What's New in Papyrology

Recent publications of papyri & ostraca 4th BC-8th AD; conferences, lectures etc. from Papy-L and other sources as noted. PLEASE SEND SUGGESTIONS

Tuesday, June 10, 2014

PN updates

Colleagues

We write with some PN updates. Mark Depauw recently visited Duke for a few days of intensive work aimed at enhancing TM/PN interoperation. Some of the fruits of this work are now visible.

If you navigate to a text, say, http://papyri.info/ddbdp/p.diosk;;1 , you will find a selection of TM data, including

* Publications
* Inventory number
* Reuse information
* Date
* Language
* Provenance, with link out to TM geo
* Archive, with link out to TM Archives
* Links out to TM People and TM Georef

Information drawn from TM is also searchable, rather simply for now. Examples: (1) You cannot yet limit a search by  the archive of Dioskourides the phrourarchos, but if you search metadata for "Dioskourides phrourarchos" you will find items that TM attributes to the same. (2) Likewise, you cannot yet limit a search by TM provenance data, but if you search metadata for "Herakleopolis" you will find items to which TM assigns that as provenance. (3) The same applies to inventory numbers. If you search for "P. G 4876" you will find P.Phrur.Diosk. And so on. Note: In all cases, you will be searching HGV, APIS, and TM. So, you will find *any* publication in which one of the three resources contains the given string.

We hope before very long to roll out a series of operational enhancements as well, for example search faceting on TM data (as currently supported for HGV and APIS data).

Also, some of you will have noticed that the PN sometimes produces erroneous aggregations of text and metadata. The cause of this problem is the old DDbDP 'dummy headers', which indicate republication information. Once we have aligned all HGV and TM publication information we can deprecate the old DDbDP reprint data, and then add re-direct/autofill assistance for users attempting to navigate to a deprecated edition. This will both fix the aggregation problem and provide better navigation as well as abbreviation resolution.

All of this is possible owing to the excellent work of the TM team (and the careful design of their database) and the DC3's Hugh Cayless and Ryan Baumann. Thanks Mark, Ryan, and Hugh!

josh sosin