About PalæoReader
PalæoReader (also PalaeoReader) is a free/open-source web-based tool that allows users to interact with previous interpretations and analyses of individual texts and add their own.
Background
The niche
Some existing tools offer similar features to PalæoReader.
Existing tools, like Perseus, host many texts, even many corpora, and have dictionaries and other text-reading tools that interact nicely with the text. In this way, PalæoReader is similar to them.
However, there are some notable differences.
As far as we have been able to tell, all such extant tools lack an ability to compare interpretations of texts with one another. They assume one definitive interpretation, and at best add commentary from the perspective of that interpretation in the form of footnotes or similar, in the style of a variorum. Quite a few sites hosting corpora don’t even credit a specific source for the interpretation hosted, and instead present a somewhat novel interpretation, rendering their analysis yet another of many out there. This can be frustrating when the interpretation is not explicitly treated as a new analysis and is not contextualised in the body of literature around the text(s).
Most such tools also fail to present more than two layers of interpretation (from among original text, transliteration, transcription, translation(s), morphological glossing, etc.), although notable exceptions (like the software underlying VATEC) do exist.
And finally, there are many (many) once-off websites that present analyses of often large corpora of texts in a given language, from a given archive, of a given genre, etc. These are often the culmination of years of work, sometimes grant-funded, and the text curators have had to deal with the logistics of constructing a website from scratch to present the work. PalæoReader is built to be deployable by anyone for any collection of texts. A big worry with once-off sites is that the scholars and grants involved in the collections they present don’t provide for long-term maintenance the websites, even though they are novel scholarly output, along the lines of publishing multiple large tomes of print material, and end up finding stable use by communities of people engaged with work on the same texts. PalæoReader will never take the place of someone who knows what they’re doing maintaining a website, but the hope is that it will be like MediaWiki, WordPress, Omeka, or similar tools in having a community of maintainers to keep the underlying software up to date, and in deployments being easy to patch or upgrade indefinitely for someone who doesn’t necessarily understand the project but does understand such tools (like IT departments at educational institutions).
PalæoReader is not meant to replace tools like Omeka, which function as web versions of something along the archive-museum spectrum. It is about presenting the depth of scholarly interpretation of artifacts both to educate (as tools like Omeka do) and to form the basis of new scholarly interpretations. PalæoReader is about presenting the contents of the texts, not the objects as artifacts.
Authors and Licensing
PalæoReader is licened under the AGPL v3 license. Among other things, this allows anyone to deploy the software for any use (such as a specific text collection) in an unrestricted way.
PalæoReader’s contributors include the following:
- Rania Abohatab - frontend development, artwork
- Lyra Ederington - backend and database development
- Roma Sarathi - frontend development
- Gidon Kaminer - database development
- Jonathan Washington - project supervisor
Logo
The PalaeoReader logo depicts a Przewalski’s horse, or takhi (Mongolian тахь /tɑxʲ/ [tʰæxʲ], Proto-Mongolic *taqi).
The takhi is indigenous to Central Asia, where it has some cultural import. There is evidence that it may have been domesticated before the modern domestic horse, and that it was increasingly rare throughout historic times. It became “extinct in the wild” in the mid 20th century, and in the late 20th century efforts began to reintroduce it into the wild by breeding populations from zoo “specimens”. Now there are again large populations of takhis living their lives on the steppe.
This history mirrors to some extent our hopes for PalaeoReader: among other things, that texts (and indeed languages) that once had places in their societies of origin but became unknown take their place again as recovered cultural heritage in societies that are cultural inheritors of the texts (or languages).
The takhi’s colours are also reminiscent of ink on aged paper (and related technologies), although PalaeoReader is not limited to presenting texts written using these technologies.
Main features
(in progress)
Viewing texts
Comparing interpretations
Contributing
(adding and editing interpretations)
The map view
The dictionary
Copyright
All original texts hosted on a PalæoReader instance are under public domain. Most were written before copyright was a concept in the world, and all are too old for any current copyright law to protect them.
All analyses (transcriptions, translations, etc.) hosted on PalæoReader sites are copyright their respective authors, to the extent permissible by law. Authors are always cited.
- Academic work is at its best when it is engaged with and able to built upon, both by those involved in research and the general public. To this end, it should be out in the world and accessible to as many people as possible.
- Transcriptions of existing texts do indeed require loads of time and expert knowledge, but are simply a rendering of what someone believes to already have been written. This is hence not creative work, and copyright law does not apply.
- Translations of existing texts, even when attempting to render the original faithfully in another language (which isn’t necessarily how every translator approaches the work), do often include some degree of creativity, so copyright claims by the translator can be justified.
- Presentation of texts, transcriptions, and translations in for scholarly analysis and educational purposes is often considered fair use of copyrighted material.
- Those who generate academic analyses do not generally do so to directly profit, but instead to expand knowledge on the topic, for their own career advancement, and maybe even for fame and renown. Copyright law is designed to protect one’s ability to profit directly off of one’s creative endeavours. Distributing work more widely achieves these other goals better than keeping an analysis paywalled.
- Front matter, discussion, commentary, and other parts of these sources that are of a less analytical and more creative manner are not usually included in PalaeoReader deployments, and users are encouraged to engage with that material.
- Presenting these analyses on a PalaeoReader deployment is no different than including previous analyses in a published work to analytically interact with them, and releasing that published work in an open access format, except that PalaeoReader additionally makes the analyses more easily accessible to the public, and accessible in new ways to researchers.
All photographs and digital representations of artefacts hosted on a PalæoReader instance are of sources that are no longer protected by copyright. A mere mechanical digitisation does take time, effort, and expertise, but is not a creative work, so is likely not copyrightable. Photographs of three-dimensional objects do require some creative work (regarding angles, lighting, etc.), so may justifiably be copyrighted.
If you believe you are the copyright holder of any material on a PalæoReader site and feel that it has been used inappropriately, please reach out to the site maintainer and explain your concerns. The goal of PalæoReader is not profit, especially not off the hard work of those whose work it showcases, but to spread existing knowledge and to enable the generation of new knowledge.