El-Assassif

This archaeological excavation program focuses on the necropolis in the El-Assassif valley. In particular, it is making good use of several databases for its post-excavation work.

It is essential for this team researchers to study both the database records and the extensive corpus (including photographs), before, during and after each excavation campaign.

During each digging campaign, and during the period before the corpus is deposited in a permanent institutional repository such as Nakala[1], it is necessary to display and study these files in third-party software, even though they are only available locally.

It was this need that initially led to the creation of software Helios in the summer of 2022, created in close collaboration with egyptologists Cassandre HARTENSTEIN and Frédéric COLIN.

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Estrades

Estrades is a research support platform offering technical solutions, coaching and training to support the development of digital humanities projects based on corpus editing.

Among other things, Estrades can make the most of not only textual corpora in TEI format[2], but also relational databases containing more information about the named entities cited by the TEI files.

It was initially to overcome the limitations of the database software on which the technical side of Estrades depended at the time that the software that would eventually be called Heimdall was created.

However, the scope of Heimdall rapidly extended thanks to the Hera modelling. Estrades’ ability to access new data sources has grown accordingly.

This work began at the end of 2023[3] as part of the incubation of the Estrades project. Estrades’ project leader, Guillaume PORTE, co-wrote the initial general specification, and validated the first versions of xHeimdall.

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Chi-Know-Po

Chinese Knowledge in Poetry (aka Chi-Know-Po, aka CKP) is a sinological project about the relationship between poetry and knowledge in medieval China.

It was the need for Estrades to import the very complete Chi-Know-Po database that really launched the development of Heimdall[3], implemented ine XQuery[4].

Subsequently, as part of the migration of the CKP database from a private server to an institutional server, certain security issues arose relating to the method of accessing the said database via Jupyter notebooks[5], developed in Python[6].

During joint working sessions with Marie BIZAIS, leader of the Chi-Know-Po project, the idea of pyHeimdall, a port of Heimdall to the Python language, emerged around summer 2024. The aim was to allow the CKP database to continue to exist in complete security, while making Heimdall more easily accessible to the Python community. And because Python is great[7].

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References