Lead White in Context Across Greco-Roman Sources: The First TheSu XML Annotation Dataset of Arguments and Recipes, with Graph Visualisations and Discussion of their Design

This paper presents the first public dataset encoded with TheSu XML, a stand-off annotation schema for modelling ideas conveyed by textual sources and for linking those ideas to their surrounding discourse contexts, designed for research in the history of ideas, philosophy, and science. The dataset is designed as a reference implementation of the TheSu XML schema, and demonstrates its core features through annotations of Greco-Roman sources discussing lead white (ψιμύθιον/cerussa). These texts provide appropriate test cases for the schema’s handling of both philosophical arguments and technical procedures. The repository contains annotations for four ancient Greek texts (from Plato, Theophrastus, Dioscorides, Plutarch) and two modern scientific studies, accompanied by graphs automatically generated from the data and visualised using Graphviz and Gephi. In creating the dataset, the author relied on close reading to capture in the annotations both explicit content and implicit reasoning. This interpretative process mirrors established practices in history and philology. A custom Python pipeline was used to transform the annotations into both detailed argumentation maps and broader network graphs. The paper explains the rationale for this dual visualisation strategy: hierarchical trees support close analysis of individual arguments and statements’ micro-contexts, and network graphs arranged through force-directed layouts facilitate discovery of patterns across sources. The results section showcases the method through a series of case studies, including visualisations of individual arguments, discourse comparisons across sources, and detailed breakdowns of lead white recipes, alone and compared to each other. This methodological framework has direct applications for the historical study of philosophical and scientific discourse, as well as of technological transmission.