This paper will present the workflow of the Grammateus project, from gathering data on Greek papyri to the creation of a web application built on top of an XML database of TEI EpiDoc[1] encoded files.

The team is composed of four researchers: two papyrologists are responsible for the corpus selection and metadata gathering in Excel spreadsheets. A digital humanist then transforms the metadata to the EpiDoc standard and creates an eXist[2] web application. Finally, a PhD student is focusing on one particular type of documents.

The Grammateus project aims to study the typology of Greek documentary papyri from Graeco-Roman Egypt, and thus to understand how a trained scribe would prepare any specific document in this context. The project is studying the material aspect of papyri, often neglected in typologies that focus on textual content. The aim is to enhance the existing digital papyrology resources, with new metadata such as the shape of papyri, their size and the direction of the papyrus fibres. The reuse and dynamic integration of external resources such as papyri.info[3] is therefore a primary aspect of the project, as well as a source of difficulties. Long-term sustainability is a sensitive issue since the project is entirely dependent on the availability of these external resources, although they are assumed to remain stable.

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