Catalogue of Paraliterary Papyri

Catalogue of Paraliterary Papyri
Professor Marc Huys and Collaborators

The CPP is an electronic catalogue of paraliterary papyri based on a Filemaker Pro database and implemented for the internet with php-programming. It contains descriptions of Greek papyri and other written materials which, because of their paraliterary character, cannot be found in the standard electronic corpora of literary and documentary papyri, the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG) and the Duke Data Bank of Documentary Papyri (DDBDP), so that they cannot be easily consulted or searched by non specialists. Generally, these texts have been published in scattered editions and, because of their diversity, have never been brought together in one collection. With the CPP project we want to fill this gap by making all the source materials easily accessible. This includes also a digital version of full text editions of the paraliterary fragments, both in plain beta code and in Unicode. The texts in beta code are simple transcriptions without any accentuation or diacritical signs, designed only to allow for easy searching. They are inserted into the CPP database as a separate field. The Unicode versions, on the contrary, are being presented as documents made accessible out of the CPP by a link. All Greek texts have been encoded with XML according to the TEI-guidelines and by an automatic conversion program they are now systematically being translated in the HTML-files displayed online. Although the CPP collection does not have the ambition to produce new scholarly editions, the texts are never simple reproductions of one particular edition but they are based on our own representation of the most recent edition or simply of the one we considered the best, and of the comparison with other editions. For the purposes of specialised research consultation of the printed editions remains necessary. In addition the CPP contains some unpublished material, but generally, less detailed information is available for these items, depending on the policy of the owning institution. The Search System has been designed so as to make possible many different types of complex searches, of which the Search Page presents some predetermined selections.