Homer’s Odyssey (Books I–IV) Text‑and‑Metadata Collections & C. Hering Homoeopathic Archivzettel Supplement

Overview

This composite collection brings together two distinct thematic groups assembled in the D59EE32S repository: (1) digitised English transcriptions of the first four books of Homer’s Odyssey—each paired with a machine‑readable entity‑relationship JSON file and a PINAX bibliographic record; and (2) a nineteenth‑century German‑language homoeopathic archival supplement (“Archivzettel Beilage”) to the Correspondenzblatt of an unnamed medical academy, authored by C. Hering and G. H. Bute. All materials are presented as plain‑text, JSON, and scanned‑PDF files with OCR transcription, and are publicly accessible via the Arke Institute URL.

Background

The Odyssey is a foundational Greek epic composed ca. 8th century BCE. The four books included here (I–IV) cover the gods’ council, Telemachus’s early actions, his visits to Nestor at Pylos and Menelaus at Sparta, and the associated mythic digressions. Each book was digitised from an English prose rendering of the ancient text and annotated through a modern named‑entity extraction project that assigns stable alphanumeric identifiers to characters, places, objects, and narrative events, enabling computational literary analysis.

The homoeopathic component originates from a 27 April 1900 supplement to the Correspondenzblatt, designed by C. Hering to accelerate the distribution of clinical case “Zettel” among physicians in Central Europe (Altenau, Nieder‑Dornburg, Leoben, Schipbach). The scanned page includes a preface, procedural instructions, cost and distribution details, and a printer’s imprint, offering insight into early twentieth‑century medical communication practices.

Contents

• Odyssey Book I–IV (four sub‑collections): each contains
- `book_0x.txt` – full English prose transcription of the respective book. - `relationships.json` – JSON mapping of 70‑90 narrative entities (gods, mortals, locations, objects) to unique identifiers for network analysis. - `pinax.json` – PINAX metadata record (creator = Homer, language = en, public‑domain status, subject headings, geographic terms).
• Hering Medical Notes – Archivzettel Beilage:

- A single scanned image (≈445 KB) of the 1900 supplement, reproduced as PDF with OCR text. - German‑language editorial content outlining the purpose, printing logistics, subscription fees, distribution network, and meeting announcement for the academy’s homoeopathic society.

Scope

The collection covers the narrative content of Odyssey Books I–IV (approximately 10 000 words total) and provides complete, indexed digital metadata for each. Geographic coverage includes mythic locales such as Ithaca, Olympus, Pylos, Lacedaemon, and Troy. The homoeopathic supplement is limited to the inaugural “Archivzettel” issue; it does not contain the subsequent case‑experience slips. Temporal coverage spans the epic’s composition (ca. 8th century BCE) and the modern digitisation (early 21st century), together with the archival document’s original date of 27 April 1900. The collection serves scholars of classical literature, digital humanities, and the history of medicine, offering both literary primary sources and a rare glimpse into early homoeopathic scholarly communication.