CURSUS:
An Online Resource of Medieval Liturgical Texts

Original URL: http://www.cursus.uea.ac.uk/
Working URL: http://www.cursus.org.uk/

About the Cursus Project

• AHRB-funded project (2000-2003) at University of East Anglia to produce resource of medieval liturgical texts and explore XML publication possibilities
• Principal Investigator Professor David Chadd and Research Assistant Dr James Cummings produced editions of 12 medieval manuscripts
• Desire of research project to investigate and compare order of antiphons, responds, and prayers in these manuscripts which detail order of service in different places in England
• Project produced full XML copies of Corpus Antiphonalium Officii, Vulgate Bible, and other supplementary information 

Project Afterlife

• 2000-3 – Main Cursus project completed UEA School of Music
• 2003 – I moved Oxford, project continues with Richard Lewis as developer to keep it running
• 2006 – Sadly, in November 2006 the Principal Investigator Professor David Chadd died
• 2009 – ‘Climategate’ (hacking of emails relating to climate change data) caused UEA to close all off-campus access
• 2010 – Richard and I unable to access departmental server; it is later replaced without  Cursus project website.
• 2014 – UEA School of Music is closed.
• 2016 – After 6 years of negotiation I get confirmation of CC+BY+NC license of data, allowing us to put it up elsewhere

Sustainability Issues

• Hosting problems
  • Using departmental server rather than centralised institutional VMs (but these were in short supply 2000-3)
• Maintenance problems
  • Climategate and loss of external SSH access to campus
• Backup problems
  • PI continued to work on his laptop, updates did not get added to the site when he died
• Long-term storage problems
  • TEI P4 XML data was always safe but not stored in open repository, although declared as 'freely available' on original site it had not been explicitly licensed
  • That university department had closed made it hard to get 'approval'.

Conclusion:

Planning For Failure

Some Endings Project Principles

• Data: 
  • Use open formats, preferably archive standard
  • Use version control and continuous integration
• Outputs: 
  • Remove dependency on server-side software
  • Avoid fashionable recent technologies
  • No dependence on external libraries
  • No query strings in URLS
  • Graceful degradation without JS or CSS
  • Massive pre-generated redundancy of outputs
• Documentation of all tech aspects, data models, etc.
•  Stable release management when data is coherent and complete

The Future

• Crystal balls are unreliable, but...
• We're on the cusp of an explosion of archival-based websites owing to HTR and ML
• Over a few years we're going from:
  Single Hand -> Single Script -> Single Collection
• If $HumanitiesFunding then transcribe($archive)
• But transcriptions need:
  • up-conversion,
  • named entity recognition (still hard for pre-modern sources),
  • translation,
  • interpretation,
  • editing?
• AI/ML will give big data but keep an eye on outputs