The Patristic Text Archive (PTA)

How to build a platform for critical digital editions of ancient Christian texts

Annette von Stockhausen

annette.von_stockhausen@bbaw.de

Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften

8 Aug 2024

The PTA as platform for digital critical editions (and beyond)

The PTA in a nutshell

Publication platform (and tool) for Akademienvorhaben „Die alexandrinische und antiochenische Bibelexegese in der Spätantike“
Also archive for editions (in all languages, Christian texts from antiquity have been transmitted) and translations – also retro digitalised editions
Focus: critical editions (with extensive documentation of the manuscript tradition to be able to evaluate editorial decissions)
Data is open access (CC-BY, CC-BY-SA – some exceptions)
Easy reuse of data (data publication https://github.com/PatristicTextArchive/ + Zenodo; API [cts, git])
Web publication (with several access routes and some tools)
Using Standards: TEI (P5) (adapted Schema), CapiTainS Guidelines (CTS; structure of files/folders), normdata (annotations).

Following the FAIR principles

Findable

for example: machine-readable metadata

Accessible

for example: Website (https://pta.bbaw.de)
for example: API (https://pta.bbaw.de/api)
for example: data repositories (https://github.com/PatristicTextArchive)

Interoperable

linking with other projects (for example: Clavis Clavium, Pleiades Gazetter)
refering to norm data (for example: Diktyon-IDs for Greek manuscripts)
using normalized vocabulary (for example: Dublin Core Metadata Initiative)
using standards (for example: TEI, CapiTainS)

Reusable

Open Access
well documented (edition guidelines and TEI schema, frontend documentation)

Linking with other projects

PTA Linked Open Data

PTA: Data

Texts: https://github.com/PatristicTextArchive/pta_data
Manuscript descriptions: https://github.com/PatristicTextArchive/pta_manuscripts
Metadata: https://github.com/PatristicTextArchive/pta_metadata
Edition guidelines: https://github.com/PatristicTextArchive/Schema

PTA: Web-Interface

Multiple approaches available

authors and works (texts)
manuscript descriptions
indices (biblical and other references, persons, places)
search (fulltext, distance; metadata)

Authors and Works

Manuscripts

Indices

Search

Distance Search

“Reader” interface

(2[4]-column; versioning)

Visualisation of metadata

Visualisation of metadata (sources, identifiers) and recommendations for reuse (citation, permalink, versions, license)

Visualisation of variants

Variant “apparatus”

Visualisation of annotations

Enrichment of annotations (here: biblical references, also: persons, places; using authority files)

Manuscript transcriptions

Embedding of digitized images of manuscripts (via IIIF standard)

Manuscript database

Implementation

Linguistic analysis

Classical Language Dictionary (CLD) for Greek and Latin, using SEDRA API for Syriac

oXygen-Authormode-addon

Screenshot oXygen editor

CollateX - automatic collation of witnesses

Screenshot of CollateX HTML-Output

Technical implementation

https://pta.bbaw.de/project/documentation
programming: Dr. Martin Fechner (backend, API) and Jan Köster (frontend), BBAW

diagram by M. Fechner, adapted by A. v. Stockhausen

Thank you!

Contact

Dr. Annette von Stockhausen

BBAW, Akademienvorhaben „Die alexandrinische und antiochenische Bibelexegese in der Spätantike“