Indexing a passage of text

What you record

Every citable passage of text that you edit is indexed to:

  1. a region of a citable image
  2. a reference for the page of the manuscript

The citable text passage is identified by a CTS URN. The region of the image and the manuscript page are each identified by CITE2 URNs.

How to record it

You keep your indexes in simple text files in the dse directory of your repository. (dse stands for “digital scholarly edition”.) You may name the files anything you like, but include the file extensions .cex.

Each line in the file is a single index entry that associates a trio of URNs. URNs are separated by the pipe character |. The illustration below shows the first two lines of a DSE file: a header line, and one row of data. (Unlike the illustration below, if you have configured Rainbow CSV to recognize cex files, the columns will be visually distinguished by colors.)

passage|imageroi|surface
urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0012.tlg001.e3:3.title|urn:cite2:hmt:e3bifolio.v1:E3_39v_40r@0.5346,0.2677,0.1974,0.04296|urn:cite2:hmt:e3bifolio.v1:E3_39v_40r

The text passage and the surface (page) are URNs your team should know before you start work on a page. You create the image URN using the Homer Multitext project’s image citation tool.

⭐️ Tips

  1. Some teams like to have one member set up a (short) series of records with text and page URNs, leaving the image URN blank, while a second member uses the image citation tool to copy image URNs and paste them into the middle column of the CEX file.
  2. Keep your editing and indexing in sync. Don’t index all the Iliad lines and scholia on a page without editing anything, or edit text without indexing the passages you’re reading.