological ground to reach its historical conclusions. But, of course, the digital cataloguing and mapping lends itself to many other research objectives and methods of quantitative analysis, which is why I’m still continuing development of TheSu. It surely can be beneficial to PlatoViaAristotle’s research objectives: for instance, monitoring the evolution of the arguments justifying a philosophical tenet across Platonist works over a long period, while comparing them with objections in Peripatetic works, can reveal subtle changes motivated by the Platonists’ need to react to such objections. Achieving such insight can be much easier using a mapping tool like TheSu.

Is: When you decided to create TheSu, what computational skills did you have, and how did you manage to acquire those skills that you didn’t have?

DM: I wasn’t completely inexperienced with coding, but I knew virtually nothing about XML annotations and how to treat them automatically. Consider that TheSu is written in XML; more specifically, it is itself an XML Schema Definition (XSD) document, or, in other words, a list of rules understood by software for XML editing and processing, defining how a correct TheSu annotation must be. Before starting to work on TheSu, I had only had experience with web mastering and web design: these were among my hobbies in my teenage years, and since then I had concretely worked on the code and graphics of a few websites. This means that I already had some understanding of HTML and CSS, although absolutely at the level of an amateur, all acquired by reading web tutorials and analyzing chunks of code from model websites. Luckily, XML is very similar to HTML, so it wasn’t difficult for me to understand its basics when I started designing TheSu. What led me to the choice of XML was a simple suggestion by a friend and colleague at La Sapienza University of Rome, Michele Bevilacqua, who at the time was working on a Natural Language Processing (NLP) project at the Classics department. I explained to him my objectives and he confidently recommended me XML and even dedicated an afternoon to giving me a crash course on how it worked. Without his timely contribution, TheSu might have never existed, or would have come out very differently.

After that, I was mostly on my own. I would not only have to master XML, which is relatively easy, but also related codes such as XSD, xPath, and xQuery. Learning the latter, which was the difficult part, was crucial, as it provided the most convenient way of generating queries, or lists, from annotated TheSu documents without requiring other programming skills. In short, it was the thing that could most quickly allow me to find specific “theses” in the annotation documents (like, all those containing the keyword “sun”) and automatically display them in any way I specified (for example, as list items each followed by sublists of the “supports” targeting them). For less complex codes, just a few web tutorials and guides such as those in the W3Schools website were sufficient for learning, but I managed to also learn xQuery by fully reading an introductory book (XQuery Kick Start, from 2004) and directly experimenting with it on my data. If you have your own data and clear purposes, you’ll surely find a way to make it work, no matter the obstacles. Learning for specific applications I really care about is for me much easier than fully learning generalities to only test them on impersonal exercises; and I think this also applies to most people.

Of course, acquiring technical coding knowledge is not the only prerequisite for successful software development. It is as important to understand best practices in the fields in which our software should operate, as well as current trends and standards, and design principles and purposes to apply when constructing our conceptual frameworks and planning their applications, always attempting to prevent as many problems and wastes of time as possible. Most of this can be learned by reading the literature in the relevant fields and keeping track of any recently published software similar to ours. After some introductory student manuals, I specifically read a lot about digital humanities, computational linguistics, Argumentation Mining, and computational approaches to the history of philosophy or science, and these readings surely influenced TheSu and my current plans for its further developments.

Finally, I just want to say that I’ve come a long way from XML and xQuery, considering that I’ve been extensively programming with Python since around March 2023. Now I can automatically generate graphs (written in DOT format) from TheSu documents using my own Python scripts, and can manipulate XML and HTML files with a freedom I could only imagine when I started my project in 2016. What allowed this turning point was the public release of ChatGPT 3.5 and 4.0. When, playing with these models, I saw that they could really instruct me on how to write Python code for any specific purpose that I had, even explaining to me their generated code line by line if requested to, I finally found a way to complete my computational skills with all its missing pieces. I finally had the occasion to learn elements of Python for my specific purposes, not needing to sacrifice any development of my usual historical-philosophical research to a general Python training, which would have been extremely time consuming. Therefore, this is my last recommendation to anyone interested in acquiring coding skills for their own objectives: just check on the web which current Large Language Model (LLM) is the best at writing code, and proceed to ask it directly to help you on your project, even when you don’t know which codes or software you should use. You will be surprised at how quickly you will learn.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: This interview is part of theERC research project PlatoViaAristotle, funded under the European Union’s H2020 programme (G.A. 885273)

References

Morrone, Daniele. 2023. “TheSu XML Schema Definition, Ns 1.0” (Version 1) [Data set], KU Leuven RDR, https://doi.org/10.48804/KD8QPO, Full documentation at https://alchemeast.eu/thesu/ns/1.0/.

Morrone, Daniele. 2022. Plutarch’s chemistry of stones and metals: Conceptions and explanations. With an appendix on TheSu XML annotation scheme [Doctoral dissertation, University of Bologna], AMSDottorato University of Bologna Repository, http://amsdottorato.unibo.it/10376/.

Lloyd, Geoffrey E.R. 1966. Polarity and Analogy. Two Types of Argumentation in Early Greek Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Donini, Pierluigi, ed. 2011. Plutarco. Il Volto Della Luna. Corpus Plutarchi Moralium 48. Napoli: M. D’Auria.

McGovern, James, Per Bothner, Kurt Cagle, James Linn, and Vaidyanathan Nagarajan. 2003. XQuery Kick Start. Indianapolis (IN): Sams.