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Update April 2009
Online access to the Duke Databank of Documentary
Papyri, and to many other papyrological resources, is now best made
through http://www.papyri.info
Please find below information from Dr Neil O'Sullivan regarding
accessing and using PHI. Either click on the links in the menu
below for specific sections, or scroll down through the page to
review all of the information provided.
Introduction
Using PHI
Accessing the PHI Databases
Results and Links to Perseus
Unicode Greek
Neil O'Sullivan, 29 March 2007
Introduction
Just as in recent years the Greek literary texts of the Thesaurus
Linguae Graecae (TLG) have become accessed much more conveniently
through the internet than through the medium of CD-ROM, so other
corpora originally published on disk are now available on the
web. The Packard Humanities Institute (PHI) put out series of
CD-ROMs containing various collections of Latin and Greek texts,
including the entire corpus of pre-Christian Latin literature (a
complete list online at
http://www.indiana.edu/~letrs/text-tools/textlists/phibibliog.html),
the immense Duke Data Bank of Documentary Papyri and a vast
collection of Greek (and some late Latin) epigraphy collected by
the Greek Epigraphy Project at Cornell and others (for a list of
contents see http://132.236.125.30/content.html).
Various Biblical texts, along with English and Latin works by
John Milton, were also included on these disks.
Of the three most important parts of the material, two (Greek
inscriptions and documentary papyri) are now freely available in
superior (i.e. updated) versions on the web, and it is
recommended that these be used rather than the original material
on the PHI disks. (The original versions do, however, remain
available via the method outlined below.)
Greek inscriptions: http://epigraphy.packhum.org/
At the time of writing, the site describes itself as a
‘beta version’ and is very poorly documented, but it
does contain material not on the original disks and use seems
fairly straightforward. For correct display of Greek letters you
should make sure that your browser is Unicode compliant.
Documentary papyri: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/Texts/papyri.html
The site is fully documented and has helpful technical
information.
The collection of Classical Latin texts, however, remains
superior to anything available on the web, and it is basically to
ensure continued access to this that the PHI material is being
maintained at a local level. The contents of the PHI CD-ROM has
been downloaded to the hard drive of a shared computer, #23 in
Arts 1.54, and the software used to access it is Diogenes,
developed and made freely avavailable by P.J. Heslin of the
University of Durham. Our thanks go to Faculty Computing for
their expertise and hard work in setting up this new arrangement.
Using PHI
The computer lab Arts room 1.54 is normally secured, but you
should be able to open it by swiping your campus card on the
reader outside. (All enquiries about access to the lab should be
directed to Faculty Computing.) #23 is
clearly marked with signs which ask others to give preference to
TLG users (who, for current purposes, can be said to include PHI
users).
Like all computers in that lab, #23 is a Macintosh running the
current operating system, OS X. You will need first to log on to
it under your user name and password. On the bottom of the screen
you will see a row of small icons (in the 'Dock' in OS X speak).
Click on the compass - this is Safari, the Apple browser for OS
X. Please note that although the databases reside locally, some
of the links on this page and within the databases themselves are
to URLs outside UWA; when you access these links, you may get
another dialogue box, requesting your user name and password. The
user name and password you need to enter here are those for your
Email account, which may not be the same as the user name and
password you used to log on to the computer originally.
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Accessing the PHI Databases
You should now be ready to make use of the databases. Type
http://localhost:8888 in the
address space at the top of the Safari window, and hit return.
This will take you to the Diogenes start page, with its
introductory paragraph and links to further instructions. These
are helpful and thorough. Note especially three main points:
1. You can choose (via the pop-up menu) only one corpus of
material at a time to work with: the default is set to the PHI
Latin corpus.
2. You can access the texts either through searching (an entire
corpus or an individual text) or browsing.
3. Greek words can be searched for only by entering them in the
Latin alphabet, either as simple transliteration or as the TLG's
Beta code (if you need to specify accents); in other words (and
unlike the TLG online), you cannot do searches by entering
Unicode Greek (although results can be displayed in this form).
Beta code is the way both the TLG texts and the Greek PHI texts
were actually entered into their databases: you can find a quick
guide to it at http://www.tlg.uci.edu/BetaCode.html
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Results and Links to
Perseus
The results of searches, and the presentation of material
browsed, have links in Diogenes to the parsing tools at the
Perseus web site, for both Latin and Greek; these tools have
further links to the online dictionaries there. Simply click on
the word to have it automatically parsed at the Perseus site.
(The online papyri site - see above - also offers this parsing
option, while the online inscription site does not.) Search
results also appear with a "Go to context" button; clicking this
will show the relevant result in its larger context.
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Unicode Greek
For technical reasons to do with the way Unicode represents
diacritical marks, the Greek output of Diogenes for inscriptions
is much inferior to that provided by the online database
discussed above. This is another reason to use the latter
whenever possible.
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