Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative
Issue 8 | December 2014 - December 2015

Selected Papers from the 2013 TEI Conference

The Linked Fragment: TEI and the Encoding of
Text Reuses of Lost Authors
Monica Berti, Bridget Almas, David Dubin, Greta Franzini, Simona
Stoyanova and Gregory R. Crane

Electronic version
URL: http://journals.openedition.org/jtei/1218
DOI: 10.4000/jtei.1218
ISSN: 2162-5603
Publisher
TEI Consortium
Electronic reference
Monica Berti, Bridget Almas, David Dubin, Greta Franzini, Simona Stoyanova and Gregory R. Crane,« The Linked Fragment: TEI and the Encoding of Text Reuses of Lost Authors », Journal of the Text
Encoding Initiative [Online], Issue 8 | December 2014 - December 2015, Online since 09 June 2015,
connection on 20 April 2019. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/jtei/1218 ; DOI : 10.4000/jtei.1218

For this publication a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license has been granted by theauthor(s) who retain full copyright.

The Linked Fragment: TEI and the Encoding of Text Reuses of Lost Authors

The Linked Fragment: TEI and the Encodingof Text Reuses of Lost Authors
Monica Berti, Bridget Almas, David Dubin, Greta Franzini, Simona Stoyanova, andGregory R. Crane

1. Introduction
1

This paper presents the research work of the Humboldt Chair of Digital Humanities at the
University of Leipzig to establish a new Leipzig Open Fragmentary Texts Series (LOFTS).1 The
project is developed in conjunction with the Perseus Digital Library at Tufts University and theHarvard University Center for Hellenic Studies. LOFTS produces open editions of ancient classicalworks that survive through quotations and text reuses in later texts (i.e., textual fragments). Thesefragments include many formats that range from quotations to allusions and translations, which
are only a shadowy image of the original depending on their distance from a literal citation (for adenition of fragmentary texts, see Berti 2012 and Berti 2013). Generations of scholars have looked
for information about lost authors and have created huge print collections of fragmentary works
that cover almost every literary genre in prose and verse, allowing for the rediscovery of authors
otherwise lost and forgotten (Most 1997). As far as Greek literature from the eighth century BCE to

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1The Linked Fragment: TEI and the Encoding of Text Reuses of Lost Authors

the third century CE is concerned, we know that the works of about sixty percent of known authors
are preserved only in textual fragments, thus showing the importance of this form of evidence(Berti et al. 2009).
2

Print editions of fragmentary works are indexed collections of excerpts extracted from theircontexts and from the textual data about those contexts. Editions of fragmentary works arefundamentally hypertexts and the goal of this project is to produce a dynamic infrastructure fora full representation of the complex relationships between sources, quotations, and annotations
about them. In a digital edition, fragments are linked directly to the source text from which they
are drawn and can be accurately aligned to multiple editions (Berti et al. 2009). Accordingly, digitalfragments are contextualized annotations about reused authors and works. As new versions of,or scholarship on, the source texts emerge in a standard, machine-actionable form, these newndings are automatically linked to the digital fragments. Such a representation allows us to go
beyond the limits of print collections of fragmentary authors, where quotations and text reuses
are snippets of text completely isolated from their original context. Fragmentary texts also include
quotations and reuses of surviving sources (e.g., Herodotus quoted by Athenaeus). In these cases it
is possible to compare the original text with its reuses and, therefore, to produce dierent textualalignments that help scholars to infer the quotation habits of ancient authors.

3

The rst step for rethinking the signicance of text reuses of lost works is to represent them insidetheir preserving context. This entails the selection of the string of words that belong to the portionof text classiable as reuse and to encode all those elements that signal the presence of the text
reuse itself (i.e., named entities such as the onomastics of reused authors, titles of reused works
and descriptions of their content, verba dicendi, syntax, etc.). The second step is to encode all theinformation pertaining to other sources that reuse the same original text with dierent words ora dierent syntax (witnesses), or that deal with the same topic of the text reuse (parallel texts),
as well as alternative editions and translations of both the source and the derived texts (Almas
and Berti 2013).

4

LOFTS has two main objectives: (1) to digitize paper editions of fragmentary works and link themto source texts, and (2) to produce born-digital editions of fragmentary works. In order to achievethese goals, LOFTS is implementing a Fragmentary Texts Editor within the Perseids Platform2(Almas and Berti 2013) and is producing a digital edition of the Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum
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The Linked Fragment: TEI and the Encoding of Text Reuses of Lost Authors

edited by Karl Müller in the nineteenth century (Müller 1878–85; DFHG Project).3 Alongside the
DFHG project, LOFTS is working on two other subprojects: (1) the Digital Athenaeus, whose goal isto produce a digital edition of the Deipnosophists, with a complete survey of quotations of both lostand surviving sources preserved by Athenaeus of Naucratis;4 and (2) the Digital Marmor Parium,
which seeks to create a digital edition of the so-called Parian Marble, a Hellenistic chronicle on
marble from the Greek island of Paros5. The latter is the work of a fragmentary author whose nameis lost and the project serves as a test case to build a model that works with both fragmentary
texts and physical fragments of ancient works such as inscriptions and papyri (Berti and Stoyanova
2014).
5

The present paper is divided into two parts. The rst part (section 2) describes the implementationof a fragmentary texts editor within Perseids, the editorial platform developed by the Perseus
Project for collaborative annotation of classical source documents. Perseids facilitates theannotation of text reuses, the production of syntactic annotations, the alignment of multiple texts,
and the production of digital commentaries on fragmentary works. This section also elaborates on
the complex nature of fragmentary texts and how dierent technologies need to be combined toreach our goals.

