CREATING CTS COLLECTIONS

The Classical Text Services protocol [CTS] provides the means for coordinating and integrating XML-
encoded documents on a single subject. Collaborative
efforts among the Stoa Consortium and the Collaboratory
for Research in Computing for Humanities at the
University of Kentucky and Harvard’s Center for Hellenic
Studies have led to the development of several
projects that seek to take advantage of CTS to provide
comprehensive access to classical literary collections. Among these projects, some focus only on the textual aspects of the source materials, and the project content consists only of XML files (encoded according to the TEI Guidelines). Other projects are more elaborate and seek to link source texts to the physical artifacts which contain them, and these projects consist of TEI-XML files and digital image files.
CTS provides the means for organizing, referencing, and querying classical texts. Developed by classicists Chris Blackwell (Furman University) and Neel Smith (College of the Holy Cross), the aim of the Classical Text Services
protocol is to define a network service enabling use of a distributed collection of texts according to notions
that are traditional among classicists. The CTS adopts and extends the hierarchical scheme of bibliographic
entities defined by the OCLC’s and IFLA’s Functional
Requirements for Bibliographic Records, or FRBR [http://www.oclc.org/research/projects/frbr/default.htm].
FRBR describes bibliographic records in terms of a
hierarchy of Works, each of which is realized through one or more Expressions, realized in turn through one or more Manifestations, realized through one or more Items. CTS implements this hierarchy using the traditional terms
Work, Edition or Translation, and Exemplar, while
extending the hierarchy upwards, grouping Works under
a notional entity called “TextGroup’” (corresponding to authors, in the case of literary texts, or any other traditional
and useful corpus, such as “Attica” for inscriptions, or “Berlin” for a published corpus of papyri). CTS also
extends FRBR’s hierarchy downwards, allowing
identification and abstraction of citeable chunks of text (Homer, Iliad Book 1, Line 123), or ranges of citeable
chunks (Hom.~ Il. 1.123-2.22). The CTS protocol
allows sharing of information about texts at any level of the conceptual hierarchy, and allows retrieval of sections
of an identified text at any hierarchical level supported by its scheme of citation.
In this session, we will describe the Classical Text
Services protocol and explain how editors can use it to organize and query texts. We will also explain how we use CTS in one text-focused project, the Neo-Latin
Colloquia project, and how we are expanding the CTS for use in the image-based Venetus A project. We
end our session with a demonstration of the CTS
Implementation Tool (CTS-IT), and introduce the
prototype of the Network Tool for Collaborative Electronic
Editing over the Internet (NeT-CEE), a tool that builds on CTS to provide support for large-scale editing
projects requiring the special talents of geographically distributed individuals.