Adding missing texts to Perseus

[SuperCowProducts]

I'd love to help make the Perseus Catalogue more complete: at the moment I'm aggregating missing texts (such as Menander, of whom I found a high-quality text here: https://archive.org/details/menanderprincip00menagoog/page/308/mode/2up?ref=ol).

This is only for personal use though, and I thought it would be great to centralise more texts into a single 'system' like the Perseus Hopper (and perhaps help with XML encoding), it being a collaborative project.

Hope this makes sense, and thank you for taking the time to respond ;)

Update

For some reason not even the Scaife Viewer, which to my knowledge already aggregates content from many sources (as specified here: https://www.opengreekandlatin.org/), seems to have Menander (the comedy playwright): https://scaife.perseus.org/library/

[AlisonBabeu]

hi @SuperCowProducts Thank you for your interest in contributing to the Perseus Catalog.

While the Greek text of Menander's plays can be found in the Catalog here (https://catalog.perseus.org/catalog/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0541), you are quite right that we never added records for English translations. The Greek text has also never been added to either Perseus (P4-which cannot be updated) or to the Scaife Viewer for the time being. This is largely because at the time Scaife was being most actively updated by Open Greek and Latin there was less focus being paid to adding fragmentary works or authors with such complicated fragmentary corpora.

One other reason we did not include such detailed level metadata for the English translations of Menander's comedies in the catalog is the sheer volume and the lack of standard identifiers for many of the identified works. There are over 67 fragmentary plays identified on the Loeb page you link to, plus the text of 18 other fragments from the Comicorum Atticorum Fragmenta, not to mention the text of the four main plays in this Loeb edition. While some of these have standard canonical identifiers within the TLG identifier system we have used to identify works as part of the canonical text system of identifiers (there are currently about 34 individual plays identified as well as six fragmentary entries in the TLG canon), the large majority do not. We have largely followed the practice of not creating new identifiers for works.

The Loeb edition that you cite and links to the translations of the works of Menander would be an excellent addition the the Perseus catalog metadata at some point. Unfortunately the catalog website and interface that is online can no longer be updated. We have long hoped to create a new interface/access to the catalog data and allow other contributions to expand it but that is a project that neither time or funding have allowed.

[SuperCowProducts]

Thanks for the clarification; so for the most complete/updated selection I should check the Perseus catalog?

[AlisonBabeu]

hi @SuperCowProducts. We have actually continued creating catalog metadata since the last update to the catalog in 2016 but it has largely for been new editions/translations going into the Scaife viewer and other related projects (and is stored in a series of XML files)

This metadata is not viewable in the online interface at the Perseus Catalog because we are no longer able to update that. If you are curious we've written in more detail about the last update in 2016 and future plans (granted these were future plans seven years ago) but it does explain a bit about metadata changes since the first data was created from 2006 to 2012 or so.

[SuperCowProducts]

Hello, you were saying "We have long hoped to create a new interface/access to the catalog data and allow other contributions to expand it but that is a project that neither time or funding have allowed.".

Quite frankly, I'd be happy to open a repo of my own to allow collaborative additions / modifications of the Perseus Catalog's current data.

This poses some questions:

1. Has someone already tried something similar (and therefore it would be best to contribute to that project rather than start from scratch)?
2. Would a pull request be okay for this? (If so, which repo hosts the complete data for Perseus)

P.S. thank you so much for supporting my ideas ;>

[juliajbeine]

Reading mentions of Menander, I once encoded the “Dyskolos” with my students for DraCor. Maybe the file could be of interest to you, @AlisonBabeu : https://github.com/dracor-org/greekdracor/blob/main/tei/menander-dyskolos.xml.

[AlisonBabeu]

Reading mentions of Menander, I once encoded the “Dyskolos” with my students for DraCor. Maybe the file could be of interest to you, @AlisonBabeu : https://github.com/dracor-org/greekdracor/blob/main/tei/menander-dyskolos.xml.

hi @juliajbeine thank you and apologies for my delay. This could indeed be an excellent addition.

[AlisonBabeu]

Hello, you were saying "We have long hoped to create a new interface/access to the catalog data and allow other contributions to expand it but that is a project that neither time or funding have allowed.".

Quite frankly, I'd be happy to open a repo of my own to allow collaborative additions / modifications of the Perseus Catalog's current data.

This poses some questions:

1. Has someone already tried something similar (and therefore it would be best to contribute to that project rather than start from scratch)?

2. Would a pull request be okay for this? (If so, which repo hosts the _complete_ data for Perseus)

P.S. thank you so much for supporting my ideas ;>

hi @SuperCowProducts I apologize for the delay in responding. So to try and answer your questions:

1. There are some different excellent open access projects out there that offer catalogs to Ancient works and Authors, but as far as I know the Perseus Catalog was the only one that focused on both Latin and Greek authors. I also don't know if these other projects are looking for data or metadata contributions. Some projects include:

• Digital Latin Library's Catalog
• digilibLT-Digital Library of Late-antique Latin Texts
• Linked Ancient Greek and Latin Catalog
• Trismegistos Authors

2. The following repository contains metadata for the Perseus Catalog (https://github.com/PerseusDL/catalog_data)
   This, however, is pretty much a static repository at this point as described in the article I linked to above. Any new metadata that has been created is created in a much more limited and different format (new authority records for authors are still created in the same way) and then expression/work level data and added to two large XML files (that grow ever larger). There is still data in a lot of the expression level records (namely page level data and URL's we would like to pull out and aggregate at some point) but this is not an active research goal at this point in time.