6

The second part (section 3) describes the Digital Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum, a synergeticeort which is currently encoding print collections of fragmentary texts and creating a directoryof fragmentary authors which feeds into the Perseus catalog.

2. Perseids Platform
7

The Perseids Platform supports collaborative editing, annotation, and publication of born-digital
editions of source documents in the classics.6 Perseids is not one single application but an
integrated environment built from a loose coupling of heterogeneous tools and services froma variety of sources. The development of the Perseids platform was inspired and motivated by
the work of several pre-existing projects: the Tufts Miscellany Collection at Tufts University,7 theHomer Multitext Project at the Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies,8 and the Papyri.info project9(Almas and Beaulieu 2013). The Son of SUDA Online (SoSOL) application sits at the core of the
Perseids platform. SoSOL is a Ruby on Rails 10 application, originally developed by the Papyri.info
project, that serves as front end for a Git 11 repository of documents, metadata, and annotations.
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The Linked Fragment: TEI and the Encoding of Text Reuses of Lost Authors

It includes a workow engine that enables documents and data of dierent types to pass throughexible review and approval processes. The SoSOL application includes user interfaces for editing
XML documents, metadata, and annotations. While it does not include a full-featured XML editor,
it supports alternative text-based input of XML markup, and can enforce XML schema validation
rules on the documents being edited.
8

A key goal behind the initial development of the platform was to enable original undergraduate
research in the eld of Classics.12 The workows related to the encoding of text reuses and lost
authors represent core use cases for the current phase of work on the platform (Almas and Berti2013).13 In developing features of the Perseids Platform to support these workows, we are focusingrst and foremost on the data. We expect that techniques for visually representing digital editions
will change rapidly with technology. So, while our work includes prototype representations ofdigital editions suitable for publication on the web, our rst priority is to enable scholars to create
data about the authors, texts and related commentaries, annotations, links, and translations in a
way that encourages and facilitates their preservation and reuse. We have identied the following
core requirements to meet this goal:•

The ability to represent the texts themselves, links between them, and annotations andcommentaries on them, in semantically and structurally meaningful ways that adhere towell-accepted and documented standard formats.

••Stable and resolvable identiers for all relevant data points, including:⚬the lost authors and their works⚬

the authors and extant texts that preserve quotations and text reuses of the lost works⚬

dierent editions and translations of the lost and extant texts⚬

named entities (e.g., persons, places, and events) mentioned within the texts⚬

commentaries and annotations on the texts, from ancient times through the present

The ability to group any of the data points into collections representing dierent
contextual views of the data.

•

The ability to accurately represent provenance information for data and workows.

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2.1 Data Formats
2.1.1 Texts
9

We use TEI encoding to represent the source texts and textual fragments preserved within them.14
TEI provides the markup syntax and vocabulary needed to produce XML that enables citablepassages of text to be unambiguously identied and linked to within their preserving context, a key
requirement of the representation of text reuses as discussed above. For example, the following
excerpt from Athenaeus’ Deipnosophists 3.6 uses the TEI <div> element to demarcate the book andchapter:<div type="textpart" subtype="book" n="3">...
<div type="textpart" subtype="chapter" n="6"><p>...Ἴστρος δ᾽ ἐν τοῖς Ἀττικοῖς οὐδ᾽ ἐξάγεσθαί φησι τῆς Ἀττικῆς τὰς ἀπ᾽αὐτῶν γινομένας ἰσχάδας, ἵνα μόνοι ἀπολαύοιεν οἱ κατοικοῦντες: καὶ ἐπεὶ πολλοὶἐνεφανίζοντο διακλέπτοντες, οἱ τούτους μηνύοντες τοῖς δικασταῖς ἐκλήθησαν τότεπρῶτον συκοφάνται. ...
</p></div></div>

2.1.2 Identiﬁers
10

The CITE Architecture developed by the Homer Multitext Project 15 provides us with a standard
identier syntax for texts, passages, and related objects and with APIs for services which canretrieve objects identied via these protocols. CITE denes Canonical Text Services (CTS) URNs forcreating semantically meaningful unique identiers for texts and passages within texts. CITE alsodenes an alternate URN syntax for data objects that are not citable text notes, such as images,
annotations, and the lost texts themselves. As URNs, these identiers are not web-resolvable on
their own. By combining them with a URL prex and deploying CTS and CITE services to serve theidentied resources at those addresses, we have resolvable, stable identiers for our texts, data
objects, and annotations (Smith and Blackwell 2012). One of our key motivations for using CTS
URNs is that they give us a robust means of targeting annotations at specic substrings of text
within a canonical work. The pointers to the text are specic to the location of these strings within
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their canonical citation structure, and not to the XML markup of any particular digital edition of
the text. Further, the URN syntax degrades gracefully to allow us to reference either the notional
work or a very specic edition of that work. Our goal in using this syntax, together with RDF andstand-o markup techniques as discussed below, is to enable the assertions we are making to standon their own as data, independent of the encoding techniques used to digitize the text.
11

For example, the following set of identiers might be used to represent a reuse of a lost work of
Istros at book 3, chapter 6 in Athenaeus’ Deipnosophists (Almas and Berti 2013):
urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0008.tlg001.perseus-grc1:3.6@Ἴστρος%5B1%5D-συκοφάνται%5B1%5D

12This is a CTS URN for a subset of passage 3.6 in the perseus-grc1 edition of the work identied by
tlg001 in the group of texts associated with Athenaeus, identied by tlg0008. The URN further

species a string of text in that passage, starting at the rst instance of the word Ἴστρος and endingat the rst instance of the word συκοφάνται.
13

urn:cite:perseus:lci.2

is a CITE URN identier for the instance of lost text being reused. This URN identies an object
whose name 2 is unique within the Perseus Collection of Lost Content Items (lci). Every item inthis collection points to a specic text reuse of a lost author as it is represented in a modern edition(see below for further discussion of CITE Collections).
14

