Technical thinking

The Greek Anthology project

Collaborative edition and translation of the Greek Anthology anthologiagraeca.org containing:

greek text in multiple editions
translations
scholia
alignment with the manuscript
authors, keywords, places, comments, references…

Goals:

a hub for the Greek Anthology
present the Anthology to a wide audience (beyond the scholars)

I will present some theoretical considerations and reflections that have emerged from the Greek Anthology project that I have been leading for some eight years. The project proposes a collaborative edition of the Palatine anthology. I will not dwell on describing this very famous corpus: a collection of about 4000 epigrams, composed around the tenth century and which has as sources the very first anthologies of classical epigrams, like the Garland of Meleager.

The project has two purposes:

To be a hub offering a large amount of information about the anthological corpus.
to present and valorize the anthology for a wide audience, not limited to academics and scholars.

It is in fact a corpus that has a fundamental impact in our Western cultures and continues to resonate in our literary and cultural imagination

The Greek Anthology project

Many actors:

Elsa Bouchard
Christian Raschle
Servanne Monjour
Annalisa Divincenzo
Margot Mellet
Mathilde Verstraete
Luiz Capelo
many other students…

Arthur Juchereau
Tim Guicherd
David Larlet
Sara Rubio
Perseus
Perseids
Library of Heidelberg
Liceo Classico Cagnazzi (Altamura)

Where do our research projects come from?

Who thinks?

Hypothesis

far from being the fruit of a single researcher, thinking is the result of a complex a set of elements that includes technical environments, protocols, formats, algorithms, data structures…

Once upon a time there was a project…

how to propose a digital editorial model capable of embodying a literary corpus such as the Greek Anthology?
- spip
- API
- Restructuring data
- New platform (django)

To demonstrate this hypothesis I will tell you the history of our project, how it was born and how it has grown to its actual form.

It’s still a work in progress, so I’ll give you an overview of an intermediate state that is still evolving.

The initial question came to me when I noticed that there was a lot of information about the Greek Anthology online, scattered around but difficult to access. It seemed to me that the digital environment could be the ideal place to valorize and disseminate the anthological corpus

The principle of an anthology is indeed based on the gathering of scattered and representative fragments of a culture according to a network of meaning and imagination that appeals to the recurrence of themes (what we call topoi). This principle is actually very close to the characteristics of structuring and circulation of content on the Web. As Milad Doueihi puts it in its “Digital culture”, our digital cultur is eminently anthological. (Doueihi 2011, 163).

The pilot project therefore explored the possibilities of editing such a corpus in a digital environment in order to highlight the multiplicity of readings, the network of topoi, and the enrichment of epigrams by a set of metadata.

Since the initial objective was not primarily academic, but rather to disseminate and promote the Anthology to a wide audience, the project structure deviated from the standards of digital scholarly publishing (XML for example, the will of establishing the text…) and led us to imagine a new editorial model.

The first version was a simple website generated with the Spip content management system, set up by Marcello Vitali-Rosati.

Spip is a French CMS, developed in the 90’s for academic publishing, and especially designed for journals publication.

The first data model, which I developped within Spip, was then used to specify the needs and above all to define the project, its research issues, its approaches and its methods.

The data structure was therefore initially defined from the constraints and design of a particular technological environment - which had been chosen somewhat at random, because of my comfort in handling it.

This observation is fundamental: the implementation of an editorial strategy, the definition of a singular conception of the text, as well as that of an epistemological and hermeneutic model for reading and interpreting it, requires the implementation of tools and environments for reading and writing. As such, there is no theory of text without manipulation of text.

The original Spip was used to define the first API, designed by Arthur Juchereau. And successively, this API allowed us to evolve the editorial model and to refine our interpretation of the meaning of text in order to develop other reading and writing environments. Throughout this process, our team progressively acquired the technical skills that were essential to follow the developments of the project, but also its epistemological and hermeneutical stakes.

In 2014, Arthur first had to explain to us what an API is in concrete terms. We had previously had a rough understanding of it. The possibility of querying the text in a standardized way from several platforms proved to be a major asset: the design of the data model was carried out in a progressive way, adding the fields that were necessary as we went along.

From that moment on our practices changed: we started to manipulate the data, using javascript or python, and it is by doing so that we gradually refined our understanding of the anthology. Our theoretical models were born from the technical environment and the change in our skills and digital practices.

What is an epigram?

an abstract entity which has
- texts
- keywords
- manuscript’s images
- author(s)
- scholia
- …

The first question that the manipulation of the data forced us to ask ourselves was: what is an epigram? Associeted with an epigram there were Greek texts - several established texts - translations of these texts, images of the codex palatinus 23, scholies, keywords in several languages… The epigram could not therefore be a text. The epigram had to have texts.

The epigram had to be an abstract entity which had several things: texts in several languages, keywords, authors. etc.

This was also in line with our wish to make an edition for a large public: it was not a question of searching for the truth of the text, but rather of highlighting all the resonances of the anthological topoi.

After the development of the first api, we were able to set up several collaborations: several editors (not only academic, but also amateur, like high school students) started to fill in information: adding texts, translations (existing or original), comments, notes, keywords…

We continued to manipulate this data to visualize and disseminate it: a tweetbot, a site where you could see the epigrams on a map etc.

This programming activity had several effects: a) an increase in computer skills; b) a better understanding of the model and its limitations (what was missing from our data) c) a better knowledge of the data we had produced; and d) a finer analysis of the needs that would have been the basis for the development of a new data model and a new platform (the current one).

Data manipulation and evolution of epistemological models

alignments (wikidata, tlg…)
authority and collaboration
algorithms to define literary concepts (variatio)

So we started to manipulate the data for research purposes in particular with a large use of Jupyter Notebooks: they allowed us to accurately display the data, to understand the structures and relationships of our model, and to raise major epistemological and methodological questions, sometimes from a data item that was an exception.

The need to disambiguate certain data led us, in addition, to use Jupyter Notebooks to explore other databases and thus try to align our objects with unique identifiers. This is the work we did on the authors: we first retrieved the TLG identifiers of the authors from the XML version of Perseus. From the TLG identifier, we were able to search for the corresponding Wikidata identifiers (when Wikidata presented the TLG identifier and when the author existed in the Wikidata database). We then aligned the authors in our database with the TLGs and the Wikidata identifiers. The work was partly done with algorithms and then verified by hand.

A recent evolution of the project consists in developing algorithms to try to better understand the notoin of variation. We mostly experiment with word embedding approches. The idea is not to find epigrams that are variations of other epigrams, because we already know the variations in the anthology. It is rather to see if an algorithm that manages to find the variations we want can be considered a formal definition of the concept of variation itself

Technique thinks

The intentions and the epistemological models of a research are established and constantly redefined by:

formats
data structure
protocols
algorithms
infrastructures
collaboration
…

Technical thinking

The Greek Anthology project

The Greek Anthology project

Where do our research projects come from?

Once upon a time there was a project…

What is an epigram?

Data manipulation and evolution of epistemological models

Technique thinks

Thank you!