Co-designing Digital Papyrology

Traditional papyrology has established effective methods for producing diplomatic editions of papyri and publishing critical editions of their textual content. Digital papyrology strives to bridge the gap with the digital age. Achieving the balance between familiarity for traditional scholars and the potential for computational analysis remains a challenge. This paper proposes an innovative co-design approach for developing digital papyrology tools, leveraging both Domain-Driven Design (DDD) and Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs). DDD emphasizes a collaborative understanding of the problem domain, while DSLs are formal languages tailored to specific domains like papyrology. The co-design process involves close collaboration with a team of papyrologists, philologists, linguists, and other humanities scholars. This ensures that the resulting tools are user-friendly and cater to the needs of traditional scholars. DSLs encode domain-specific knowledge, facilitating the creation of machine-actionable Digital Scholarly Editions (DSEs) that remain user-friendly. CophiEditor, a modular web environment designed within a micro-services architecture, implements the complete workflow for creating DSL-based DSEs. The co-design approach, the DSL definition, and the DDD paradigm guarantee that CophiEditor is familiar and produces interoperable and extensible data. The development of CophiEditor, within the ERC GreekSchools project, showcases the potential of this approach. It offers greater accessibility of digital tools for traditional philologists and opens doors for new possibilities in computational analysis of ancient texts.