Abstract
The Homer Multitext project ( hmt ) is documenting the language and structure of Greek epic poetry, and the ancient tradition of commentary on it. The project’s primary data consist of editions of Greek texts; automated and manually created readings analyze the texts across historical and thematic axes. This paper describes an abstract model we follow in documenting an open-ended body of diverse analyses. The analyses apply to passages of texts at different levels of granularity; they may refer to overlapping or mutually exclusive passages of text; and they may apply to non-contiguous passages of text. All are recorded in with explicit, concise, machine-actionable canonical citation of both text passage and analysis in a scheme aligning all analyses to a common notional text. We cite our texts with urns that capture a passage’s position in an Ordered Hierarchy of Citation Objects ( ohco2 ). Analyses are modeled as data-objects with five properties. We create collections of ‘analytical objects’, each uniquely identified by its own urn and each aligned to a particular edition of a text by a urn citation. We can view these analytical objects as an extension of the edition’s citation hierarchy; since they are explicitly ordered by their alignment with the edition they analyze, each collection of analyses meets satisfies the ( ohco2 ) model of a citable text. We call these texts that are derived from and aligned to an edition ‘analytical exemplars’.
Highlights
The Homer Multitext is an ongoing collaborative project in editing and analyzing the primary source documents for Greek epic poetry, the Byzantine manuscripts from the 10th through the 13th Centuries ce that preserve versions of the Homeric Iliad and the ancient tradition of commentary from Alexandrian and Roman scholars
The editions are encoded in xml validated against the Text Encoding Initiative’s p5 schema (TEI Consortium Editors, 2016), but the hmt uses only a very small subset of the tei’s tagset, limited to three semantic areas: 1. markup applying a citation scheme to the text 2. markup documenting the editorial status of portions of the text 3. markup identifying textual tokens that are not valid Greek lexical forms
The analysis record is the canonical identifier for this cluster of objects: the five items documenting this instance of applying a specific analysis to a specific passage of text
Summary
This article describes the approach to textual analysis adopted by the Homer Multitext Project (hereafter hmt) taking advantage of the cite/cts architecture (Blackwell and Smith, 2012a). The aim is to enable declarative models of textual analysis, with the particular goals of analyzing syntactic structure, historical orthographies, text-reuse, and of creating machine-actionable (but technologically agnostic) critical apparatus This data-model is independent of technology, but currently implmented through an archive of xml texts and plain-text tabular data, and served as rdf in .ttl format. We separate the concerns of citation, manipulation of textual content, alignment of analysis with textual content, and identification of acts of analysis All of these concerns can be documented concisely and explicitly, with simple tabular structures. This approach to analysis yields what we call ‘analytical exemplars’, coherent readings of a specific edition which can be treated as texts in their own right, identified by canonical citation. This approach has proved useful in our work on the Homeric tradition, and for other problems in classical philology (Berti et al, forthcoming, 2016)
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