The Duke Collaboratory for Classics Computing (DC3) is pleased to announce the Harpokration On Line project, which aims to provide open-licensed collaboratively-sourced translation(s) for Harpokration’s “Lexicon of the Ten Orators”.
Users can view and contribute translations at http://dcthree.github.io/harpokration/ or download the project data from GitHub. Detailed instructions for contributing translations can also be found in the announcement blog post.
The project (and name) draw inspiration from the Stoa-hosted Suda On Line project.
The code used to run the project is openly available at https://github.com/dcthree/harpokration. The project also leverages the existing CTS/CITE architecture. This architecture, pioneered for other Digital Classics projects, allows us to build on well-developed concepts for organizing texts and translations—concepts which are transformable to other standards such as OAC and RDF. Driving a translation project using CITE annotations against passages of a “canonical” CTS text seemed a natural fit. Using Google Fusion Tables, Google authentication, and client-side JavaScript for the core of our current implementation has also allowed us to rapidly develop relatively lightweight mechanisms for contributing, using freely-available hosting and tools (GitHub Pages, Google App Engine) for the initial phases of the project.
The DC3 is excited to see where this project leads, and hopes to also lead by example in publishing this project using open tools under an open license, with openly-licensed contributions.
