Duke Databank of Documentary Papyri (DDBDP)

Sometimes abbreviated as DDB

The Duke Data Bank of Documentary Papyri (DDBDP) is an electronic corpus of published Greek and Latin documents written on papyrus, ostraca, or wooden tablets. The project began in in 1982 as a collaboration between Professors William H. Willis and John F. Oates, both of Duke University, and Dr. David R. Packard. The David and Lucile Packard Foundation and the Packard Humanities Institute (PHI) funded the project from its inception through 1996; the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) provided additional financial support. Duke University’s Perkins Library and Special Collections Library (now Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library) has offered invaluable material support since the project’s birth, and continues to do so.

In 1996/7 the DDBDP migrated its authoritative version from the PHI CD to the web-based Perseus Project (now Perseus Digital Library), from beta-code to SGML. For the next decade the DDBDP was funded as part of the Advanced Papyrological Information System (APIS), supported by the NEH, with technical support generously provided by Perseus.

In 2004/5 the DDBDP and Heidelberger Gesamtverzeichnis der griechischen Papyrusurkunden Ägyptens (HGV) commenced mapping their two largely overlapping data-sets--Greek texts and descriptive metadata, respectively--to each other. Concurrent with these discussions, a collaboration between DDBDP leadership and the Duke University Libraries obtained a planning grant from the Scholarly Communications Division of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, "Planning the Future of the Duke Databank of Documentary Papyri, 2005"). Papyrologists, information technology specialists, and librarians and administrators concerned with issues surrounding sustainability came together to map out a sustainable future for the DDBDP. The way forward was clear: open source, standards-based development, greater collaboration, increased vesting of data-control in the user community, greater interoperability with other projects.

In the Summer of 2006 the founding leader of the DDBDP, John Oates, passed away and James Cowey, of the HGV, joined Joshua D. Sosin as Co-Director of the DDBDP.

With a clear set of objectives in mind, Duke University (again a collaboration between the DDBDP and Duke University Libraries) obtained generous funding from the Scholarly Communications Division of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, for a project entitled “Integrating Digital Papyrology” (2007/8). Its goals were to migrate the DDBDP from idiosyncratic SGML to the internationally recognized EpiDoc standard of TEI XML mark-up, and from betacode Greek to Unicode Greek; to merge the fully mapped DDBDP texts and HGV metadata and translations in a single XML stream; to map these texts to corresponding APIS records, including metadata and images, where they exist; to enhance the Papyrological Navigator (see further on the Papyrological Navigator) in order to enable searching of the newly merged and fully mapped dataset. Work was conducted by teams at the Institut für Papyrologie, Universität Heidelberg; Centre for Computing in the Humanities (CCH), King’s College London; Columbia University Libraries; Carolina Digital Library and Archives, University of North Carolina, CH; the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW), New York University. The fruits of these efforts were released under open access provisions in October 2008 (all content under CC BY and software under GNU GPL). A lightly redacted version of the proposal funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation can be read here: IDP1. A final report will be made available here.

In October 2008 a two-year initiative was launched, again under generous support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation: “Integrating Digital Papyrology 2.” A team comprising scholars and programmers from Duke University, the University of Kentucky’s Center for Visualization and Virtual Environments (Vis Center), ISAW, Heidelberg, CCH, UNC-CH, will among other tasks (1) improve usability of the PN search interface on the merged and mapped data from the DDBDP, HGV, and APIS, (2) facilitate third-party use of the data and tools, (3) and create a version controlled, transparent and fully audited, multi-author, web-based, real-time, tagless, editing environment, which—in tandem with a new editorial infrastructure—will allow the entire community of papyrologists to take control of the process of populating these communal assets with data. A lightly redacted version of the proposal funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation can be read here: IDP2.

The current public version is available via the PapyrologicalNavigator (papyri.info).