These URNs represent distinct technology-independent identiers for the two cited objects, andby prexing them with the http://data.perseus.org URL prex (representing the web address
at which they can be resolved) we create stable web identiers for them, making them compatible
with linked data best practices:16
http://data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0008.tlg001.perseusgrc1:3.6%40Ἴστρος%5B1%5D-συκοφάνται%5B1%5D

17

http://data.perseus.org/collections/urn:cite:perseus:lci.2
15

The RDF data model also gives us more precision than XML with respect to targets of annotations
and subjects of assertions. A human reader can usually tell from context whether an assertion
concerns the wording of a sentence, the writing of a sentence as an event, the author of asentence, or another scholar’s assertion about the sentence. XML has no standardized semantics,
and interpretations of relationships among elements and attributes are often underspecied in

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The Linked Fragment: TEI and the Encoding of Text Reuses of Lost Authors

XML vocabularies (Renear et al. 2002). In RDF, subject, predicate, and object roles in a statement
are explicit at the data structure level. Distinctions among domain entities (such as author vs.
authorship event, or morpheme vs. sentence) are encoded as a class identity for the resource.
2.1.3 Annotations
16

The term “Annotations” covers a potentially wide variety of data types. We can have simple
annotations in the form of typed links between data points, such as: a textual fragment and a
proposed author of that fragment; detailed textual commentaries making an assertion about atext; a complex morphosyntactic analysis of a section of text; an alignment between editions
or translations of a text. The Open Annotation (OA) data model “species an interoperable
framework for creating associations between related resources, annotations, using a methodologythat conforms to the Architecture of the World Wide Web.”18 The OA model enables us to serialize
every annotation in its most simple form, as a link between one or more target items being
annotated, and one or more bodies representing the contents of the annotation. OA also gives
us a standard vocabulary for categorizing the motivation for the annotations. URIs are used to
specify both the target and the body of the annotation. We use the OA data model both as theprimary representation of an annotation, in cases where the annotations are created by linking
two identiers (such as a link between a passage in a text and an identier for a named entity or
event), and also as a serialization method for more complex annotations, where the annotation
process involves the creation of complex documents as the annotation bodies which we can thenreference by their URI identiers. In the latter case, we use a variety of standard formats for theactual annotation bodies, including:

17•

The Perseus Ancient Greek and Latin Treebank Schema 19 for morphosyntactic analyses.

•

The Alpheios Translation Alignment Schema 20 for text alignments.

•

Markdown Syntax 21 for short textual commentaries.

•

TEI XML for primary and secondary source texts.

The annotation representing the assertion (discussed above) that text at Athen., Deipn. 3.6
describes a reuse of a lost work of Istros identied by urn:cite:perseus:lci.2, serialized in OA
using the JSON-LD22 format, might be formalized as follows (Almas and Berti 2013):

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The Linked Fragment: TEI and the Encoding of Text Reuses of Lost Authors{"@context": "http://www.w3.org/ns/oa-context-20130208.json","@id": "http://perseids.org/annotations/urn:cite:perseus:annsimp.2.1","@type": "oa:Annotation","annotatedAt": "2013-03-05T07:57:00","annotatedBy": {"@id": "http://data.perseus.org/sosol/users/Monica Berti","@type": "foaf:Person","name": "Monica Berti"},"hasBody": "http://data.perseus.org/collections/urn:cite:perseus:lci.2","hasTarget": "http://data.perseus.org/citations/
urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0008.tlg001.perseus-grc1:3.6%40Ἴστρος%5B1%5D-συκοφάνται
%5B1%5D","oa:motivatedBy":"oa:linking"}18

Figure 1 shows a possible visual representation of the same annotation:
Figure 1. Visual representation of an OA annotation of a text reuse in Athen., Deipn. 3.6.

2.2 Collections
19

We need to be able to organize text reuses into various types of collections of data, including
those represented in a given traditional print edition which comprises: reuses from one or many
authors; all text reuses attributed to a specic author; all text reuses quoted by a specic author;
all text reuses referencing a specic topic; all text reuses attributed to a specic time period.
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CITE Collection Services dene a protocol for identifying and retrieving digital representations ofobjects identied by CITE URNs. CITE URNs uniquely identify objects in a set of objects of a similar
kind: for example, images, manuscripts, and entries in commentaries. (CITE stands for Collections,Indices, Texts, and Extensions.) Examples of CITE collections used to support the encoding oftext reuses for our project include the abstract lost text entities themselves, digital images ofmanuscripts of the extant source texts that quote those lost texts, commentaries on instances oftext reuse, and linguistic annotations of the quoted text.

2.3 Provenance20

Scholars produce data through a variety of activities, observations, and other events. Some datais created, other data discovered. The provenance of a digital object is an account of its origin
and change over time. Documenting and preserving data provenance in a structured, machinereadable format enables us to more precisely track and document shared resources, ultimately
improving data quality and encouraging further sharing. Specically, we intend our retrieval,
editorial annotation, and communication tools to create records of the research transactions inwhich they are used. These records are expressed in RDF vocabularies that are based on abstract
provenance models.

21

According to Groth et al. (2006), two key principles for provenance data are that (1) actors must
only record propositions that they know to be true, through statements of what they observe; and(2) each statement of provenance must be attributable to a particular actor.

