Distributed Text Services for Digital Classics

Since around 2017, the Distributed Text Services (DTS) initiative has been developing a standardized approach to sharing and citing textual resources. In the past year, the DTS specifications have reached a stable phase, providing a robust API for managing text collections with both fine-grained and normalized metadata. The API enables seamless retrieval of textual subparts (citable units) within structured citation trees, supporting TEI-XML as well as other formats relevant to researchers in the digital humanities.

To ensure the practical adoption of DTS, the Technical Committee, in collaboration with Matteo Romanello, has focused on developing tooling and reference implementations. Notable examples include the DoTS implementation, funded by Biblissima+ and developed at PSL-ENC, as well as the DraCor implementation, both of which have benefited from testing and feedback. Romanello has also provided the community with a DTS compliance tester, finally enabling implementers to verify their own stack in relation to the standard.

This presentation will introduce, for the first time, Dapytains, a new software implementation designed to address one of the most complex aspects of DTS: the dynamic extraction and reproduction of TEI-XML subparts. With the introduction of the CiteStructure element in TEI in 2021, the DTS Technical Committee has provided a novel, machine-actionable way to structure and retrieve citable textual units, along with their metadata. Dapytains serves as an example implementation capable of reusing these structures in Python, with opensource code that can be adapted to other languages. Additionally, we propose a new version of Hooktest, which verifies the integrity of CiteStructure implementations in accordance with DTS specifications.

By presenting this work, we aim to engage digital classicists and scholars working on textual infrastructures, inviting discussion on the future of distributed text services and their role in the study of classical and later texts.

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Streamed live on Youtube at: https://youtu.be/s1po4jVKkys