Digital Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum (DFHG)

Digital Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum (DFHG)

Editor Monica Berti

Description
As part of the Leipzig Open Fragmentary Texts Series (LOFTS), the Digital Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum (DFHG) Project is producing a digital edition of the five volumes of Karl Müller’s Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum (FHG) (1841-1870), which is the first big collection of fragments of Greek historians ever realized.

Karl Müller’s FHG consists of a survey of excerpts from many different sources pertaining to more than 600 fragmentary authors. Excluding the first volume, these authors are chronologically distributed and cover a very long period (from the 6th century BC down to the 7th century CE). Fragments are numbered sequentially and arranged according to works and book numbers (when such information is available). Every fragment is translated into Latin. The first volume includes also the text of the Marmor Parium – with Latin translation, chronological table, and commentary – and the Greek text of the Rosetta Stone (Rosettanum) – with a French literal translation as well as a critical, historical and archaeological commentary. The fifth volume includes a section with fragments of Greek and Syriac historians preserved in Armenian sources (in French translation).

While produced two centuries ago and superseded by the monumental edition of Felix Jacoby (Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker), Müller’s FHG is still a fundamental contribution to Greek fragmentary historiography. In particular, it is very suitable for providing rapid, broad coverage and an extensive foundation upon which a new generation of born-digital editions of fragmentary texts can build. Müller’s five volumes have been transcribed into a simple text format and are being converted into a TEI XML edition, where the excerpts become machine-actionable quotations that can be automatically aligned not only to the original source editions from which Müller drew but also to any other open editions.

As part of the Leipzig Open Fragmentary Texts Series (LOFTS), the DFHG Project uses the EpiDoc subset of the Text Encoding Initiative as its XML tagset and an XSLT template is being created in order to help encoders better visualize the markup. The original pages of Müller’s FHG will be displayed to visualize the original layout. The DFHG uses also the CTS/CITE Architecture, and all data in DFHG will be available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.