Thursday, April 17, 2014

Oral Poetics and the Homer Multitext

One of the central research questions that drives the Homer Multitext is this: “How do you make a critical edition of an oral tradition, like that of the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey, that spanned a thousand years or more? What is the best way to represent the textual history of songs that were created in and for performance, but survive only in textual forms from later eras?” In our 2010 book, Iliad 10 and the Poetics of Ambush, Mary Ebbott and I attempted to demonstrate that a "multitextual"  approach to Homeric poetry is useful not only for understanding the transmission of the text of the epics, but also for better understanding the poetics of oral poetry. We could not have written that book, which is meant to be a sustained demonstration of the workings of oral poetry over the course of an entire book of the Iliad, without the data and tools of the Homer Multitext that were available to us at that time.

As new ways of viewing and working with the surviving documents that transmit Homeric poetry become possible, Mary and I would like to continue to use them to enhance our understanding of the poetics of the Iliad and Odyssey. With that in mind, we have decided to revive a long neglected Oral Poetry blog, which we will maintain along with this one, and in close coordination with one another. The Oral Poetry blog will be devoted primarily to questions of poetics, while we will continue to make posts here about the manuscripts and papyri and what they tell about the system of oral poetry in which the Iliad and Odyssey were composed.

To kick off this phase of the Oral Poetry blog, we are planning a series of posts about the poetics of Iliad 2. You can read my initial post about this work here. You can also read a much older post on this blog about the transmission of the Catalogue of Ships from Book 2 here. It is the special treatment and seemingly controversial place of the Catalogue in the surviving manuscripts and papyri that drives us to try to better understand the poetics of this fascinating record of names and places. 

Sunday, April 13, 2014

Testing the HMT project’s technical underpinnings

In February, we noted the release of new draft specifications for the CTS URN notation that we use to cite texts, and the CTS protocol that we use to retrieve texts in the Homer Multitext project. Since the publication of the draft specifications, we have released updates of a suite of test data and of software using the test data to assess the compliance of a given CTS service with the current version of the protocol.

Together with version 1.6 of this software, the ctsvalidator servlet, we are today releasing version 0.9.0 of our implementation of the CTS protocol, sparqlcts. The new version of sparqlcts passes 100% of the ctsvalidator tests.

To recapitulate what we have released in 2014 in our work on CTS:
  • Formal specifications for the Canonical Text Services protocol, and CTS URNs. The specifications include Relax NG schemas for a CTS Text Inventory (the catalogue of a CTS library), and Relax NG schemas for validating the responses to CTS requests.
  • A test data set, documented in a valid CTS Text Inventory, and available in three formats:
    • valid and well-formed XML
    • tabular data in simple delimited text files
    • RDF triples in .ttl format
  • A set of 68 tests applying CTS requests to the test data set. The tests are defined in an XML file listing the request and parameters to be submitted to a running CTS installation. For each test, a corresponding XML file gives the expected responses to the request.
  • The CTS Validator, a web-app that runs the tests against any online CTS service hosting the corpus of test-data.
  • An implementation of the Canonical Text Services, sparqlcts, a Java web-app drawing its data from a SPARQL endpoint.  When the SPARQL end point is hosting the corpus of test data, sparqlcts passes 68 out of 68 of our defined tests.
This of course does not mean that sparqlcts is necessarily flawless (there may be problems that ctsvalidator does not test for), but it is an important milestone. One of the most profound implications of digital scholarship is that when we can automate the testing of digital work, we should invert the humanist’s traditional order of composition and assessment: specify the automated test first, then work until you pass the test. This applies to the software we use, too. When we next update our online services, we can be confident that our text service has successfully passed 100% of a challenging series of tests.

Links

Christopher Blackwell and Neel Smith, project architects