PhiloGrid: Creating a Virtual Research Environment for Classics

FAIN: PX-50013-08

Tufts University (Somerville, MA 02144-2401)
Gregory R. Crane (Project Director: November 2007 to November 2010)

Creation of a digital collection of fragmentary writings of Greek historians and development of a virtual research environment for Greco-Roman antiquity using grid technologies that would be broadly applicable to other humanities disciplines.

[A grid is a computing architecture that coordinates large numbers of computers and data to act as a single large computer. It enables individuals or institutions grouped as virtual organizations to dynamically share computational resources.] Philogrid, a collaboration of the Perseus Digital Library (DL) at Tufts University in the United States and the Internet Centre at Imperial College London in the United Kingdom, proposes to create an expandable, grid-enabled, Web service-driven virtual research environment for Greco-Roman antiquity based initially upon open source texts and services from the Perseus DL. First, we will add to the Perseus DL the writings of Greek historians that exist only in fragmentary form. This task goes beyond simple data entry: we will create the first major digital collection of fragmentary authors designed from the start to interact with multiple source editions. Second, we will create a repository of philological data about the Greco-Roman world seeded with twenty years' worth of Perseus materials. The objects that we create will not only include books but every labeled object within each logical document. Third, we will convert the workflow that has evolved over the past ten years to process textual materials in Perseus into a grid-enabled workflow based on Web services that can be applied to and customized for many collections. Although this project will concentrate on the classics collections in the Perseus DL, the new workflows will also process non-classical Perseus content, and will thus from the start demonstrate their generality. The development process will follow a strategy already successfully employed in e-Science projects at the Imperial College Internet Centre. It will consist of conversion of the Perseus workflow and tools into a Web service environment, in which the Perseus workflow is analyzed into steps, each of which is published as a Web service with a configurable API. A workflow mirroring the Perseus workflow will then be composed and fine-tuned using model data from Perseus and sample data from the digitization within the current scope of this project. The results of this project would be freely accessible on the Web.

Associated Products

Collecting fragmentary authors in a digital library (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Collecting fragmentary authors in a digital library
Author: Monica Berti
Author: Matteo Romanello
Author: Alison Babeu
Author: Gregory Crane
Abstract: This paper discusses new work to represent, in a digital library of classical sources, authors whose works themselves are lost and who survive only where surviving authors quote, paraphrase or allude to them. It describes initial works from a digital collection of such fragmentary authors designed not only to capture but to extend the ontologies that traditional scholarship has developed over generations: the aim is representing every nuance of print conventions while using the capabilities of digital libraries to extend our ability to identify fragments, to represent what we have identified, and to render the results of that work intellectually and physically more accessible than was possible in print culture.
Date: 07/01/2009
Primary URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1555400.1555442
Primary URL Description: Final copy of this paper available through the ACM Digital Library.
Secondary URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10427/70401
Secondary URL Description: Copy of this paper deposited into the Tufts Digital Archive.
Conference Name: JCDL '09 Proceedings of the 9th ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries

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