Adding New Texts

Adding new texts to the current version of Tesserae is relatively simple. Once we have a text properly formatted, we can run a program to process it, make a few other adjustments (like adding it to drop-down lists and entering its information into our list of sources), and it will be ready to search.

So achieving our goal of adding all Perseus classical Greek and Latin texts this year should be a walk in the park, no?

In fact, there is a bottleneck: getting the texts properly formatted for addition. We need a plain text (in .txt format) that has the proper section markers at the beginning of each line (of poetry) or section (of prose). For Perseus texts, this means automatically stripping out the XML information and inserting the section markers.

We’re moving forward with this work, but would welcome help. A set of instructions gives further detail on how to put texts in the correct format. Anyone who wants to pitch in should email Tesserae Fellow James Gawley for further advice. Note that, although the instructions give some examples of English texts, we have no team members working on English at the moment, and so don’t currently have the capacity to process other English texts.

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