Dear Colleagues:
We are pleased to announce that the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has
awarded a grant to Duke University to support integration of the
DDBDP, APIS, and HGV. Work is already under way, taking place at
Duke, Columbia, Heidelberg, and the Centre for Computing in the
Humanities at King’s College London.
At the end of the project (August 2008) we aim to release a single,
stable user interface -- the Papyrological Navigator that was
demonstrated at the Congress -- to support cross-searching on DDBDP,
APIS, and HGV. At that point the canonical copy of the DDBDP will no
longer reside at Perseus, but at Duke (archival) and Columbia (for
searching). We have posted a lightly redacted copy of the proposal
that Mellon funded at www.duke.edu/~jds15/DDbDP-APIS-
HGV_propRedacted.pdf.
In the meantime, we invite you to use a *temporary* DDBDP search
interface (at http://ldpddev.cul.columbia.edu/cgi-bin/ddbdp/
ddbdp.pl). This engine, very kindly given to us by David Mimno
(University of Massachusetts at Amherst), is not perfect and will not
be the basis for the interface currently under development, but it
will tide us over when Perseus is down and until next August.
The temporary interface will undergo *no future development* under
this current project. Known strengths and weaknesses:
- access to most of the texts entered since PHI7 (the effective
cut-off for the old Perseus interface; inclusive up to ca. 2003),
Unicode output
- it is slow; line numbers are not clearly identified; some
markup incorrectly rendered on screen; search terms are not
highlighted within result sets.
Limitations notwithstanding, we are grateful to have use of this
temporary expedient and look forward to unveiling the next generation
Papyrological Navigator and an integrated DDBDP-APIS-HGV next summer.
Search tips for users:
-to search the entire corpus, leave the “Series” box blank
-if you do not see the searched word(s) on the results page, use
“Find” in your browsert window (enter Unicode Greek, and remember that
-eta = “h” on the keypad
-theta = “q”
-xi = “c”
-chi = “x”
-psi = “y”
-omega = “w”
All best,
Joshua Sosin
James Cowey
Rodney Ast
