A Database Platform for Digital Cultural Heritage

The Srophé App is an open source database designed to support digital humanities research in the history of culture. Srophé [pronounced, Srō-Fay] is an eXist-DB application which enables researchers to encode and link historical data, with a focus on texts, persons, geography, events, and material artefacts. The Srophé App was created as the digital publication platform for Syriaca.org: The Syriac Reference Portal and thus its original use case was pre-modern cultural heritage data associated with the Syriac language (a dialect of Aramaic). Because the Srophé App architecture is built on the broad XML guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative. (TEI) and the principles of Linked Open Data, the Srophé app has also proved useful for digitally representing data from a variety of cultures across different time periods ranging from the architecture of medieval China to the geography of early modern South America to nineteenth-century British literature (soming soon). The app is capable of handling many kinds of data including full text literary copora, encyclopedias, online journals, geographical gazetteers, prosopographies, and annotated bibliographies (building its functionality on top of Zotero).

Funding for the Srophé App has been provided by The Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the International Bazan Prize Foundation, Vanderbilt University, Texas A&M University, and Marquette University. The Srophé App is developed by the team of researchers in Vanderbilt University's Digital Heritage Research Cluster and the Center of Digital Humanities Research at Texas A&M University. The lead developer is Winona Salesky.