The corpus of Greek medical papyri and digital papyrology: new perspectives from an ongoing project

The ongoing project of digitising a corpus of ancient Greek texts on papyrus dealing with medical topics raises some problematic questions involving general issues of digital papyrology. The main electronic resource of papyrological texts, the Papyrological Navigator (papyri.info), has indeed been designed to host documentary items, while the special technical, even literary nature of medical papyri (which include, besides documents related to medicine, also handbooks, school books, and treatises by both known and unknown authors) requires new ways to treat the relevant data (paratextual devices such as diacriticals, punctuation, abbreviatios, layout features). Such issues are currently under discussion by the team charged of the forthcoming Digital Corpus of Literary Papyri (DCLP), but further options need to be taken into consideration in order to develop a fully functional, interactive, dynamic database of ancient technical texts: in particular, this paper will present and discuss the potentialities of a multi-layer linguistic annotation (useful to fulfil the needs of a multifaceted technical language) and of a multitextual digital edition (helpful in consideration of the fragmentary condition of the texts and of their often problematic relationship with the known manuscript tradition)