Editio maior is an umbrella for s series of projects and initiatives by Holger Essler to create the digital edition of papyri. There is a long-standing collaboration with the Centro Internazionale per lo Studio dei Papiri Ercolanesi, Naples, the Institut für Papyrologie, Heidelberg, and Massimo Magnani, Parma. So far, 643 texts have been encoded in this way.

Current projects

• The Thesaurus Herculanensium Voluminum (THV) is being created in collaboration with the Centro Internazionale per lo Studio dei Papiri Ercolanesi, Naples. The final goal is a comprehensive database of all edited texts from Herculaneum. So far it contains 178 texts and 297 inventory numbers.
• E(dendo)discimus The digital edition of papyri has been part of Holger Essler's teaching in Venice and Würzburg for years. Over the years 196 texts have been encoded as practical training and to expand the corpora.
• INTEGRATION – INTEllectual miGRATION aims at enriching our knowledge of Ancient Greek and Roman philosophical thought through the evidence provided by Greek and Latin papyri. So far 2 texts have been encoded by the unit at Ca'Foscari (Venice).

Completed projects

• ENCODE From September 1, 2020 to October 31, 2023, this joint project under the leadership of Bologna worked on the promotion of collaborative, participatory and intercultural digital access to the ancient written heritage through new didactic tools. One focus was on the encoding of fragmentary texts. In addition to creating an online course on encoding papyri (on #dariaTeach) Würburg encoded 57 texts as part of a workshop and individual work.
• Ekdosis - DAAD-funding From 1 April 2018 to 31 March 2020, Ekdosis was funded as a joint project by Würzburg and Parma by the German Academic Exchange Service and the Italian Ministero dell'Istruzione, dell'Università e della Ricerca as part of the project-related exchange of persons program. In the course of several workshops and research trips, 62 texts were encoded.
• Anagnosis: From October 1, 2014 to December 31, 2019, Anagnosis was funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research as a sub-project of Kallimachos. Center for Digital Edition and Quantitative Analysis. The aim was to automatically link transcriptions of papyri and manuscripts with the corresponding image file. In the course of this project, some texts were encoded, partly as part of the Thesaurus Herculanensium Voluminum, 148 texts as separate contributions to the Digital Corpus of Literary Papyri.
• Digital Corpus of Literary Papyri was a joint project funded by the NeH/DFG Bilateral Digital Program and lead by Heidelberg and New York. Running from July 2013 to August 2017 it created a digital platform for editions of literary papyri, which is now part of papyri.info. As a partner, Würzburg contributed the texts of the Thesaurus Herculanensium Voluminum and added further texts in cooperation with Anagnosis (see above).