22

In our use case, we need to be able to (1) reference ancient data that can be identied but that
did not literally come into existence as the result of any modern computational interaction (andwhich may in fact no longer be extant in any preserved source); and (2) identify the role a data
item, such as an ancient scholarly assertion, plays as the vehicle for the modern scholarly claims.
A third requirement, which results from the second, is that we need to be able to represent theassertions of the ancient scholars, on which our modern assertions depend, in a format that canbe included computationally in a common data set with the modern claims.

23

Although our usual workow discourse describes domain entities coming into existence andundergoing genuine change, that understanding poses problems for tracking identity and othersemantic relationships. For example, if a text is enriched by adding TEI markup, what exactly is

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preserved in the derivation of the newer version from the older? On what basis do we identify thesame original work in each reuse despite the supercial dierences between them? And how do we
represent assertions concerning works that have no physical exemplars? Our solution to dilemmas
like these is to employ complementary data provenance models: one with a transformational view
and another with a semiotic view of the same research events.
24

The W3 Consortium’s PROV is a specication for expressing provenance records with descriptionsof the entities and activities involved in producing and delivering or otherwise inuencing a given
digital object.23 A PROV activity is an event through which entities come into existence and/orchange to become new entities. Activities are dynamic aspects of the world, such as actions andprocesses. For example, a PROV account of the OA annotation shown in the previous section would
document its coming into existence at a particular time through a researcher’s use of annotation
software.

25

In contrast to PROV, the Systematic Assertion Model (SAM) treats events in scholarship as linguistic
acts (Wickett et al. 2012). SAM is concerned not with mutable data structures that change fromone form to another, but with unchanging abstract objects that come to stand in new contingent
relationships during a project. A SAM account of the OA annotation, for example, would beconcerned with its role as a vehicle for the scholar’s claim of a proposition’s truth (that is, theproposition that Athen., Deipn. 3.6, quotes LCI 2). A SAM description links an annotation expression
to the act of annotation, the claim advanced at that time and place, the annotator’s justication forthe claim, and to interpretive contexts necessary for understanding the annotation. In the present
example these contexts would include the OA vocabulary and the JSON-LD serialization syntax.

26

SAM’s formal account of research data and its content supplies contextual information that PROV
lacks, but PROV can record functional relationships that SAM hides: because SAM’s abstract symbol
structures and propositions are immutable, their roles in a project are incompletely speciedwithout the PROV view of their use as inputs and outputs to activities.

27

In the scenario discussed in this paper, a scholar wants to annotate what she thinks is a reuse ofa lost text attributed to Istros in an extant source text by Plutarch (Sol. 24.1), where Istros is notnamed.24 The scholar, using the Perseids annotation tools to produce a concrete representation

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10The Linked Fragment: TEI and the Encoding of Text Reuses of Lost Authorsof this assertion, indicates the text that represents the reuse. An example of an RDF triple
documenting this action—the selection of the string starting with the rst instance of ἐξαγωγὴ tothe rst instance of συκοφαντεῖν according to the SAM data model—is:<system:actions/berti/textsel1> sam:indicates [ xsd:string"ἐξαγωγὴ1,συκοφαντεῖν1"];
event:agent <perseids:users/berti>;
event:time [xsd:dateTime "2013-05-20T09:01:00"];
a sam:Indication.
28

Although we could represent this action as an activity involving the scholar’s physical interaction
with the system, we would lose the signicance of the linguistic force behind the scholar’s
identication of the text.

29

In reaction to her selection of text, the system computes a URI identier for that text. This event
can be represented as a SAM computation, but in order to represent the fact that the URI came into
being as a result of a user-system interaction, it is also appropriate to describe this as a PROV activity
that was informed by the scholar’s previous action of selecting a string of text (Almas et al. 2013):<system:urncompute1> sam:indicates <data:citations/
urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0007.tlg007.perseus-grc1:24.1%40ἐξαγωγὴ%5B1%5D-συκοφαντεῖν%5B1%5D>;
event:agent <system:installation1>;
event:time [xsd:dateTime "2013-05-20T09:01:01"];a sam:Computation, prov:Activity;
prov:wasInformedBy <system:actions/berti/textsel1>.

2.4 Dissemination and Presentation30

As discussed above, our primary focus thus far has been on capturing the data about the authors,
texts and related commentaries, annotations, links, and translations in a way that is accurate
and also encourages and facilitates its preservation and reuse. Visual representation of the datais one type of reuse, and the data format selections have been made with the need to support
disseminations for online presentation in mind. The JSON-LD syntax recommended by OA allows
us to easily build a dynamic display interface in Javascript which navigates the JSON-LD data
object and retrieves the datasets identied as the targets and bodies of the annotations at theiraddressable URIs, as served by supporting CTS and CITE services. Our prototype interface 25
provides a demonstration of one possible approach to a digital representation of text reuse data.
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The Linked Fragment: TEI and the Encoding of Text Reuses of Lost Authors

Similarly, although we hope eventually to be able to represent the rich provenance metadata
discussed above in the visual representation of our digital editions, we are above all concernedwith capturing the data in a way that ensures they can be preserved and serve as the basis forfurther research.

3. The Digital Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum (DFHG)
Project
31

As mentioned before, one of the goals of LOFTS is to digitize paper editions of fragmentary works
and link them to the source texts from which the fragments have been excerpted. Such a work
aims both at preserving a philological heritage and at providing a methodological foundation
for implementing a new generation of born-digital editions of fragmentary texts. Accordingly,
LOFTS is encoding the Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum (FHG), which is one of the most importantcollections of textual fragments of Classical authors.

