φώνημ᾽ ἀκούω καὶ ξυναρπάζω φρενὶ / χαλκοστόμου κώδωνος ὡς Τυρσηνικῆς.
I hear your voice and grasp it in my mind, / like the voice of a bronze-belled Tyrrhenian trumpet. -- Sophocles, Ajax ll. 16–17
Part of the Ajax Multi-Commentary project, Kōdōn (Greek for the "bell of a trumpet") is a minimal computing platform for authoring and compiling (multi-)commentaries.
A multi-commentary pulls glossae from more than one commentary at once, applying these comments to lemmata in a shared edition of the text. (In future iterations, a multi-commentary might also entail multiple editions of a text.)
By creating a shared edition for all of the comments to cite simultaneously, a multi-commentary enables the reader to explore hundreds of years of a commentary tradition at a glance, gleaning new insights into how the commentaries interact with the critical text and with each other.
The multi-commentary platform works by combining editions, commentaries, and (optionally) translations into a reading environment.
Editions are TEI XML. Kōdōn will parse properly formatted TEI for canonical references using the <refsDecl> element in the TEI header. For now, because Kōdōn focuses on amplifying commentaries, each canonical reference mainly consists of its CTS URN citation — e.g., for line 17 of Sophocles' Ajax urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0011.tlg003.perseus-grc2:17 — and the plain text reference to the line.
There is, however, rudimentary support for handling TEI's <del> and <add> elements, with plans to support additional markup in the future.
Each commentary consists of a series of glosses that point to canonical references in the editions. Citations to critical editions must be formatted as CTS URNs. For example, to cite the word κώδωνος at Sophocles, Ajax l. 17, you would use the following URN: urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0011.tlg003.perseus-grc2:17@κώδωνος.
TODO: Should we continue to support the slide-based short syntax for per-comment metadata, relying on the YAML block only document-level data? Or should we use a YAML metadata block for each glossa and treat each glossa as a separate markdown document?
Like commentaries, translations must point to a critical edition of the text.
TODO: Specify how translations should work.
Copyright 2024 Matteo Romanello, Ajax Multi-Commentary Project
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