The following press release reached me on the CLASSICS-L list:
Ten years ago today, a private American collector purchased the Archimedes Palimpsest. Since that time he has guided and funded the project to conserve, image, and study the manuscript. After ten years of work, involving the expertise and goodwill of an extraordinary number of people working around the world, the Archimedes Palimpsest Project has released its data. It is a historic dataset, revealing new texts from the ancient world. It is an integrated product, weaving registered images in many wavebands of light with XML transcriptions of the Archimedes and Hyperides texts that are spatially mapped to those images. It has pushed boundaries for the imaging of documents, and relied almost exclusively on current international standards. We hope that this dataset will be a persistent digital resource for the decades to come. We also hope it will be helpful as an example for others who are conducting similar work. It published under a Creative Commons 3.0 attribution license, to ensure ease of access and the potential for widespread use. A complete facsimile of the revealed palimpsested texts is available on Googlebooks as ³The Archimedes Palimpsest². It is hoped that this is the first of many uses to which the data will be put.
For information on the Archimedes Palimpsest Project, please visit:
For the dataset, please visit:
Now I approve really strongly of this. Consider how many projects exist to create a locked-in architecture, a prestige website, but NOT to make the data — transcription data in this case, in XML — available to the online community. I recently posted about the St. Gall project — and how, worthwhile as it is, they hadn’t made the manuscripts available as PDF’s, but had chosen a proprietary and very slow browser which obstructed access.
It reminded me of the Oxford manuscripts site, which had a slow and clunky browser. But since it was all in JPG’s, I wrapped a perl script around them when I needed to use images of one manuscript as part of a translation project. The images remained on their site; I just devised a better access method. That script still gets a lot of links; and I offered it back to the Oxford site if they wanted it. Everyone benefitted from the open technology.
The Archimedes announcement is a contrast to some of the recent projects. Archimedes are not even supplying a browser. They’re making the raw data available, and let he that wants devise whatever presentation layer he wants. Marvellous! I do hope that some seriously creative solutions are devised, to leverage this data set and produce something that no conventional delivery would ever have thought of.
Come on, the St. Gall project is ok! They provide the original JPGs free to download, as does the Archimedes site. This is at least better than the Sinaiticus website where you cannot even download any images!
Hey, I think the St. Gall project is more than OK — it’s great! Full marks to them, and long may they flourish! But the general ethos of the Archimedes people is yet a step further in the right direction.