3.1 The FHG Texts
32

The ve volumes of the FHG edited by Karl Müller (1878–85) comprise the rst big collectionof fragments of Greek historians’ work ever realized. The work collects excerpts from textual
sources pertaining to more than six hundred fragmentary authors. Excluding the rst volume,these authors are chronologically distributed and range from the sixth century BCE to the seventh
century CE. Under each author the fragments are numbered sequentially and arranged according
to works and book numbers (when such information is available), and every fragment is translated
into Latin. The rst volume also includes the text of the inscription of the Marmor Parium with a
Latin translation, a chronological table, and a commentary, and the Greek text of the Rosetta Stone
with a French literal translation, as well as a critical, historical, and archaeological commentary.
The fth volume includes fragments of the writings of Greek and Syriac historians preserved in
Armenian sources.

33

The basic structure of the FHG has introductions to the volumes with discussions of the content,
citations of sources, and references to bibliographical records. Sometimes short introductions
precede the fragments of the fragmentary authors with biographical information and related

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textual evidence. The Greek fragments are arranged into two columns and the Latin translations
are printed at the bottom of the page below a horizontal line. The FHG does not include a critical
apparatus for the Greek text.

3.2 The DFHG Project34

LOFTS is producing the rst digital edition of the FHG as a means of providing an open, linked,
machine-actionable text for the study and advancement of Greek fragmentary literature.26 The text
is encoded in accordance with the latest TEI EpiDoc standards.27 The decision to adopt the EpiDoc
subset was dictated by two factors: (1) EpiDoc markup lends itself well to ancient texts, be thesepapyri, inscriptions, manuscripts, or editions, allowing for various levels of detail; (2) encoding
in EpiDoc ensures compatibility with existing papyrological and epigraphic resources, with the
EAGLE-Europeana network,28 and with the forthcoming EpiDoc-compliant Perseus 5.0 databank.

35

The Leipzig Humboldt Chair and Perseus Digital Library partnership entails a synergetic eort not
only to enrich the Perseus Catalog 29 but also to provide new testing material for the continuous
development of the Perseids Platform, where the rst EpiDoc version of the FHG will be placed forfurther annotation. This undertaking is proving to be invaluable not only for the growth of partner
resources but also for the development of the EpiDoc schema itself.30

36

The project team is also working on the text of the so-called Marmor Parium (IG 12.5.444), which isa fragmentary inscription from the island of Paros that preserves a Hellenistic chronicle from thereign of Cecrops (1581/1580 BCE) to the archonship of Euctemon (299/298 BCE).31 The epigraphicaltext was edited in the rst volume of the FHG because of its historiographical value (Müller 1878–
85, 1:533–90). The author of the text is unknown, but the content reects his choices and it consistsof a list of historical events mainly based on the Athenian history. In this respect, this evidence
is a perfect example of a fragmentary author, whose work is preserved not through quotations inlater texts, but in a fragmented original form. The text of the inscription is also being encodedin EpiDoc. An important part of the project is the identication of named entities mentioned in
the inscription (such as names of kings and magistrates, personal names, and place names). The
Pleiades gazetteer has been referenced for the place names.32 The identication of individuals will
make use of and feed into the Standards for Networking Ancient Prosopographies project (SNAP).33
The team is also producing a visualization of the chronology preserved by the Marmor Parium with
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the open source tool TimelineJS, which allows the comparison of the text not only with otherancient chronologies but also with dierent chronological interpretations of the content of theinscription made by modern scholars (Berti and Stoyanova 2014).34

3.3 The EpiDoc Guidelines and Encoding Process
37

The digital text of the FHG was obtained by feeding the volume scans available at the Internet
Archive35 to an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) engine, which transformed the printed text
into digital form. The error-laden Greek output was corrected semi-automatically and stored intext les. Any remaining errors are manually rectied during the encoding process.

38

LOFTS has drawn up an EpiDoc template that is compatible with the Perseus Digital Library corpus
and applicable to all types of texts produced by the University of Leipzig Open Greek and Latin(OGL) Project, which is producing a comprehensive open collection of Classical sources.36 The
template covers basic layout and citation structures with room for alteration and improvement
and it is integrated with encoding guidelines, produced not only to document the LOFTS editorial
choices but also to help external individuals contribute to the encoding process. The projectproduction line consists of two stages: (1) the encoding process is implemented by LOFTS andtackles layout, citation elements, and philological issues; (2) the initial editorial endeavor and theguidelines are made available for crowdsourcing, where contributors are encouraged to further
tag the EpiDoc les with information regarding places, personal names, and any other relevant
entities.
3.3.1 Stage One: First Level of Encoding by LOFTS39

The editorial team of LOFTS creates one XML le per fragmentary author. Every le contains a<teiHeader> with specic information about the author, volume, or book in question. As for the<text>, Müller’s layout is not kept since the Greek text is separated from its Latin translation. The

structure within <text> reects the structure of each volume, using the <div type="textpart">with dierent @subtype values, whenever needed. Müller’s Latin translations of the fragments are
encoded in a separate XML le to facilitate text alignment.
40

For example, fragment 6 of Ion of Chios will be encoded as follows (gures 2, 3, and 4):

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Figure 2. Page image from FHG 2:48: Greek text of fragment 6 (outlined in red) and Latin translation (outlined
in yellow).

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Figure 3. Image from the XML ﬁle for the Greek translation.

Figure 4. Image from the XML ﬁle for the Latin translation.

