Week 4: Very old meets relatively new

For this week’s (very belated, and I do apologize!) blog post Duke University’s Integrating Digital Papryology project caught my eye, because I liked the idea of bringing XML and something as far removed from modern text as PAPYRUS together. In case you don’t know or couldn’t guess, “papyrology” is just a fancy name for studying ancient literature preserved and written on papyrus, the common paper-like writing material made from the papyrus plant, used in ancient civilizations like, in this case, Greece.

Integrating Digital Papyrology hosts 55 000 papyrological texts, combined with 65 000 metadata records. The site also includes a “user-friendly, tags-free” interface for authoring and editing XML content, used by “hundreds of users worldwide.” The site uses EpiDoc, which is a subset of the TEI’s standard for the representation of texts in digital form, developed for digital editions of ancient inscriptions. It strives to address not only the transcription and editorial treatment of the text, but also the history and materiality if the objects on which the texts appear, in this case papyri. EpiDoc XML is validated against a TEI-derived schema. Unfortunately, the website itself did not explain its use of EpiDoc or even what it was; I had to read about it from the TEI site.

I couldn’t actually examine the editing interface on the site as it requires verified sign in, but the description of the Papyrological Editor states that it is a “multi-author, version controlled, editing environment that enables collaborative editing of texts in a framework of rigorous and transparent peer review.” Integrating Digital Papryology does, however, make the post-edit code fully available, as each public facing record includes a link to the XML as you can see from the screenshots I took below.

Screenshots taken from p.euphrates.17 record : http://papyri.info/ddbdp/p.euphrates;;17?rows=2&start=5&fl=id%2Ctitle&fq=series_led_path%3Ap.euphrates%3B*%3B*%3B*&sort=series+asc%2Cvolume+asc%2Citem+asc&p=6&t=6

Main site: http://papyri.info