Proteus: Capturing the Big Data Problem of Ancient Literary Fragments

The hugely successful Ancient Lives website, a crowd-sourced collaborative online project dealing with the archive of Greek papyri from Oxyrhynchus, which has had tremendous public impact over the past two years, has generated a massive database - over 1.5 million transcriptions of the Oxyrhynchus papyri (over 7 million characters), the work of over 250,00 online collaborators. These include literary, sub-literary and documentary texts. To handle this mass of data with maximum efficiency we now propose to build Proteus, a system comprising of both an innovative digital editing and research tool for scholars working on unpublished papyri and a larger web portal devoted to literary and subliterary fragments (sub-classified for history, biography, and so on). We aim to produce a single on-screen interface to enable comparison between original and edited versions of literary and subliterary texts, and establish an online system that facilitates collaboration between scholars in the editorial process. Proteus' editing tool will change the way papyrologists and editors work, while its web portal, accessible to the world, will both instigate further research and provide an intelligent means of interfacing the conjectures and variant readings that these fragments generate as they are re-edited over time. Whilst constructing this tool, we will also produce a critical edition of Servius' commentary on Vergil Aeneid VI, serving as a prototype for subsequent digital critical editions of his commentary on other books of the epic. This prototype will offer a framework for creating digital editions of ancient commentaries in general, whose complex formatting require innovative ways of digital reading, something beyond the codex experience. Given the biographical and historical nature of many of the texts generated, we will also take the opportunity to update a seminal reference work devoted to fragmentary evidence: the Die Fragmente der Griechischen Historiker Continued. Part IV: Biography and Antiquarian Literature.

The project will thus have five main outputs:
1) The Proteus digital editing tool, through which scholars assigned to work on Oxyrhynchus papyri will edit their fragments and make them ready for print and digital publication.
2) The Proteus digital portal for searching literary and subliterary fragments and the collaborative re-editing of texts. We intend to immediately populate our site with 1,700 unpublished Bodleian papyri, 300 Antinoopolis papyri, and select unpublished Sackler papyri including Homer's Iliad and Homerica, Herodotus and the Septuagint.
3) The digital Servius environment: a prototype interface for digitally researching and creating digital editions of ancient commentaries. Servius' commentaries on Virgil's Aeneid book VI will become accessible online in the first instance.
4) The imaging of hundreds of thousands more unstudied papyri from our archive for processing in Ancient Lives and Proteus.
5) Immediate updating of Die Fragmente der Griechischen Historiker Continued. Part IV: Biography and Antiquarian Literature with new fragments.

Our project will reach a wide-ranging audience, from school children to professional scholars. It is a digital environment designed to engage both traditional and non-traditional research communities. Its original point of interface, Ancient Lives, is a place where original documents, previously confined to the eyes of experts, are made available to the public through the use of a web interface: interested users go online, browse and access fragments of their choice, and contribute to the project by entering transcriptions, measurements and other information by means of online tools. The resulting data, collated and refined by algorithmic intelligence, will greatly contribute to our knowledge of the Graeco-Roman world.
In capitalizing on our unique and massive database of unedited and unpublished Greek languages texts, we intend now to provide even greater open access to project output. The flow of data through Proteus represents a change in the very methodology of classical philology and papyrology. Scholars from anywhere in the world will be able to edit fragments with the assistance of intelligent linguistic data mining algorithms. This merging of human and machine intelligence is designed to speed up the process of analysis, while at the same time ensuring accuracy is retained. Moreover, Proteus' research and re-editing environment will offer global access to project output, a virtual place where any interested party can access and work with our data. With fragment numbers in excess of one million, and the subsequent data they generate, Proteus will never be static, but continually evolving and changing over time. Better still, for the hundreds of thousands of volunteers that have entered transcriptions on the Ancient Lives site, Proteus will also be the place where they can see the results of their work and even engage further, alongside the scholarly community, in its collaborative re-editing environment.