Digital Corpus of Greek and Latin Literary Papyri

FAIN: HW-50021-11

New York University (New York, NY 10012-1019)
Roger Bagnall (Project Director: December 2010 to February 2013)

Two workshops toward developing an online resource for a corpus of literary papyri, similar to other resources available for documentary papyri.

Since the end of the 19th century, Egypt and, to a lesser extent, other places in the Mediterranean have yielded thousands of papyri, many written in Greek and Latin. The majority of them contain documentary texts concerned with public and private affairs, but an estimated 15% are ancient books of varied content, such as epic, ancient drama, lyric poetry, historical and oratorical works, medical treatises, lexicographical texts, etc. To determine the appropriate scope of a digital corpus of these texts, we propose to invite those whose scholarship and teaching depend on literary papyri to two workshops, to be attended also by the technical specialists behind the new DDbDP. The engagement of all these individuals will be critical to the long-term sustainability of the project, and by the end of the second workshop we intend to have a clearly defined set of goals and a realistic workplan that will serve as a basis for a project aimed at realizing a digital corpus of literary papyri.