DDbDP improvements

Josh Sosin reports:

I write on behalf of the entire Integrating Digital Papyrology team with 
a few updates.

(1) Since we unveiled the DDbDP's new text-editing platform, well over a 
1000 texts have been entered by the community. Special thanks go to our 
colleagues N. Gonis and his team, A. Benaissa, and P. Heilporn, who 
together have done all of us an enormous favor by entering hundreds of 
texts. But contributions have been made by dozens of colleagues from 
around the world, for which we may all be grateful. I acknowledge here 
too the (completely unremunerated) efforts of the Editorial Board 
members, who painstakingly vet every submission. We have a way to go 
yet, but I think it fair to say that we are now steaming along.

(2) We have now officially started referring proposed emendations to the 
board of Senior Editors, the speed, seriousness, and collegiality of 
whose efforts already are both credit to the collegiality of our field 
and promise of great things to come.

(3) Frequent users of SoSOL will have noted (or soon will) that we have 
taken the first major steps toward bringing the DDbDP's apparatus 
criticus conventions more closely into line with current practice. 
Specifically, you will see that we now offer a slightly more nuanced 
syntax for handling errors and orthographic regulariztion ('orth' has 
been replaced with 'reg [regularization] and 'corr' [correction]; the 
Helpers and Documentation have been updated; all texts in progress will 
be automatically updated so that nothing breaks).

(4) The PN has made a number of great improvements since last we wrote 
to the list. We are grateful for the many good suggestions (and bug 
reports) offered by a good many colleagues, and especially by the 
Trismegistos team and K. Worp. If something doesn't work the way you'd 
like, let us know. We won't/can't address *everything*, but we want to 
hear *anything* that you think would improve searching and browsing.

(5) Finally -- and maybe most exciting -- just yesterday we released (in 
addition to a number of enhancements to both DDbDP and HGV SoSOL 
interfaces) a new line-by-line commentary feature for DDbDP texts. If 
you open a DDbDP text and select the 'Commentary' tab at the top, you 
will be brought to a view of the Greek/Latin text that allows entry of 
notes and commentary, keyed to specific lines or ranges of lines. 
Documentation is not yet available, but I think you will find that the 
interface is pretty intuitive. For now, this allows you simply to enter 
free text. In future, the commentary will support easy linking to DDbDP 
texts, HGV records, APIS records, any of the suite of TM projects, and a 
variety of other useful features, including close interoperation with 
some of the projects under way at TM now. But for now, please feel free 
to test the initial functionality. Do know, however, that this feature 
is *live*; that all such comments will, as of *now*, be submitted to the 
same peer-review process that currently controls DDbDP submissions.

-

(*) The DDbDP remains under co-directorship of James Cowey and Joshua 
Sosin, who together set policy in close consultation with Rodney Ast, 
the newly empaneled Editorial Board, and other colleagues. Day-to-day 
editorial decisions are made democratically by the Editorial Board 
(Rodney Ast, James Cowey, Paul Heilporn, Todd Hickey, Cisca Hoogendijk, 
Joshua Sosin), often in consultation with other colleagues. Under the 
new editorial platform, SoSOL, editorial proposals of special difficulty 
or weight are referred to a board of Senior Editors, who advise the 
Editorial Board on the virtue of the submissions. Senior Editors are: 
Isabella Andorlini, Roger Bagnall, Willy Clarysse, Hélène Cuvigny, 
Nikolaos Gonis, Dieter Hagedorn, Ann Hanson, Andrea Jördens, James 
Keenan, and Klaas Worp. Both panels of editors will rotate on a regular 
(yet to be determined) basis.

Please feel free to direct questions regarding the DDbDP to Rodney Ast 
(ast@uni-heidelberg.de), James Cowey 
(james.cowey@urz.uni-heidelberg.de), and Joshua Sosin 
(joshua.sosin@duke.edu); best to email all three, since inevitably all 
three will discuss.

The current public version is available at: http://papyri.info/