41

While retaining the same number (6), the Greek is encoded in a <cit> and the Latin translation
in a <p>. The <cit> is broken down into <bibl>, which contains the source <author> (Plutarch)
and work, and a <quote>, containing the Greek text. Whenever there is a note, the <note> element
is also placed within <cit>. Any information that does not strictly pertain to the fragment is
encoded in a <p>. This initial editorial stage also involves replacing special characters, such as theæ diphthong, with their Unicode entities (see the Latin translation, where æ is displayed as &#230;)
in order to avoid font and potential display issues and confusion between graphically similar but
semantically dierent characters (e.g., capital Latin c and Greek capital lunate sigma). Numbers,
including ordinal, are also tagged. Footnotes are given arabic numbers (Müller uses asterisks) for
clarity.

42

An XSL transformation 37 is used to help the encoder better visualize the marked-up text and links
the main body to the footnotes. All references to other works (often abbreviated by Müller) aretagged as <bibl> and will eventually point to a master bibliography le. Work titles appearing in
the Greek and Latin texts are wrapped in a <title> element. Where we have both the Greek andthe Latin titles of a work, the two titles are enclosed in another <title> tag:<title><title xml:lang="grc">Περὶ τελετῶν</title> sive <title type="alt"xml:lang="la">De mysteriis</title></title>

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43

The FHG does not include a critical apparatus, but sometimes Müller signals variant readings in thetext, and these are tagged as <rdg> elements inside an <app> within the main text. Personal names
are simply tagged as <persName>. Names often carry additional information, such as patronymics
and epithets or clues about an individual’s profession. Encoding such specicity is not a stage one
priority but a stage two expectation.

44

Another problematic feature when working with editions of fragmentary works is how to encode
specic editorial decisions concerning the attribution of a quotation or a text reuse to an author
whose original works are lost. Müller sometimes adds dierent marks (parentheses, square
brackets, or question marks) to the fragment number in order to signal uncertainty about the
attribution of that fragment.38 In these cases the uncertainty is encoded using the @ana attributeto the <cit> element, with one of the following values: "#dubia", "#incerta", and "#anonyma".
These values are dened in the <classDecl> element in <encodingDesc> in the header. The reason
for this choice depends on the fact that when the project was started not all relevant elements
had the @cert attribute. Even if they did, Müller reasons for marking something as uncertain varya lot, and he is also inconsistent in his use of these sigla. The use of the <certainty> element
also proved problematic, because of this inconsistency, since it was at times dicult to determine
whether the uncertainty was the content of the citation, the attribution to an author, or the extent
of the quotation. So it was decided to roughly map Müller’s three sigla to what seemed the mostfrequent and probable uncertainty categories across the collection, and rather than have @cert
or <certainty> sometimes in <cit> sometimes in <bibl> sometimes in <quote>, to have threedierent values of the @ana attribute in <cit>.
3.3.2 Stage Two: Crowdsourced Annotation

45

Once complete, these basic XML les are deposited in the Perseids Platform for further annotationby third parties. While still in testing mode, this second stage encourages annotators to tag any
additional information, including—but not limited to—the following:•Names (person).39•

Names (place).40•

Bibliographic references: expansion of bibliographic references and linking to bibliography
le.

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17The Linked Fragment: TEI and the Encoding of Text Reuses of Lost Authors

46•

Numbers.

•

Titles within Greek and Latin text.

•

Stage 2 encoding of the Latin translations (after initial encoding at stage one).

The editorial board provides the nal review for each le. EpiDoc-encoded DFHG les are being
progressively added to the DFHG GitHub repository 41 for everyone to download, improve, and sharein accordance with our CC BY-SA 4.0 International License.42

4. Conclusions
47

The Leipzig Open Fragmentary Texts Series (LOFTS) aims not only at producing an open seriesof Greek and Latin fragmentary authors, but also at building a model for representing quotations
and text reuses of lost works in a digital environment. In order to achieve these goals, dierent
technologies are being used and implemented beyond the TEI XML standard. The nal outcome
is the production of dynamic excerpts from source texts. In the case of digitized print editions offragmentary works, this means linking the fragments directly to the source text and annotating
their metadata within it. In the case of new-born digital editions of fragmentary texts, fragments
become multilayered annotations of information concerning fragmentary authors and reuses of
their lost works. These dynamic excerpts contribute to the production of a real “multitext,” where
each version of the same text embodies a dierent step in its transmission and a reconstruction ofphilological conjectures (on the concept of multitext see Blackwell and Crane 2009). The ultimate
goals are the creation of open, linked, machine-actionable texts for the study of textual reuses ofClassical works and the development of a collaborative environment for crowdsourced annotations
that involve both scholars and students.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Almas, Bridget, and Marie-Claire Beaulieu. 2013. “Developing a New Integrated Editing Platform for Source
Documents in Classics.” Literary & Linguistic Computing 28(4): 493–503. doi:10.1093/llc/fqt046.

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Almas, Bridget, and Monica Berti. 2013. “Perseids Collaborative Platform for Annotating Text Re-usesof Fragmentary Authors.” In DH-Case 2013. Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Collaborative
Annotations in Shared Environments: Metadata, Vocabularies and Techniques in the Digital Humanities,edited by Francesca Tomasi and Fabio Vitali, article no. 7. New York, NY: ACM Digital Library.
doi:10.1145/2517978.2517986.
Almas, Bridget, Monica Berti, Sayeed Choudhury, David Dubin, Megan Senseney, and Karen M. Wickett. 2013.
“Representing Humanities Research Data Using Complementary Provenance Models.” Poster presented
at Building Global Partnerships—RDA Second Plenary Meeting, Washington, DC, September 16–18, 2013.
Berti, Monica. 2012. “Citazioni e dinamiche testuali. L’intertestualità e la storiograa greca frammentaria.” In
Tradizione e Trasmissione degli Storici Greci Frammentari II. Atti del Terzo Workshop Internazionale. Roma, 24–26
febbraio 2011, edited by Virgilio Costa, 439–58. Tivoli: Edizioni Tored. http://www.monicaberti.com/wpcontent/uploads/2014/08/CitazioniDinamicheTestuali.pdf.
———.

