The Sixth Generation of the Perseus Digital Library and a Workflow for Open Philology -- DRAFT

TL;DR

This paper presents Perseus 6, a major update to the digital library that integrates diverse digital texts and annotations for classical languages, emphasizing a new workflow and open data architecture.

Contribution

It introduces a new workflow and architecture for integrating digital texts and annotations in Perseus 6, expanding beyond previous versions to support open, machine-actionable data.

Findings

Perseus 6 supports a wide range of digital and annotated texts.

The ATLAS architecture enables integration of diverse linguistic data.

Most data is now available on Github for open access.

Abstract

We report here on the workflow that we needed to develop in order to integrate the growing range of openly licensed, born-digital and, increasingly, machine actionable publications. Our developmental work focused upon textual data for Ancient Greek, Latin, Old English, Classical Arabic and Classical Persian but the challenges that we have had to address are relevant to sources in a wide range of languages, ancient and modern. Perseus 6 was designed to be a publishing workflow that organizes complementary data into an integrated reading environment. This document focuses on the ways in which we have organized the data and describes the current state of ATLAS (Aligned Text and Linguistic Annotation Server) architecture. While this is the sixth version of the Perseus Digital Library, Perseus 6 represents a major step beyond its predecessors. Where Perseus 5 (described below) can represent and integrate digital versions of print editions (e.g., critical editions with interactive textual notes, links to lexicon and commentary entries), Perseus 6 was designed to bring together an expandable range of born-digital classes of annotation. An online ATLAS server with some initial functionality is now online and public services will expand during the rest of 2024. Most of the ATLAS data is, however, now available on Github and that data will be the focus on this paper in its current version.