Publishing the HMT archive
Posted by
Neel Smith
at
11:47 AM, Thursday, February 27, 2014
The editorial work of the Homer Multitext project is ongoing, and, as
good photography of more manuscripts and papyri becomes available, is
open-ended. While we have provided openly licensed access to our source
images and editorial work in progress since our first digital
photography in 2007, we have not previously offered packaged
publications of our archive.
That is changing in 2014. The project’s editors have decided on a
publishing cycle of roughly three issues a year (since our work tends to
be concentrated around an academic calendar of fall term, spring term,
and summer work). Published issues of the project archive must satisfy
four requirements.
- The issue must be clearly identified. Our releases are labelled with a year and issue number: our first issue is 2014.1.
- All content published in a given issue must pass a
clearly identified review process. Teams of contributing editors work in
individual workspaces. (We use github
repositories to track the work history of these teams.) When a block of
work passes a series of manual review and automated tests, it migrates
from “draft” to “provisionally accepted” status and is added to the
project’s central archival repository. This is the repository that we
are publishing for the first time this week.
- All published material must be in appropriate open
digital formats. Apart from our binary image data, all the data we
create are structured in simple tabular text files or XML files with
published schemas.
- All published material must be appropriately licensed
for scholarly use. All of our work is published under a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike license. (Licenses for some of our image
collections additionally include a “non-commercial” clause: in those
cases, a license for commercial reuse must be separately negotiated with
the copyright holder.)
Access to the Published Digital Archive
We are also distributing our published issues as nexus artifacts (previously mentioned briefly here),
a system that allows software to identify and retrieve published
versions automatically. Whether manually or automatically downloaded, it
now becomes possible for scholars (and their software) to work with
citable data sets from the constantly changing archive of the HMT
project.
Read the rest of the notice
here.
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