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Welcome to the GitHub Pliny project homepage.
The Pliny project was primarily active from 2005 to 2015, and during that time aimed to promote some thinking that would look broadly at the provision of tools to support what I called “traditional” humanities scholarship. One of its products was a piece of software, also called Pliny, which facilitated note-taking and annotation -- a key element of Humanities research for many scholars. It went further than this, however, by providing a set of facilities which allowed its user to integrate these initial notes into a representation of an evolving personal interpretation -- perhaps one of the key goals of scholarly research. Some recent work has centered on models for how materials created in Pliny could most effectively facilitate the writing of a research article.
Pliny was free software, but is no longer available. Keeping it alive and working as operating environments change stopped being practical some time ago, although I keep a personal operating copy of Pliny for personal use. If you are interesting in trying out Pliny, get in touch with me and I’d be glad to see you could be set up with a working version of the software. The code is open-source and is available from this GitHub repo.
If you'd like to comment on Pliny, please get in touch with me at my email address john.bradley@kcl.ac.uk.
Why is this project and software called Pliny? As will become evident from the rest of this website, the Pliny project was about some of the impacts that could arise from the digital handling of notetaking. In this light, I am beholden to Willard McCarty for the name, who pointed me at Pliny the Elder -- an individual who was famous in classical Roman times as someone who expressed his curiosity about all things by constantly recording notes about them. Apparently, he seems to have written quite a few works (Michel Barran says the number of works is 75 in his article about Pliny in Eric Weisstein's World of Biography), but the only one to survive is his encyclopaedic Historia Naturalis, which orders and presents his collected notes under a large number of topics. It is perhaps characteristic of his curiosity that he collapsed and died while travelling to see Vesuvius first-hand (and to rescue friends) during its eruption in 79 C.E.
Pliny's initial development was made possible by the provision of leave time for me in the academic year 2005-6 so that I could focus on Pliny's development. I am much indebted to Harold Short (then director of CCH) and King's College London (KCL) for making this possible. Furthermore, in 2008 the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded KCL one of its MATC awards to Pliny. The money provided made it possible for more work to be done: focusing on how Pliny could integrate with other Digital Humanities research tools by developing a prototype WordHoard application that integrated with Pliny. I wish to thank the Mellon Foundation for making this possible.