2013.

“Collecting

Quotations

byTopic:

DegreesofPreservation

andTranstextual

Relations among Genres.” Ancient Society 43: 269–88. http://poj.peeters-leuven.be/content.php?
url=article&id=2992614&journal_code=AS. doi: 10.2143/AS.43.0.2992614.
Berti, Monica, and Simona Stoyanova. 2014. “Digital Marmor Parium. For a Digital Edition of a Greek
Chronicle.” In Information Technologies for Epigraphy and Cultural Heritage. Proceedings of the First
EAGLE International Conference, edited by Silvia Orlandi, Raaella Santucci, Vittore Casarosa, Pietro
Maria Liuzzo, 319–24. Roma: Sapienza Università Editrice. http://www.eagle-network.eu/wp-content/
uploads/2015/01/Paris-Conference-Proceedings.pdf.
Berti, Monica, Matteo Romanello, Alison Babeu, and Gregory R. Crane. 2009. “Collecting Fragmentary Authors
in a Digital Library.” In JCDL ’09: Proceedings of the 9th ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, 259–
62. New York, NY: ACM Digital Library. doi:10.1145/1555400.1555442.
Blackwell, Christopher, and Gregory R. Crane. 2009. “Conclusion: Cyberinfrastructure, the Scaife
Digital Library and Classics in a Digital Age.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 3(1). http://
www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/3/1/000035/000035.html.
Groth, Paul, Simon Miles, and Steve Munroe. 2006. “Principles of High Quality Documentation for Provenance:
A Philosophical Discussion.” Lectures Notes in Computer Science 4145: 278–86. doi:10.1007/11890850_28.
Most, Glenn W., ed. 1997. Collecting Fragments. Fragmente sammeln. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
Müller, Karl, ed. 1878–85. Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum. 5 vols. Paris: A. F. Didot.
Renear, Allen, David Dubin, and C. M. Sperberg-McQueen. 2002. “Towards a Semantics for XML Markup.”
DocEng ’02: Proceedings of the 2002 ACM Symposium on Document Engineering, 119–26. New York, NY: ACM
Digital Library. doi:10.1145/585058.585081.

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Smith, D. Neel, and Christopher W. Blackwell. 2012. “Four URLs, Limitless Apps: Separation of Concerns in
the Homer Multitext Architecture.” In Donum natalicium digitaliter confectum Gregorio Nagy septuagenario a
discipulis collegis familiaribus oblatum: A Virtual Birthday Gift Presented to Gregory Nagy on Turning Seventy
by His Students, Colleagues, and Friends. Cambridge, MA: Center for Hellenic Studies, Harvard University.
http://chs.harvard.edu/wa/pageR?tn=ArticleWrapper&bdc=12&mn=4846.
Wickett, Karen M., Andrea Thomer, Simone Sacchi, Karen S. Baker, and David Dubin. 2012. “What Dataset
Descriptions Actually Describe: Using the Systematic Assertion Model to Connect Theory and Practice.”
Poster presented at the 2012 ASIS&T Research Data Access and Preservation Summit, New Orleans, March
22–23. http://hdl.handle.net/2142/30470.

NOTES
1

http://www.dh.uni-leipzig.de/wo/projects/open-greek-and-latin-project/the-leipzig-open-

fragmentary-texts-series-lofts/.
2

For a prototype interface, see http://perseids.org/sites/berti_demo/.

3

On this project, see below, section 3.

4

Digital Athenaeus, Universität Leipzig, http://www.dh.uni-leipzig.de/wo/projects/open-greek-

and-latin-project/digital-athenaeus/.
5

Digital Marmor Parium, Universität Leipzig, http://www.dh.uni-leipzig.de/wo/projects/open-

greek-and-latin-project/digital-marmor-parium/.
6

http://perseids.org/.

7

http://www.library.tufts.edu/tisch/ematlocalstorage/miscellany_collection/home.html.

8

http://www.homermultitext.org/.

9

http://www.papyri.info/.

10

http://rubyonrails.org/.

11

http://git-scm.com/.

12

This work was supported by grants from Tufts University, the National Endowment for the

Humanities (grant HD-51548-12), and the Institute from Museum and Library Services. Funding
from the Mellon Foundation is now allowing us to expand the platform to support classroom-based
collaboration on digital editions, beginning-to-end scholarly workows, and the development ofdynamic syllabi using the resources managed by the platform.

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13

For the prototype functionality used by students of the Digital Philology course at the Universityof Leipzig in the fall of 2013, see http://sites.tufts.edu/perseids/workows/fragmentary-authorworkows/fragmentary-text-prototype-fall-2013/.
14

The texts will adhere to the EpiDoc subset of the TEI standard, as discussed further below.

15

Documentation: http://www.homermultitext.org/hmt-doc/cite/index.html.

16“Perseus Stable URIs,” Perseus Digital Library Updates, http://sites.tufts.edu/perseusupdates/

beta-features/perseus-stable-uris/.
17

At the time of this writing, complete implementation of the CTS standard for resolution ofpassage subreferences at the data.perseus.org address is still pending.
18

Open Annotation Data Model, February 8, 2013, http://www.openannotation.org/spec/core/20130208/index.html.
19

http://nlp.perseus.tufts.edu/syntax/treebank/agdt/1.7/data/treebank-1.5.xsd.

20

https://svn.code.sf.net/p/alpheios/code/xml_ctl_les/schemas/trunk/aligned-text.xsd.

21

John Gruber, “Markdown: Syntax,” http://daringreball.net/projects/markdown/syntax.

