The Sixth Generation of the Perseus Digital Library and a Workflow for Open Philology

We report here on the workflow that we needed to develop in order to integrate the growing range of
openly licensed, born-digital and, increasingly, machine actionable publications. Our developmental work
focused upon textual data for Ancient Greek, Latin, Old English, Classical Arabic and Classical Persian
but the challenges that we have had to address are relevant to sources in a wide range of languages,
ancient and modern. Perseus 6 was designed to be a publishing workflow that organizes complementary
data into an integrated reading environment.3 This document focuses on the ways in which we have
organized the data and describes the current state of ATLAS (Aligned Text and Linguistic Annotation
Server) architecture. While this is the sixth version of the Perseus Digital Library, Perseus 6 represents a
major step beyond its predecessors. Where Perseus 5 (described below) can represent and integrate digital
versions of print editions (e.g., critical editions with interactive textual notes, links to lexicon and
commentary entries), Perseus 6 was designed to bring together an expandable range of born-digital classes
of annotation. An online ATLAS server with some initial functionality is now online and public services
will expand during the rest of 2024.4 Most of the ATLAS data is, however, now available on Github and
that data will be the focus on this paper in its current version