A presentation from the HERA information day event in February 2015.

1. Sharing Ancient WisdomS
Learning from Experience:
The case of SAWS
Exploring the Tradition of Greek and Arabic Wisdom
Literatures
Charlotte Roueché – Centre for Hellenic Studies, King’s College London

2. SAWS project:
Sharing Ancient Wisdoms
Alexander, asked
whom he loved
more, Philip or
Aristotle, said:
”Both equally, for
one gave me the
gift of life, the other
taught me to live
the virtuous life.
Socrates said: "I have
met with three evils –
grammar, poverty and
a damned woman. I
made my escape from
two of them, but I
could not escape the
Diogenes was asked by someone
why people give to beggars but
not at all to philosophers, and he
said: Because, perhaps, they
expect to become lame or blind
but not to become philosophers.
Aristotle said
that educators
are more to be
honored than
mere begetters,
for the latter
offer life but the
former offer the
good life.
He [Pythagoras] said:
Fathers are the cause
of life, but philosophers
are the cause of the
good life.
Alexander admired Aristotle
at the start and loved him
no less, as he himself said,
than his own father, since
he had life through his
father but the virtuous life
through Aristotle

3. An ambitious aim: to bring different specialists
together within a single output:
the SAWS Dynamic Library
We may have been naïve when we set this as our
target. We have indeed achieved it: but what did
we learn along the way?
And what would have been useful to know at the
start of the project?

4. Frontiers to cross:
•National
•Administrative
•Language
•Discipline
•External
•Age

5. Working across national borders
This was the simplest of our challenges. All of us work in
small specialist subject areas, and were therefore used
to working with colleagues all over the world.
We met most often in London, because it tended to be the
easiest place for everyone to meet. Otherwise we used
Skype a lot, and DropBox for sharing our texts.
You still have to make an effort to ensure that everyone is in
the loop all the time . . . You speak to someone in the
corridor, but forget to record it for the others . . .

6. Jordanous, Stanley, Tupman -
Contemporary Solutions to publish ancient
documents (SAWS/Islandora) DH2013
Administrative
In your group, you need to think hard about who is to be
the PL.
There a lot of chores:
• Some academic - writing the application through to
writing the report
• Many administrative and financial
So the most important question is –
Who has the most robust research administration
backup team?

7. Language
All the project leaders were entirely comfortable working and
writing in English. This presented slightly more problems for
some of the junior researchers.
Our materials were in several languages - primarily medieval
Greek and Arabic, but also Spanish and Latin: we did not all
know all the languages. It would have been desirable to end
up translating everything into one language, but this would
have been a much heavier task for some than for others.
BUT some of our language difficulties were interdisciplinary and
the simplest words are the most dangerous. Do you all
mean the same thing by ‘library’ or ‘edition’ or
‘concordance’? It might be useful even to build a project
glossary.

8. Interdisciplinarity
This always tends to be difficult. Perceptions are very
important and Respect Matters.
The textual scholars had great respect for one another,
reflecting the traditions of their training. They had more
difficulty in understanding the role of the digital humanists on
the project, as not just technical supporters, but co-
researchers. I feel sure that similar gaps appear in other
interdisciplinary projects.
I had to spend quite a lot of energy on these relationships.
You can set the stage for this at the beginning: but trust and
respect really develop over time, as you work together. You
need to be alert for gaps opening up, and to explain, again
and again, what value each member is brining to the project.

9. External relationships
A core element of our project was to link and connect with
other online scholarly resources, and to make ourselves
available to them.
These are far more abundant for classical Greek materials
than for medieval Greek, or for Arabic - so there was an
imbalance.
But there was also, I think, an emotional barrier - the idea of
linking up to other people’s publications is a little unsettling
for some people. It is the PL’s job to build the confidence of
other in the project. But I was too slow to realise that some of
my partners were making much less use of such resources.

10. SAWS manuscripts contain references to geographical
places that are listed in the Pleiades ancient gazetteer
SAWS texts and their inter-
relationships are modelled
by an ontology that reuses
the FRBRoo and CIDOC
models
Several datasets are linked together in
Pelagios, including…
Pelagios links together
several datasets via
shared geographical
links (using Pleiades
URIs, OAC annotations
and VoID descriptions)
Content links
exist between
SAWS and
Perseus texts
Sharing Ancient Wisdoms
Exploring the tradition of Greek & Arabic wisdom
literatures using Semantic Web Technologies
http://www.ancientwisdoms.ac.uk/
Pleiades
An online gazetteer of
ancient geographical
places
http://pleiades.stoa.org/
Perseus
A digital library of
transcriptions of ancient
texts
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/
Pelagios
A ‘networking medium’ for ancient
places, using Linked Open Data
principles
http://pelagios-project.blogspot.co.uk/
SPQR
Semantic descriptions of data on
Byzantine resources including
ancient papyri and inscriptions
http://spqr.cerch.kcl.ac.uk/
Nomisma
Data on ancient
coin hoards
http://nomisma.or
g/
Geographical
references in
SAWS texts
are being
linked to
Pelagios
Papyri.info
Papyrological
documents
http://papyri.info/
Iaph & IRT
Inscriptions from
Aphrodisias and from
Roman Tripolitania
http://insaph.kcl.ac.uk/
http://irt.kcl.ac.uk/
SPQR semantic data describe
data on inscriptions and papyri
CIDOC-CRM
A cultural heritage model
http://www.cidoc-crm.org/
FRBR-oo
A model of bibliographic
records, harmonised with
CIDOC http://www.cidoc-
crm.org/frbr_inro.html
“Linked Ancient Data” – links
outside SAWS texts

11. Age
This was a frontier which I had not foreseen.
My age means that I can take risks - such as publishing in a
new and unconventional format.
The digital humanists on the team can publish online with no
problems.
For my textual colleagues, this is not a risk that they can
afford to run. They will need to generate printed books to
advance their careers in traditional departments. This may
have meant a slight withholding of commitment by them. If
the online edition was perfect, would a book publisher take
on the production of a printed version?
You need to be aware of these aspects, and where the
project fits into each person’s career.

12. Benefits
All these matters had to be negotiated.
In the process we all learned new things, and had to think
about our own approaches to our material.
We were developing a form of publication, and were
resolved to share it: it was therefore useful to have to think
about the demands of different projects - although not easy!
We developed an understanding of teamwork which is still
rare in the Humanities. The PL has to set the tone.

13. Jordanous, Stanley, Tupman -
Contemporary Solutions to publish ancient
documents (SAWS/Islandora) DH2013
Knowledge Exchange
Our project was principally useful to others through
its methodology – which is now being taken up.
We spent a lot of time presenting our work and
inviting comments and criticisms: we reported on this
activity regularly, and even provided a map.

14. Jordanous, Stanley, Tupman -
Contemporary Solutions to publish ancient
documents (SAWS/Islandora) DH2013
For an excellent presentation from another
preoject see the AHRC website:
http://www.slideshare.net/AHRC/hera-
creativity-and-craft-production-in-middle-
and-late-bronze-age-europe-cinba

15. Aristotle
tutoring
Alexander
(13th
century
manuscript)
Sharing Ancient WisdomS
http://www.ancientwisdoms.ac.uk
The exchange of ideas
continues . . .