22

JSON for Linking Data, http://json-ld.org/.

23

PROV-DM: The PROV Data Model, W3C Recommendation, April 30, 2013, http://www.w3.org/

TR/prov-dm/.
24

To substantiate her argument, the scholar must also identify corroborating material, including

instances of Istros’ text in other primary sources—in this example that of Athenaeus, Deipn. 3.6,
who does name Istros as the source.
25

http://perseids.org/sites/berti_demo/index.html(source code athttps://github.com/

PerseusDL/lci-demo).
26

Digital Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum (DFHG) Project, Universität Leipzig, http://

www.dh.uni-leipzig.de/wo/projects/open-greek-and-latin-project/digital-fragmentahistoricorum-graecorum-dfhg-project/.
27

EpiDoc: Epigraphic Documents in TEI XML, http://sourceforge.net/p/epidoc/wiki/Home/.

28

http://www.eagle-network.eu/.

29

http://catalog.perseus.org/.

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30

There is little room or intention in this article to elaborate further on the topic. Let it suce

to say this endeavor has contributed to the new release of the schema (published in February2014) which now allows, among other additions, the following: (1) the @rend attribute of <hi>
can now have "stacked" as a value to encode stacked symbols or characters (such features areoften found in manuscripts); (2) the <anchor> element is no longer omitted. All this has been
explained in version 8.20 of the EpiDoc Guidelines (Tom Elliott, Gabriel Bodard, Elli Mylonas,
Simona Stoyanova, Charlotte Tupman, Scott Vanderbilt, et al., EpiDoc Guidelines: Ancient Documents
in TEI XML, December 4, 2014, http://www.stoa.org/epidoc/gl/latest/).
31

http://www.dh.uni-leipzig.de/wo/projects/open-greek-and-latin-project/digital-marmor-

parium/32

http://pleiades.stoa.org/.

33

http://snapdrgn.net/.

34

http://timeline.knightlab.com/.

35

https://archive.org/details/fragmentahistori01mueluoft.

36

http://www.dh.uni-leipzig.de/wo/projects/open-greek-and-latin-project/.

37

http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt.

38

See, for example, Müller 1878–85, 1:1, frr. 5 and 7; 1:56, fr. 83; 2:29, fr. 2.

39

For example, Κάδμος Ἀρχελάου Μιλήσιος, where we have the name of the author (Κάδμος), thename of the father (Ἀρχελάου), and the ethnicon (Μιλήσιος). Further details on, and matching of,name components will be part of a later, spin-o prosopography project.
40

GeoNames geographical database, http://www.geonames.org/.

41

https://github.com/OpenGreekAndLatin/dfhg-dev/wiki.

42

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/.

ABSTRACTThis paper presents a joint project of the Humboldt Chair of Digital Humanities at the University of Leipzig,
the Perseus Digital Library at Tufts University, and the Harvard Center for Hellenic Studies to produce a new
open series of Greek and Latin fragmentary authors. Such authors are lost and their works are preserved
only thanks to quotations and text reuses in later texts. The project is undertaking two tasks: (1) the
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digitization of paper editions of fragmentary works with links to the source texts from which the fragments
have been extracted; (2) the production of born-digital editions of fragmentary works. The ultimate goals
are the creation of open, linked, machine-actionable texts for the study and advancement of the eld ofClassical textual fragmentary heritage and the development of a collaborative environment for crowdsourced
annotations. These goals are being achieved by implementing the Perseids Platform and by encoding the
Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum, one of the most important and comprehensive collections of fragmentary
authors.

INDEX
Keywords: fragmentary text, digital edition, Classics, CTS, SAM, PROV, EpiDoc

AUTHORSMONICA BERTI
Monica Berti is Assistant Professor at the Humboldt Chair of Digital Humanities at the University of Leipzig,
where she teaches courses on digital philology. Since 2008 she has been working with the Perseus Digital
Library at Tufts University, where she has been visiting professor in the Department of Classics. Her current
research work is focused on representing quotations and text reuses of ancient lost works.
BRIDGET ALMAS
Bridget Almas is the lead software developer for the Perseus Digital Library at Tufts University. She has
been working in software development since 1994, and for Perseus since 2010. She also currently serves as amember of the Technical Advisory Board of the Research Data Alliance.
DAVID DUBINDavid Dubin is a research associate professor at the University of Illinois Graduate School of Library andInformation Science. His research areas are the foundations of information representation and description,and issues of expression and encoding in documents and digital information resources.

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GRETA FRANZINIGreta Franzini completed her Classics BA and Digital Humanities MA degrees at King’s College London. Greta
is currently doing a PhD at the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, where she conducts research in the elds ofClassical Philology, Manuscript Studies and Literary Criticism. She is also currently working as a Researcher at
the Göttingen Centre for Digital Humanities. Previously, she worked as a Research Associate at the Humboldt
Chair of Digital Humanities at the University of Leipzig.
SIMONA STOYANOVA
Simona Stoyanova is a classicist who specializes in epigraphy, and a digital humanist. She works as a research
associate for the Open Philology Project at the University of Leipzig. She is also a PhD candidate in DigitalClassics at King’s College London. Her research is focused on the Greek and Latin epigraphic traditions in themixed-language population of the province of Thrace, with particular interest on palaeographical issues andtheir possible investigation through the DigiPal framework.
GREGORY R. CRANE
Gregory R. Crane is the editor-in-chief of the Perseus Project at Tufts University, where he is professor ofClassics and holds the Winnick Family Chair of Technology and Entrepreneurship. He is also Alexander von
Humboldt Professor of Digital Humanities at the University of Leipzig.

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