Announcement: Digital Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum (DFHG) Project

 For the launch of this project see now here.

 Digital Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum (DFHG) Project

As a first step within the Leipzig Open Fragmentary Texts Series (LOFTS), the Humboldt Chair announces the Digital Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum (DFHG) Project, whose goal is to produce a digital edition of the five volumes of Karl Müller’s Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum (FHG) (1841-1870), which is the first big collection of fragments of Greek historians ever realized.

Karl Müller’s FHG consists of a survey of excerpts from many different sources pertaining to more than 600 fragmentary authors. Excluding the first volume, these authors are chronologically distributed and cover a very long period (from the 6th century BC down to the 7th century CE). Fragments are numbered sequentially and arranged according to works and book numbers (when such information is available). Every fragment is translated into Latin. The first volume includes also the text of the Marmor Parium – with Latin translation, chronological table, and commentary – and the Greek text of the Rosetta Stone (Rosettanum) – with a French literal translation as well as a critical, historical and archaeological commentary. The fifth volume includes a section with fragments of Greek and Syriac historians preserved in Armenian sources (in French translation).

While produced two centuries ago and superseded by the monumental edition of Felix Jacoby (Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker), Müller’s FHG is still a fundamental contribution to Greek fragmentary historiography. In particular, it is very suitable for providing rapid, broad coverage and an extensive foundation upon which a new generation of born-digital editions of fragmentary texts can build.

Müller’s five volumes have been transcribed into a simple text format and are being converted into a TEI XML edition, where the excerpts become machine-actionable quotations that can be automatically aligned not only to the original source editions from which Müller drew but also to any other open editions.

As part of the Leipzig Open Fragmentary Texts Series (LOFTS), the DFHG Project uses the EpiDoc subset of the Text Encoding Initiative as its XML tagset and an XSLT template is being created in order to help encoders better visualize the markup. The original pages of Müller’s FHG will be displayed to visualize the original layout. The DFHG uses also the CTS/CITE Architecture, and all data in DFHG will be available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.

The DFHG Project allows to create a large amount of annotations of text re-uses on surviving sources, concurrently building a big survey of fragmentary authors and works, which are part of the Perseus Catalog. Latin translations published by Müller are aligned to the Greek text through Alpheios.

Documentation

• DFHG Guidelines (1.0) (contributing to the general EpiDoc Guidelines).
• DFHG Authors (Progress).
• EpiDoc-encoded DFHG authors are progressively added to the DFHG GitHub repository for everyone to download, improve and share in accordance with our CC BY-SA 4.0 International License.