Abstract
The Homer Multitext project (hmt) is documenting the language and structure of Greek epic poetry, and the ancient tradition of commentary on it. The project’s primary data consist of editions of Greek texts; automated and manually created readings analyze the texts across historical and thematic axes. This paper describes an abstract model we follow in documenting an open-ended body of diverse analyses. The analyses apply to passages of texts at different levels of granularity; they may refer to overlapping or mutually exclusive passages of text; and they may apply to non-contiguous passages of text. All are recorded in with explicit, concise, machine-actionable canonical citation of both text passage and analysis in a scheme aligning all analyses to a common notional text. We cite our texts with urns that capture a passage’s position in an Ordered Hierarchy of Citation Objects (ohco2). Analyses are modeled as data-objects with five properties.
We create collections of ‘analytical objects’, each uniquely identified by its own urn and each aligned to a particular edition of a text by a urn citation. We can view these analytical objects as an extension of the edition’s citation hierarchy; since they are explicitly ordered by their alignment with the edition they analyze, each collection of analyses meets satisfies the (ohco2) model of a citable text. We call these texts that are derived from and aligned to an edition ‘analytical exemplars’.