Saturday, August 30, 2014

New content, new contributors


Eric Raymond popularized the phrase "release early, release often" as a philosophy for software development. It works for digital scholarship, too.

We're happy to announce today an early release of a facsimile browser incorporating new material from our photography in the Escorial last summer. The digital facsimile edition requires data about the manuscripts (including what folios appear in what sequence), an index aligning each folio with a canonical citation of lines of the Iliad, and an index identifying which side of which folio each image illustrates. A group of dedicated and talented volunteers (some shown in the photo) has been meeting regularly on Friday afternoons to put this material together for the Escorial Υ.1.1 manuscript, prior to beginning work on a full diplomatic edition of the text (as others are already doing for the Venetus A and Venetus B codices).

Perhaps even more remarkable than the volunteers' rapid mastery of Escorial Υ.1.1's Byzantine script is the fact that all of the students are in their first year of Greek. If you're not accustomed to learning about the transmission of Homer from first-year Greek students, a Friday afternoon with this group is enlightening.



You will undoubtedly see postings on this blog in the future announcing further releases of material from "Team Escorial Υ.1.1." In addition to the puzzles they've had to solve to make today's release available, they are compiling careful observations that will lead to a helpful guide to the paleography of Escorial Υ.1.1, and have already noted a number of unpublished or unappreciated discrepancies bewteen Escorial Υ.1.1 and other manuscripts that are forcing all of us working on the Homer Multitext project to reassess entirely the traditional scholarly views on the (b) family of manuscripts of the Iliad.

The Escorial Υ.1.1 group has currently indexed more than half of the manuscript: we're including folios 1 recto - 109 recto (covering Iliad books 1-8) in today's release.

Our profound thanks to all members of the group (alphabetically):

  • Matthew Angiolillo
  • Neil Curran
  • Maria Jaroszewicz
  • Alex Krasowski
  • Becky Musgrave
  • Kathleen O'Connor
  • Anne Salloom
  • Megan Whitacre


Monday, August 11, 2014

New publication of Homer Multitext research

If you would like to know what kind of research is being enabled by the Homer Multitext project, check out the recent publication in the Sunoikisis Undergraduate Research Journal of work by Matthew Angiollilo, Thomas Arralde, Melissa Browne, Nik Churik, Brian Clark, Stephanie Lindeborg, Rebecca Musgrave, and Neel Smith, in which the construction, organization, and layout of three Byzantine manuscripts of the Iliad are discussed. 

Friday, August 1, 2014

First publication of software for HMT services

In February, we announced the first publication of the HMT project’s archival data. Today, we are releasing the first published version of hmt-digital, a java servlet providing digital services for working with the project archive.

Version 1.0 is now installed at http://www.homermultitext.org/hmt-digital, where you can routinely expect to find the currently published services using the currently published version of the data archive. We continue to run a test site at http://beta.hpcc.uh.edu/tomcat/hmt-digital/. The test set normally runs in-progress versions of hmt-digital, and uses unpublished versions of our data archive.

Our software, like all the data in our archive, is openly licensed. If you’d prefer to run a local installation of the hmt-digital services, you’ll find instructions on the README for the project’s github repository.

Links