The Digital Corpus of Literary Papyri (DCLP) is an electronic corpus of fragmentary ancient books, sub- and para-literary works, and other non-documentary texts that were written on portable media such as papyrus, ostraca, or wooden tablets. In addition to the canonical literary genres and authors implied by the corpus' name, in practice DCLP includes whatever material is absent from the Duke Databank of Documentary Papyri (DDbDP).
Following the successful completion of a 2011 planning grant, from 2013–2017 DCLP was developed under the leadership of Roger Bagnall (ISAW) and Rodney Ast (Heidelberg), with the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft's Bilateral Digital Programme. Thanks to the generous collaboration of Willy Clarysse and Mark Depauw, in December 2014 the Leuven Database of Ancient Books – now part of Trismegistos – shared metadata for 14,613 texts, providing the backbone of DCLP and a foundation for the work of adding textual transcriptions in machine-readable format. Cooperation with the Duke Collaboratory for Classics Computing (DC3) enabled the corpus to build upon the existing technology within papyri.info, tailored to the specific needs of literary papyrology. Core team members included James Cowey, Tom Elliott, Holger Essler, Carmen Lanz, and Marcel Keller. As elsewhere in papyri.info, all data and metadata in DCLP is encoded in TEI/EpiDoc XML.
Numerous teams – led by Holger Essler, Daniel Riaño, Nicola Reggiani, and the late Isabella Andorlini (among others) – contributed to the early establishment of DCLP, adding bibliography, transcriptions, and links to both sketches and photographs for hundreds of files. The corpus has benefitted and continues to benefit from the contributions of external projects such as ENCODE, REDHIS, Project Anagnosis, the Corpus dei papiri filosofici, Thesaurus Herculanensium Voluminum, and DIGMEDTEXT, as well as contributions made in the course of webinars, workshops, and other instructional classes led by members of the editorial board.
DCLP was formally launched in December 2017 at litpap.info and was subsequently incorporated into papyri.info. The work of adding ancient texts continues: as of October 2023, nearly 15% of the corpus' contents include textual transcriptions.
The DCLP editorial board consists of Rodney Ast, James Cowey, Holger Essler, Julia Lougovaya and Mike Sampson. The current public version is available via papyri.info, which since July 2013 has been under the stewardship of the Duke Collaboratory for Classics Computing (DC3), a digital classics R&D unit within the Duke University Libraries. DC3 was merged into Digital Strategies and Technology in July 2020. Raw data is available under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, alongside that of papyri.info's other constituent collections, via a public-facing GitHub repository.
Please feel free to direct questions regarding DCLP to the members of the editorial board – inevitably all will discuss.