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The Mayan Epigraphic Database Project (MED) is an experiment in networked scholarship with the purpose of enhancing Classic Mayan epigraphic research. At present, MED consists of a relational database of glyphs ("gnumbers"), images, phonetic values ("pvalues"), and semantic values ("svalues") according to the consensus among various American Mayanists (MacLeod and Reents-Budet 1994). Also present is the beginning of an archive of digitally transcribed Mayan texts.
Server space for MED is provided by the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) at the University of Virginia, and the Multimedia Engineering Computation Atelier (MECA) at Princeton. MED is owned by Raf Alvarado, Coordinator of Humanities and Social Sciences Computing at Princeton.
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12.14.2001: The Guestbook has been removed.
03.15.99: The frames-based glyph catalog is running again.
10.05.98: The beta version of my new calendar conversion program can be accessed here. Please let me know if it you find that it computes any dates incorrectly; feel free to send other comments as well. Also, the interactive glyph catalog will be down for just a bit longer.
04.29.98: The interactive glyph catalog will be down for a day or two, as I will be upgrading the server. Apologies for any inconveniences this may cause.
02.17.98: Apologies for the inconsistent behavior of the interactive catalog over the past few days. I was experimenting with different web servers; it turns out that Apache for NT would gag when generating the long list of gnumbers for the upper-left frame.
I was delighted to learn of a beta version of a fully searchable database composed of the data published in John Dienhart's 3-volume work, The Mayan Languages: A Comparative Vocabulary (Odense University Press, 1989). This is very high-quality resource, and Dienhart deserves recognition for publishing it on the web.
12.03.97: I have added (finally) a front-end to an actual relational database of epigraphic material. Please check out the new interface to the glyph catalog here. Documentation and other interfaces will be coming soon.
12.01.97: Michael Everson has published a revision of my conventions of digital transcription, which contains a number of useful insights. His document can be found here. My initial response, posted to AZTLAN-L, is the following.
I want to thank Michael Everson for initiating a collective revision of the some of the ideas I have published on my web site for Mayan epigraphic research.[1] The idea of a collectively authored set of standards is something I have been wanting to implement, but I simply have not had the time to do set up my web site to stage such a conversation (which would require much more than the exchange of email). This situation ought to change in the coming months, as certain developments in my situation may allow for a revision of the site. On the other hand, I would like to make a few a suggestions about how such a process ought to proceed, regardless of its venue. In a follow-up messsage I will to respond to some of the specific suggestions made by Michael in his revision of my digital text archive page.[2] The most important feature of any process of developing and ratifying a set of standards, regardless of the specific nature and purpose of those standards, is that the process be moderated. Just as important, the role of moderator ought to be filled by a legitimate (i.e. recognized) party. Unfortunately, as I have come to realize, MED is not that party, at least as it now stands, nor is any one else. Thus, before we can get started in this process, we ought to establish the ground rules for the conversation. After this, we can choose a web site and a set of tools for the storage and publication of the minutes of whatever conversation takes place. (Of course, if only a small group of people are interested in such a process, say two or three, then legitimacy becomes a matter of these people agreeing amongst themselves about how things ought to proceed. For example, if Michael and I are the only ones interested in this issue, then we can just work out the details amongst ourselves.) Regarding the legitimating party, I am interested in seeing some established epigraphers become involved in this process, not only to legitimate the standards that are set, but to initiate a new era in scholarship founded on the model of freeware (a la GNU and the FSF), where "source code"--i.e. data--as well as standards are made publically available on the Internet. In this connection, I have been pleased with Ringle and Smith-Stark's recent MARI publication. In addition to providing readers with the complete corpus of Palenque's texts in digital form--i.e. transcribed according to Thompson's system--it makes a number of useful contributions to the project of digitizing Mayan texts from other sites. For example, the authors have introduced some new punctuation marks to more accurately transcribe texts, and a number of glyphs have been added, retired or reclassified in Thompson's framework. On the other hand, it must be pointed out that the method of organizing and distributing the data associated with the concordance seems to violate the spirit of digital scholarship; the actual digital texts are hidden in binary files, and can only be reached via a Visual Basic front-end which, aside from being platform-specific--not a good thing in this age of HTML, Perl and Java--is quite limited in functionality. Moreover, the standards for encoding the texts were not publically developed as they might have been. It would be nice if other epigraphers, such as Bricker, Justeson, Stuart and Houston, all of whom seem to have an appreciation of how the computer can aid epigraphic research, would collaborate on setting standards for transcription. This, in addition the contribution of actual data, would allow for the creation of an epigraphic research repository that would rival the Human Genome Project in utility and innovation. Endnotes [1] /med [2] ~/dtext_archive.html
9.12.97: I have removed the most recent frames-based catalogs; they contained incorrect pvalues, due a systematic error. I will be recreating them as soon as possible. In the very near future, this site will be "downsized" to reflect a more a more practical focus on providing access to a glyph catalog with pvalues, and a small set of digital texts. My current tasks--finishing my dissertation and working full-time--prevent me from following through with the plans I have for this site at the present time.
