Rome Wasn't Digitized in a Day - Council on Library and Information ...

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<strong>in</strong>itial fund<strong>in</strong>g (Sos<strong>in</strong> et al. 2007) to migrate DDbDP from SGML to EpiDoc and from betacode to
Unicode Greek, to merge mapped DDbDP texts and HGV metadata <strong>in</strong> a s<strong>in</strong>gle XML stream, and then
to map these texts to their APIS records, <strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g metadata and images. They also wished to create an
enhanced papyrological navigator (PN) to support search<strong>in</strong>g of this newly merged and mapped data
set. In October 2008, the Mellon Foundation funded IDP-2, a new, two-year project (Sos<strong>in</strong> et al. 2008),
to “(1) improve operability of the PN search <strong>in</strong>terface on the merged and mapped data from the
DDBDP, HGV, and APIS, (2) facilitate third-party use of the data and tools, (3) and create a version
controlled, transparent and fully audited, multi-author, web-based, real-time, tagless, edit<strong>in</strong>g
environment, which—<strong>in</strong> tandem with a new editorial <strong>in</strong>frastructure—will allow the entire community
of papyrologists to take control of the process of populat<strong>in</strong>g these communal assets with data.” The
goal of the IDP is to create an editorial <strong>in</strong>frastructure where papyrologists can make contributions to
this <strong>in</strong>tegrated knowledge source. This edit<strong>in</strong>g environment SoSOL is now available onl<strong>in</strong>e. The
project wiki provides extensive software descriptions and downloadable code. 659
The related papyri.<strong>in</strong>fo 660 website provides two major features: a list of l<strong>in</strong>ks to papyrological
resources and “a customized search eng<strong>in</strong>e (called the Papyrological Navigator [PN]) capable of
retriev<strong>in</strong>g <strong>in</strong>formation from multiple related sites.” The Papyrological Navigator currently retrieves
and displays <strong>in</strong>formation from the APIS, DDbDP, and HGV. L<strong>in</strong>ks are also provided to Trismegistos
texts, and the unique Trismegistos papyri numbers (TM number) have proved very important <strong>in</strong> the
design of the PN (Sos<strong>in</strong> 2010). The goal of this project is to demonstrate “that a system can be
designed to provide an <strong>in</strong>tegrated display of a variety of scholarly data sources relevant to the study of
ancient texts.” This prototype uses portlet technology and a higher-resolution image display platform,
and “moves beyond the creation of centralized “union databases,” such as APIS, to leverage and
<strong>in</strong>tegrate content created and hosted elsewhere <strong>in</strong> the scholarly world.” A major research effort of this
project is <strong>in</strong>vestigat<strong>in</strong>g the scalability of their approach, and they hope to design a system that will
<strong>in</strong>clude and <strong>in</strong>tegrate data sources beyond the <strong>in</strong>itial ones <strong>in</strong> this project. A portlet platform was also
chosen to support “personalization and profil<strong>in</strong>g” so scholars can use it efficiently <strong>in</strong> their research. A
sample record 661 demonstrates the potential of this research by <strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g the metadata for an
<strong>in</strong>dividual papyrus (P.Oxy 4 744) from the APIS and HGV, with the full DDbDP transcription (with
downloadable EpiDoc XML), an English translation (when available), and an image that can be
focused <strong>in</strong> on <strong>in</strong> detail. More technical documentation can be found at the IDP website. 662
Interedition: An “Interoperable Supranational Infrastructure for Digital Editions”
The Interedition Project 663 has the major goal of promot<strong>in</strong>g “<strong>in</strong>teroperability of the tools and
methodology” used <strong>in</strong> the field of digital scholarly edit<strong>in</strong>g. As the project website notes, many scholars
have already created “amaz<strong>in</strong>g computer tools” and the goal of Interedition is to facilitate contact
between scholars and to encourage creators of such tools to make their functionality open and available
to others.
This project is funded as a European Union Cost Action from 2008 to 2012 and it will hold a series of
meet<strong>in</strong>gs between researchers <strong>in</strong> the fields of digital literary research and IT to explore “the topic of a
shared supranational networked <strong>in</strong>frastructure for digital scholarly edit<strong>in</strong>g and analysis.” At the end of
659 http://idp.atlantides.org/trac/idp/wiki/IDPSoftware
660 http://www.papyri.<strong>in</strong>fo/
661 http://www.papyri.<strong>in</strong>fo/apis/toronto.apis.17/
662 http://idp.atlantides.org/trac/idp/wiki/PapyrologicalNavigator
663 http://www.<strong>in</strong>teredition.eu/