Domain-Driven Design and Domain-Specific Languages in the Digital Editing of Herculaneum Papyri

This contribution explores the role of Domain-Driven Design (DDD) and Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) in the digital editing of ancient texts, with a focus on the Herculaneum papyri within the framework of the ERC GreekSchools project. The project addresses the challenges of creating reliable digital editions of fragmentary and complex sources, where traditional scholarly practices must be reconciled with computational methods. Building on principles of DDD, we propose a methodology that integrates the design of digital scholarly editing tools with the conceptual models and workflows already familiar to papyrologists and textual scholars. Within this framework, DSLs emerge as a powerful means of encoding scholarly conventions while simultaneously enabling automation and interoperability. The development of DSLs tailored to textual scholarship allows for the formalization of editorial practices in ways that remain faithful to established conventions but also open new possibilities for computational analysis. Concrete examples will be drawn from the CoPhi Editor platform, developed as part of GreekSchools, which implements a DSL-based approach to Digital Scholarly Editing (DSE). These case studies highlight not only how DSLs facilitate the encoding of editions in TEI/EpiDoc XML, but also how they support tasks such as textual restoration and the systematic exploration of editorial hypotheses.