2.1 Mapping the Field of Digital Papyrology

General introduction on why Papyrology seems to be the vanguard in the digital approaches to ancient writing cultures and how the discipline is evolving. This chapter will also represent an overview of the consolidated tools and platforms for Digital Papyrology.

2.1.5 Textual Databases

Papyri.info is currently perhaps the most representative resource of Digital Papyrology. It summarizes all the key concepts of accessibility, integration, collaboration, updating, standardization, and is constantly evolving to meet the increasingly diverse needs of Third Millennium papyrologists. The recent inclusion of editions published in journals is paving the way for the development of a digital Sammelbuch compiled on the basis of Papyri.info records and not vice versa. The possibility of inserting new records has also opened up new editorial spaces: the practice of the born-digital edition, the native digital edition, i.e., not a simple encoding of a paper edition, but the publication of a papyrus directly online, is experiencing a slow but steady affirmation, stimulating more general technical and theoretical reflections on the concept of digital critical edition. Given the importance of the platform, this page contains only its brief presentation, while lesson 2.2. From User to Maker is entirely dedicated to its explanation. 


In 2006/7, following the collaborative experience of APIS, Roger Bagnall (Columbia University) launched the Integrating Digital Papyrology (IDP) project, aimed at creating an integrated platform of papyrological digital resources. Thus Papyri.info was born, bringing together the Duke Databank with the most significant metadata catalogs (first APIS and HGV, then Tm) through a model based on the unique Tm Number (see above 2.1.3 Metadata catalogues). For the occasion, the Greek texts were converted from BetaCode to Unicode standard and the earlier markup was converted in the XML TEI markup standard defined by EpiDoc for the digital encoding of ancient documents (see 1.4.1 Principles and standards). 

In 2010, the first version of the search interface of Papyri.info, i.e. the Papyrological Navigator (PN), was released. It offers numerous options for navigating records and conducting searches in aggregated texts and metadata. The results are displayed in an HTML formatting that recalls the appearance of printed editions, derived from the underlying XML code through the application of transformation sheets (XSLT) (see 2.2.2 The Papyrological Navigator). 

A very recent implementation is the Digital Corpus of Literary Papyri (DCLP), created to extend the potential of Papyri.info to the texts of the literary and paraliterary papyri. 

To facilitate encoding by the entire papyrological community, a particular markup language called Leiden+ was developed for the Papyrological Editor (PE), which reproduces the Leiden editorial conventions as much as possible. In this way, users can directly encode texts or corrections more easily than by applying long strings of XML code. The system is then able – through the XSugar routine – to automatically convert Leiden+ into XML (and vice versa). The editorial work of the users is evaluated by a scientific committee of experts, who decide whether to accept the proposals or not; if accepted, they will then be definitively finalized in the database, while a special function keeps track of all interventions, in an editorial history indispensable for the critical evaluation of the texts (see 2.2.3 The Papyrological Editor). 

Further reading
ENCODE Database Modules