Lead White in Context Across Greco-Roman Sources: The First TheSu XML Annotation Dataset of Arguments and Recipes, with Graph Visualisations and Discussion of their Design
Presents the first public dataset encoded with TheSu XML. The dataset contains annotations of Greco-Roman sources discussing lead white (ฯฮนฮผฯฮธฮนฮฟฮฝ / cerussa) from four ancient Greek texts (Plato, Theophrastus, Dioscorides, Plutarch) and two modern scientific studies. The annotations capture both explicit content and implicit reasoning through close reading, following established practices in history and philology. The open-source Python tool TheSu-to-DOT converts the annotations into hierarchical argumentation maps for close analysis and network graphs for comparative analysis across sources. The paper examines the rationale for this dual visualisation strategy and presents case studies including individual arguments, cross-source discourse comparisons, and detailed breakdowns of lead white recipes.
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