An Open Source Paradigm for Classics:
The Canonical Text Services

Christopher Blackwell

Furman University

Classicists have grown accustomed to using digital libraries, with their ability to offer speedy access to a wide variety of texts and translation, lexical and morphological tools, and other kinds of data indexed to the texts. But existing models of digital libraries have a few shortcomings: they require complex software and hardware and considerable full-time expertise to keep them running. Access to their contents is often limited to a pre-defined interface, which may be useful for reading and browsing but less useful for other purposes. And their contents are, inevitably, someone else's selection. Another model, a complement to existing digital libraries, would allow the content of a library to be distributed across a large number of simple servers, requiring only basic hardware and only moderate technological expertise. It would present raw data in a generic way, allowing a variety of modes of interaction, both by human readers and by machines, which might turn that raw data to other purposes.

The Canonical Text Services Protocol brings together texts, translations, and indices, by means of very simple technology. Anyone with a desktop computer connected to the internet can publish texts or information about texts and have those texts included in a distributed digital library. The CTS is a part of the TICI Stack (an acronym for Texts, Images, Collections, and Indices), which expands networked services beyond texts alone.

This presentation will demonstrate how a reader in Memphis can, through a web-page served from Washington, DC, find and read a text or translation of Plato's Ion in South Carolina, focusing on quotations from Homer in that text, courtesy of an index in Massachusetts, and then read those Homeric passages in texts residing in both Washintgon and Kentucky; also demonstrated will be reading a text of Livy, first choosing to have the text linked to morphological and lexical tools, and then linked to the Google Maps service. Finally, this presentation will show how TICI allows scholars easily to expose images and their metadata, and how users can build web-based, portable slideshows by editing a simple text file.