Concordia
FAIN: PX-50003-08
New York University (New York, NY 10012-1019)
Roger Bagnall (Project Director: November 2007 to July 2010)
Development of technologies for integrated searching, dynamic mapping, and geographical correlation of Web-based humanities collections, focusing on existing and newly digitized papyrological and epigraphic texts related to Greek and Roman Libya and Egypt.
The Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King's College, London joins the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University in responding to the NEH/JISC call for innovative digitization projects. Concordia is a creative and time-critical transatlantic collaboration that advances digitization priorities along two complementary axes: dissemination of key epigraphical, papyrological, and geographic resources for Greek and Roman culture in North Africa, and piloting of reusable, standard techniques for cyberinfrastructure. This demonstration project unites an array of separately produced and hosted primary source collections with a unique geographic dataset to provide search and analysis presently available only in a few special-purpose, closed systems. The content of three existing, respected collections (including 50,000 papyrological and 3,000 epigraphic texts) are brought together with open-source software and newly digitized content (an additional 950 epigraphic texts plus complete topographic and toponymic records for over 3,000 historical geographic features) to create an unparalleled research resource for Greek and Roman Libya and Egypt. Concordia uses basic Web architecture and standard formats (XHTML, EpiDoc/TEI XML, and Atom+GeoRSS). The project would catalyze the rapid establishment of a simple, Web-based research infrastructure which takes us beyond discrete Web pages and bland hyperlinks to actionable electronic citation and cross-project discovery without continued waiting for mature international repository networks or the putative 'semantic Web'. The results of this project would be freely accessible on the Web.