A Terabyte of Homer: Managing the Data for the CHS/Marciana Project

Christopher W. Blackwell (Furman University)

The team that went to Venice in May of 2007 photographed three manuscripts of the Iliad, generating 2211 raw digital images. In this talk, I will discuss the management of these images from the moment of their capture through their initial publication on the CHS’s website. Topics will include: the file-naming conventions for the raw images; the process of sharing, storage, and backup in the field; the process of generating useful derivative images from the raw files, and the scholarly decisions behind that process; issues of copyright and licensing; the technology of MD5 checksums that ensure perfect fidelity among duplicate sets of data; and some lessons we learned from our mistakes along the way.

Of particular interest to a general audience may be the challenge of making such a vast amount of digital data available online in a practical and useful way. The second half of this talk will consist of a demonstration of the interfaces to the published images, which combines technology from the Google Maps Application Programming Interface, a Canonical Text Services engine allowing access to images based on citations to the Iliad, and the system of electronic indexing that allows users to move among different views of the same folio, and to page between folios.

The talk will conclude with an invitation for interested parties to contribute to the ongoing project of providing access, through an open-ended set of applications, to this important, freely available data.