Archimedes Palimpsest Digital Release Changes Document

Authors: Mike Toth
Doug Emery
Date: October 31, 2011

Contents

1 Rights and conditions of use

The Archimedes Palimpsest data is released with license for use under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Access Rights. It is requested that copies of any published articles based on the information in this data set be sent to The Curator of Manuscripts, The Walters Art Museum, 600 North Charles Street, Baltimore MD 21201.

2 Introduction

This document is a list of changes and additions made to the Archimedes Palimpsest data set since its initial release on October 29, 2008. It describes changes as of October 2011. Some changes are corrections to mistakes in core data and metadata. Other changes reflect new information and new data that were not available in 2008. Each change is described here. This document supplements the original 2008 ReadMe file, which is in the same directory as this document..

3 Palimpsest text content changes

Since 2008, scholars have learned more about the non-Archimedes content of the palimpsest. New texts have been identified, and misattributions of some of the texts have been discovered. This has led to changes to the abbreviations for the textual content of the underlying manuscripts. These changes are used in the Archimedes Palimpsest print catalog (Reviel Netz, William Noel, Natalie Tchernetska, Nigel Wilson, eds. The Archimedes Palimpsest. 2 vols. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

Detailed information about these changes has been added to the Folio Index document in the Internal Documents folder of the data set.

4 File name changes

Two image files were misnamed in the 2008 release of the data. The original, incorrect file names were:

The new, corrected file names are:

5 Text transcription update

The digitized transcriptions of the Archimedes and Hyperides texts have been updated substantially since 2008. Additionally, a TEI version of the transcription of the philosophical commentary, which was not available in 2008, has been added to the data set as a full-length transcription and as spatially mapped folio-length transcriptions in the Commentary folio image directories. Text file versions of the spatial mappings are also provided in the Supplemental directory.

These new and updated transcriptions incorporate new readings and corrections and employ a different type of markup for the physical and intellectual divisions of the text. This last change is the most significant for automated uses of the TEI. Whereas the 2008 versions of the transcriptions used containing elements for text divisions, such as <seg>...</seg> to mark lines, the 2011 version instead uses "milestone" tags, like <lb/> and <milestone/>, to mark physical and intellectual divisions in the text. A complete description of the encoding practices used in this project is provided in the "TEI Encoding" document in the Internal Documentation folder of this archive.

6 Table of contents file

As of October 2011, an XML table of contents file contents.xml has been added to the Archimedes Palimpsest data set. The contents file is in the Data directory. It provides machine readable identification of the files in each folder, and folio-by-folio identification of the palimpsest texts. It can be validated using the XML schema definition file (XSD) archie_manifest_1_0.xsd, which can be found in the Data/schema directory.

7 Contributed Research additions

This document does not describe additional research materials added to the data set's Contributed Research directory (ResearchContrib). For information on data found in that directory, please see the Read Me files in that directory.

Note that new additions to the Contributed Research directory should be accompanied by a dated Read Me file that describes the new content. New additions to the data set should conform to the archival standards set for the rest of the data set. In particular, we ask that new image files be in TIFF or PNG formats and that text documents be in text or PDF formats (that is, not in proprietary word processor, spreadsheet, or presentation formats).