News from the Duke Data Bank of Documentary Papyri / Integrating Digital Papyrology team

On behalf of Joshua D. Sosin

Colleagues:


I write on behalf of the entire Integrating Digital Papyrology team with a few updates.


(1) Since we unveiled the DDbDP's new text-editing platform, well over a 1000 texts have been entered by the community. Special thanks go to our colleagues N. Gonis and his team, A. Benaissa, and P. Heilporn, who together have done all of us an enormous favor by entering hundreds of texts. But contributions have been made by dozens of colleagues from around the world, for which we may all be grateful. I acknowledge here too the (completely unremunerated) efforts of the Editorial Board members, who painstakingly vet every submission. We have a way to go yet, but I think it fair to say that we are now steaming along.


(2) We have now officially started referring proposed emendations to the board of Senior Editors, the speed, seriousness, and collegiality of whose efforts already are both credit to the collegiality of our field and promise of great things to come.


(3) Frequent users of SoSOL will have noted (or soon will) that we have taken the first major steps toward bringing the DDbDP's apparatus criticus conventions more closely into line with current practice. Specifically, you will see that we now offer a slightly more nuanced syntax for handling errors and orthographic regulariztion ('orth' has been replaced with 'reg [regularization] and 'corr' [correction]; the Helpers and Documentation have been updated; all texts in progress will be automatically updated so that nothing breaks).


(4) The PN has made a number of great improvements since last we wrote to the list. We are grateful for the many good suggestions (and bug reports) offered by a good many colleagues, and especially by the Trismegistos team and K. Worp. If something doesn't work the way you'd like, let us know. We won't/can't address everything, but we want to hear anything that you think would improve searching and browsing.


(5) Finally -- and maybe most exciting -- just yesterday we released (in addition to a number of enhancements to both DDbDP and HGV SoSOL interfaces) a new line-by-line commentary feature for DDbDP texts. If you open a DDbDP text and select the 'Commentary' tab at the top, you will be brought to a view of the Greek/Latin text that allows entry of notes and commentary, keyed to specific lines or ranges of lines. Documentation is not yet available, but I think you will find that the interface is pretty intuitive. For now, this allows you simply to enter free text. In future, the commentary will support easy linking to DDbDP texts, HGV records, APIS records, any of the suite of TM projects, and a variety of other useful features, including close interoperation with some of the projects under way at TM now. But for now, please feel free to test the initial functionality. Do know, however, that this feature is live; that all such comments will, as of now, be submitted to the same peer-review process that currently controls DDbDP submissions.


(*) The DDbDP remains under co-directorship of James Cowey and Joshua Sosin, who together set policy in close consultation with Rodney Ast, the newly empaneled Editorial Board, and other colleagues. Day-to-day editorial decisions are made democratically by the Editorial Board (Rodney Ast, James Cowey, Paul Heilporn, Todd Hickey, Cisca Hoogendijk, Joshua Sosin), often in consultation with other colleagues. Under the new editorial platform, SoSOL, editorial proposals of special difficulty or weight are referred to a board of Senior Editors, who advise the Editorial Board on the virtue of the submissions. Senior Editors are: Isabella Andorlini, Roger Bagnall, Willy Clarysse, Hélène Cuvigny, Nikolaos Gonis, Dieter Hagedorn, Ann Hanson, Andrea Jördens, James Keenan, and Klaas Worp. Both panels of editors will rotate on a regular (yet to be determined) basis.


Please feel free to direct questions regarding the DDbDP to Rodney Ast, James Cowey, and Joshua Sosin; best to email all three, since inevitably all three will discuss.


The current public version is available at: http://papyri.info/


All best,
josh sosin (for the entire IDP team)
--
Associate Professor, Classical Studies, Duke University
Associate Editor, Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies
Co-Director, Duke Data Bank of Documentary Papyri