8.30.97: A note about Linda Schele.
7.17.97: There are some mistaken values in the new frames-based catalogs. Please refer to the older catalogs for any pvalues. I am currently working to fix the newer catalogs; I have kept them up for users to experiment with a frames-based reference tool.
The rumor that Bill Ringle has digitized a number of Mayan texts is apparently true: He and Thomas C. Smith-Stark have published A Concordance to the Inscriptions of Palenque, Chiapas, Mexico, Middle American Research Insitute Publication 62, Tulane University (New Orleans LA 70118). According to postings in AZTLAN-L, it contains transcribed texts, a concordance of Palenque dates, a catalog of glyph elements, a table of head variants, and a good introduction to glyph block structure and reading order. It also comes with a CD that contains an electronic version of the concordance, plus some Windows 3.x software to display it. (Perhaps someone ought to rewrite it in Python?) All of this for $35.95 + 3.50 S&H in the USA.
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At the center of the Project is the idea that the Internet can be used as a powerful tool in scholarly research. Over and above the properties of nanosecond speed and massive storage that make computers enormously useful instruments for information processing, the Internet introduces qualities of information access and exchange that are particularly useful to scholars in the humanities and social sciences. To adapt an aphorism from theology, the Internet is a sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere. Anyone with access to a terminal on the 'net has arrived at a "place" where information and people, though they be physically located thousands of miles away, are gathered, as if in the same building. Unlike the traditional library, inforamtion stored in this place is simultaneously and universally distributed. And unlike a conference or a seminar, the exchange of that infornmation is on-going and open to all.
The consequences of this new mode of communication are profound but perhaps difficult to envision. After all, the Internet has been around for twenty- five years and hasn't yet had a profound effect on the conduct of humanistic research. Nonetheless, as any observer of the 'net will point out, the full potential of the medium has yet to be fulfilled, and the time is upon us when a critical mass of participants will change all that. As is often pointed out, we are in the midst of a revolution in communication no less profound than that of the print revolution initiated by Gutenberg in the fifteenth century.
To see how the Internet might enhance epigraphic research, consider the following scenario. A student of the Classic Maya wishes to research a particular motif in the hieroglyphic texts, say the practice of auto- sacrifice. The student, who, let us say, attends a university in the United States, wishes to explore this motif as it appears in textual narratives. In order to pursue this research, the student will have to acquire as large a body of hieroglyphically inscribed artifacts (or their facsimiles) as she can, in order to explore the various patterns and contexts associated with the motif. The larger the body of information, the more clearly will emerge the patterns of association, substition and absence, and the more accurate will be her research.
At the outset of her research, our student encounters a problem. Depending on where she lives and studies, access to this information will be limited. Aside from the various books she has been able to buy and check out, she will have to go to other libraries, museums and collections--in Philadelphia, Austin, Cambridge, Washington DC, San Francisco, not to mention Mexico, Guatemala, and Europe--to complete her work. Of course, due to constraints of time and money, she will not be able to go to all of these places, but instead will go to some of them and make the best of what she can acquire.
After she has amassed her material, she is faced with another problem. Because she is not yet an expert epigrapher, she would like to ground her research in the work of authorities in the field. Sensitive to the complexity of epigraphic decipherment, translation and interpretation, she would like to know not only what gloss an epigrapher has provided for each block in a text, but the precise interpretive moves and decisions that led to the gloss. To what extent did the epigrapher apply the structural method of Berlin, Proskouriakoff and Kelly? What Thompson numbers were associated with each glyph? What phonetic or semantic values were assigned to each glyph? How were these values selected and combined to produce the words and sentences attributed to the inscription?
Here our student encounters a serious problem. The published material contains precious few examples of translations that detail the stages of glyphic identification and evaluation. Except for a few sources, like the Research Reports on Ancient Maya Writing (Center for Maya Research) and site reports like the Excavations at Seibal (Peabody Museum, Harvard), the translations available to her are incomplete. To remedy this, she limits her body of material to those texts that she can account for, either from published sources or by contacting epigraphers with specific questions.
But here she encounters another difficulty. She finds that epigraphers disagree on their transcriptions of the same text. Disagreements are of course to be expected, and indeed applauded, but she finds that occassionally there are discrepancies at the level of identification. That is, a given glyph may be classified as a token of two or more glyph types. (Roughly speaking, a glyph type corresponds to a glyph number in Thompson's scheme.) To remedy this problem, she creates, from the material at her disposal, a set of standard transcriptions that contain the varying identifications.
