We’re very excited to announce a new feature at Coptic SCRIPTORIUM.  We’ve created a new online web application that we think will allow users to read and reference our material much more easily.

Users can read Coptic documents on HTML pages taken from the data visualizations.  There are also easy links to our search tool ANNIS and to our GitHub repository for downloading files.

And we have a system of canonical URNS that provide persisent identifiers for documents, texts, authors, and text groups.   This means you can cite our data in your scholarship, and then readers will be able to back to our site and find our most recent versions of the documents you have cited.

We’ve got a little video to introduce it, or dive right in at http://data.copticscriptorium.org.

This is a BETA release, which means you might see a few things that need to be ironed out.  (For one thing, our small corpus of documentary papyri are not yet in the system — stay tuned, and in the meanwhile you can still read and query them in ANNIS.)  We are pretty pleased with how it’s turning out and look forward to future developments.

Many thanks to Bridget Almas of the Perseus Digital Library for helping us develop a canonical referencing system, and to Archimedes Digital for implementing the application.