Gregory Crane, editor-in-chief of the Perseus Digital Library, recently said this (p. 11 here):

For a generation we have fretted about whether junior scholars could gain tenure for digital publications. The question rather is how long faculty will be able to get credit for static publications, consisting only of prose and without accompanying machine actionable data.

I am not on the tenure track of course, but I hope to be and would rather not start out behind, which is one of the reasons I signed up for our Digital Humanities class.

In this post, I want to do two things. First, I want to ask what you think about Crane’s statement. He is addressing scholars in the field of Classical studies. Do you think his statement holds in your own field within the humanities? Do you think that there will come a time when publishing machine-actionable data will be required for promotion and tenure, and if so, how soon?

Second, I want to share a bit of my work and how I plan to do some of what Crane suggests: have machine-actionable data to accompany a static publication. Here goes.

As part of a summer institute I attended in 2011, I edited a papyrus letter that a Roman soldier wrote to his family in ancient Egypt, telling them that he would come visit. My edition of the letter is in press, and I just got the proof yesterday. It will be published in the Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists (and later available online).

Once I make corrections to the proof, what I need to do next is convert part of my static publication into machine-actionable data, as Crane says.  I will be converting my Greek text and English translation of the letter. (My static publication also features an introduction and line-by-line commentary, most of which will not be converted into machine-actionable data.)

During the summer institute they showed me how to use Papyri.info. It is a digital humanities research tool that allowed me to prepare my edition of the letter. During the summer institute, they also showed me how to contribute content to the site, so that down the road I would be able to add the published Greek text and English translation of my papyrus to the databank of papyri.

In 2011, when they showed me how to contribute content to the site, I entered some short Greek texts into the databank. Here is the record for one of the shortest ones that I entered (o.abu.mina.330). If you go to the editorial history, you will see where I encoded the Greek text in EpiDoc XML, which they taught me during the summer institute. These are the others that I did: o.abu.mina.337, o.abu.mina.340, o.abu.mina.344, o.abu.mina.361, o.abu.mina.377, p.gen.4.191.

That was a while ago, and I need to ask them, namely Josh Sosin at Duke, to refresh my memory. No doubt there are instructions online that he will point me to. I also note that we will be talking about text encoding in class, so that will be good for me.

After I read up on EpiDoc XML, it will still be challenging for me to encode my Greek text and English translation because they are much longer than the ones I entered into the databank in 2011. Plus, the papyrus that I edited is in really bad shape, so I have lots of editorial symbols to encode for. But I can always get help from others, and there is a review team who will make sure that the text and translation are entered correctly.

This is what the record for my papyrus (p.tept.2.583) looks like now. There is already a basic record of it in the databank, even though the letter had not been translated and prepared for publication yet. Now that I have done that, I need to update the electronic record. Currently its usefulness is limited. Once I add my Greek text and English translation, then other researchers will be able to benefit from my work in the same way that I benefited from previous work in the databank. For instance, they will be able to search for the word “furlough,” and the Greek text of my papyrus will come up along with any other papyri that mention military leave.

I could not have edited the letter without using Papyri.info, and I look forward to contributing to it.