Editor femina facti: What happens when women edit the Iliad?

We’re experimenting with a new web site design, based on content written entirely in Markdown. It uses jekyll to generate the web site, with the Hydejack theme.

The Homer Multitext is producing complex data. The complexity is irreducible, since it is our mission to publish digital editions mapped to their manuscript folios, with Iliadic texts associated with commentaries.

The Homer Multitext produces integrated data on Greek Epic poetry, its language, its evolution over time, the traditions of scholarship surrounding it, and the physical artifacts, manuscripts and papyri, that are our only evidence. For a concise explanation of what the HMT publishes, please see http://www.homermultitext.org/digital/overview.

How do you coordinate contributions from a hundred editors and ensure the quality of the resulting archive? For the HMT project, that is not a hypothetical question. Our reponse involves a combination of software and project organization that differs in some significant ways from other digital projects. This post summarizes the technological systems we use. A later post will separately describe the work flow we follow as we work in teams.