After having limited her material to those texts and images that meet her criteria, our student then produces a set of interpretations and, based on these, arrives at a set of hypotheses to account for the meaning of the motif she is studying. At this point she wishes to submit her ideas to the criticism of others working in the field. Again, she encounters limitations. Desiring to augment the criticism of her advisors, who may not be specialists in her subject, she must wait for a conference or journal to present her work, or for the responses of those to whom she has sent it. These things take time and, unless she is in close contact with the specialists whose evaluations she desires--those individuals able to provide that precious resource unassumingly referred to as "personal communication"--they do not always succeed in allowing for the kind of immediate dialogue that is so important for the advancement of scholarly research.
In the end, after going through one or two rounds of criticism by these methods, our student produces her study, after which it is distributed to those who may be interested by it, to those libraries that will accept it, or, if her work is good enough and she is well connected, to a publisher. Over the next few years, she will receive responses from people who have picked up a copy of her work. Even in the best of circumstances, she does not expect a response from her work in less than a year.
To borrow the language of economics, this scenario describes the cycle of the production, distribution and consumption of scholarly research. In general, it describes how scholars today do work given the means of communication available to them--the infrastructure of books and buildings that are circulated and in which scholars circulate as they produce their work. The scenario also describes how research is limited by barriers which do not become visible except by contrast to what is made possible by another means of communication, such as that provided by the Internet. At each stage in her research our student encountered limited access to information, specifically to the raw data, interpreted data and interpretive criticism. In each case, the restrictions arose from the fact that the information is stored in a medium which resists easy distribution.
Now consider what effect the Internet might have on this cycle. Assume that a site or number of sites have been set up where researchers can submit and retrieve information of various kinds, such as scanned images and transcriptions of epigrapraphic texts, translations of those texts, and criticism of those translations. Also found at these sites are various glyph dictionaries (such as Kurbjuhn's Catalogue), along with dictionaries of the relevant Mayan languages, as well as various experimental text-processing programs that have been created to aid in the task of translation. Assume further that important epigraphers contribute to these sites, and that they, along with numerous others, have contributed for some time.
With this rudimentary infrastructure of networked scholarship in place, each point of the cycle of research will be greatly enhanced. Our student will be able to access immediately a large body of data in the form of scanned facsimiles and tanscribed texts. She will also be able to access existing translations of these texts, along with, perhaps, criticisms of those translations. And she will be able to communicate the results of her work as it evolves, through the use of electronic mail with participants and by posting notes in archives reserved for such ephemera. As for the distribution and publication of her results, she can get a head start by posting her work to an appropriate archive. In short, at all points in our scenario where access to data was restricted by limitations of having to travel to a particular place at a particular time, our student gains enormously in saved time and quantity of information.
In addition to these benefits, the prospect of networked scholarship offers other, unexpected advantages that arise from the constraints that medium places on message. The Internet, after all, is made up of computers, and therefore differs from spoken and printed communication not only by virtue of its fast and vast distributive capacity, but by the formal requirements it places on information that is exchanged on it. Any networked document will have necessarily the properties of replicability, searchability and transformability. What this means for epigraphic research is clearest in the area of hieroglyphic transcriptions. More valuable perhaps than a scanned image of a text, which has limited processing potential, a properly transcribed text can be "read" by a variety of translation routines, from programs which simply parse texts or replace Thompson numbers with phonetic or semantic values, to "smart" programs designed to imitate the rule-governed aspects of decipherment and translation.
Equally valuable to epigraphy is the potential that electronic transcriptions offer for statistical analyses of collections of texts. For example, a text archive, which might easily contain the entire corpus of inscriptions, can be searched as a single document, and patterns of glyphic distribution, substitution and combination can be detected with great speed and accuracy. Other possibilities include the classification of hieroglyphic texts on the basis of their statistical "signatures", as has been detected in statistical analyses of novels, letters and other documents.
Whatever the role such text processing techniques may play in one's epigraphic research, there are other, more subtle features of networked scholarship that will have a decisive effect on that research. These derive from the nature of the medium itself. Although one accesses an archive on the Internet privately and as an individual, as if it were a bookshelf in one's study--and in a very real sense it is--the archive is in an equally real sense a public and collectively authored entity. In principle, all transcriptions are submitted individually and edited collectively. The sharedness of the medium means that transcriptions will tend to be standardized according to the consensus of participants. It also means that the difference between transcription and translation will be more marked--transcription being consensual and translation individual--with the result that the medium will encourage epigraphers to be explicit about the steps they make in producing a translation. Thus, if it is true that epigraphic practice cannot be reduced to algorithms--and it is difficult not to think so--it will be clear at what points rule-governed behavior gives way to intuition and "play," in the positive, hermeneutic sense of that term.
The above should suffice to demonstrate the point that the Internet can enhance significantly the process of epigraphic research. The immediacy and universality of access to primary and secondary sources, the centralization and standardization of that information, the explication of the interpretive process--these are factors that epigraphers should recognize as essential conditions for the growth of their research. It is with the purpose of creating these conditions, and fulfilling the potential that networked scholarship holds for Classic Mayan epigraphic research, that the Mayan Epigraphic Database Project has been created.
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