For this week’s blog question I rediscovered the Perseus Digital Library Project. This website is a valuable resource that offers a very extensive collection of ancient classical texts, often with translations in English. It had been a helpful tool during my undergraduate degree. Primarily, the Perseus Project focuses on Greek, Latin and Arabic texts, yet it has a variety of more recent articles (early English, German, American Civil War etc.). Regardless of the subject, the user is freely able to explore the collection. Search bars allow for easy navigation and the catalogue may even be sorted by authors or titles.
Since 1985, the project has ambitiously proposed its mission, “to make the full record of humanity - linguistic sources, physical artifacts, historical spaces - as intellectually accessible as possible to every human being” (Perseus Digital Library, 2014). While their objective may be slightly unrealistic, the venture continues to expand and develop as an open-source collaboration yearly.
The library has been listed under ‘Projects Using the TEI’ from the TEI website and has provided some detail on its use. A number of documents have been transcribed into XML versions. There are even orange XML links accessible to view the texts in the encoding scheme, which I found very useful and intriguing. In particular, the objective is to create a further resource, where morphological analysis and tags for people and places can be produced. Above all, the XML component allows for third-party members to share and collaborate. The texts can be easily redistributed and modifications can be made following a standard epiDoc TEI stylesheet.
Exploring the website, the text I used as an example for the XML features was Homer’s Odyssey. The epic is very well known and would be given much precedence within the collection. It is here within the XML version that we may observe the project’s encoding strategies. All the formatting and tagging is available to the public. Additionally, several Perseus articles and publications are also obtainable, they offer insights into the methods used. Overall, the Perseus Digital Library Project illustrates the increasing interest for the digitalization of texts. One can see how collective research and public access continues to be a priority.
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