Research desks
The library is one flat list of corpora (the shelf map is The Library; the code-per-language table is Languages). This page is the other view of the same sources: the research desks (the CLI calls them axes) — scholarly hats, each worn to work one tradition.
A desk is not a folder. It is a tag over the source list, and a source wears every tag it serves — the Vulgate sits at the Classicist’s desk for its Latin and at the Biblical scholar’s for its scripture; the UD treebanks answer to nine desks at once. Multi-membership is the point, not an accident to be tidied away. The full rationale, with the dual-tagging and whole-source-membership rulings, is docs/axes.md.
Each desk below leads with its persona — the hat’s one-line
self-description, printed verbatim by nabu axis — and links to its own
page, where the member shelves, live holdings, instruments, CLI recipes
and terminal setup live.
New here? The Quickstart sets up the library in minutes.
The 30 desks
Jump to a desk: classical · romance · epigraphy · slavic · germanic · celtic · italic · etym · biblical · hebrew · syriac · ethiopic · arabic · hittite · cuneiform · egyptian · iranian · indic · buddhist · tibetan · korean · sea · sinitic · japonic · turkic · mongolic · americas · africa · baltic · local
classical
The Classicist — Greek and Latin letters read whole, Homer to the late grammarians.
The Greco-Roman literary lane: the Perseus canons and First1KGreek, Diorisis, LSJ and Lewis & Short, the grc/lat treebanks, and the Vulgate wearing its Latin-literature hat beside its scripture one.
romance
The Romanist — the Latin-to-vernacular continuum, charter Latin to Roland to the troubadours.
The Latin-to-vernacular continuum: CroALa’s medieval and neo-Latin opens the desk; late-antique prose, the MGH critical editions, and the Old French treebanks and texts join as their shelves land.
epigraphy
The Papyrologist-Epigraphist — reads what survives on stone, sherd, papyrus and tablet, lacunae and all.
Documentary corpora at the artifact grain: papyri, the Latin/Greek and Levantine and Sicilian inscription databases, the Continental Celtic, Italic and Tyrsenian editions, ogham stones, Hittite tablets — the shelves where fragment search and findspots earn their keep.
slavic
The Slavicist — Cyril and Methodius to the damaskini, canon to vernacular.
Old Church Slavonic and its daughters: the OCS/Old Russian treebanks, the gospel and monument corpora, Freising, the Slovenian historical lane with PriLit’s earliest narrative prose (1643–1866), Balkan damaskini, and the Church Slavonic dictionary shelves.
germanic
The Germanicist — Gothic and Old English to the Norse sagas and the runestones, the word-hoard of all three branches.
Gothic on the proiel/ud treebanks beside the West and North Germanic branches: Old English verse (ASPR) and prose (ISWOC) with Bosworth-Toller, Old Icelandic (IcePaHC via ud), Old Norwegian and the Poetic Edda (Menotec), the Medieval Nordic manuscript archive (Menota), the Corpus of Middle English (CME), early-modern English at scale (EEBO-TCP), Beowulf again in Klaeber’s edition with its aligned English (perseus-anglit), the Old Saxon Heliand (HeliPaD), Middle High German manuscripts (ReM), Middle Low German and Low Rhenish (ReN), the German print era whole (DTA, 1473–1969), and the runic inscriptions (Rundata, dual-tagged epigraphy).
celtic
The Celticist — from Lepontic stones to the Old Irish glossators.
Continental Celtic epigraphy (RIIG, Lexicon Leponticum and its word shelf), ogham Primitive Irish, CorPH’s Early Irish, the St Gall Priscian glosses in Latin and Old Irish, the UD Old Irish treebanks, the kaikki attested-Celtic extracts riding wiktionary-recon, and the GPC open subset as the Welsh dictionary shelf.
italic
The Italicist — the languages of pre-Roman Italy, Oscan to Etruscan to Raetic.
The Sabellic, Etruscan, Venetic and Raetic epigraphic shelves (CEIPoM, ItAnt, the Etruscan editions, TIR), Lepontic at the Celtic border, I.Sicily’s island mix, and the Sabellic-to-Latin loan lane.
etym
The Comparative Indo-Europeanist — laryngeals, reflex chains, the long descent of words.
The reconstruction shelves: the kaikki proto-extracts, IE-CoR cognacy, LIV, the Leiden Latin dictionary, StarLing’s bases, and the curated loan edges. Non-IE lanes of the same shelves ride their own axes too — dual-tagging, never folding.
biblical
The Biblical scholar — one text across Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Syriac, Coptic and English witnesses.
The cross-language scripture hat: the Masoretic shelves and the Scrolls, the Greek NT, Vulgate and WEB, Peshitta and the Syriac corpus, Coptic Scriptorium, the Targums, and the OSHB-BHSA bridging module. The hebrew and syriac language desks coexist with this hat by design.
hebrew
The Hebraist — Masoretic vowels, Qumran consonants, the Aramaic of the Targums.
The Hebrew-and-Aramaic language desk beside the cross-language biblical hat: OSHB, BHSA, DSS, SDBH and the lexicon shelf, the Sefaria Targums, the bridging crosswalk, and IIP’s inscriptions of Israel/Palestine.
syriac
The Syriacist — the Peshitta and the estrangela bookshelf.
The Syriac language desk: the ETCBC Peshitta and the Digital Syriac Corpus, riding beside the biblical hat by design.
ethiopic
The Ethiopicist — Aksum to the scriptoria: Enoch, Jubilees, and the Geʿez Bible.
The Ethiopic (Gǝʿǝz) desk in the Oriental-Christian neighborhood: the Beta maṣāḥǝft transcriptions (the Geʿez Bible, 1 Enoch, Jubilees, the Kebra nagast, royal chronicles), Dillmann’s Lexicon, and the TraCES analyzed corpus with its Aksumite inscriptions — riding beside the biblical hat by design.
arabic
The Arabist — the Islamicate library whole, Quran and hadith to falsafa and adab.
The OpenITI lane: premodern Arabic and Persian literature at corpus scale — Quran and hadith, history and biography, law and falsafa, the dīwāns and adab — with the Persian shelf (Ḥāfiẓ, Ibn Sīnā) riding the same Arabic-script fold that makes ara/fas cross-searchable — and DiCCAS, disaster accounts excerpted from ten classical sources with catastrophe terminology tagged — and the KITAB text-reuse instrument: upstream-computed reuse edges joining the held OpenITI books pairwise on the intertext desk.
hittite
The Hittitologist — Anatolia in cuneiform, KBo and KUB by tablet and line.
The Hittite desk: TLHdig’s tablet corpus (dual-tagged cuneiform by ruling — its lines also carry Akkadian, Sumerian, Luwian, Hattic, Hurrian), the glossed Hittite texts, the UD Hittite treebank, and ACLT’s Hieroglyphic Luwian inscriptions.
cuneiform
The Assyriologist — Sumerian, Akkadian, Ugaritic, Hittite: the tablet world entire.
The cuneiform-culture shelves: Oracc and CDLI, ETCSL’s Sumerian literature, eBL’s fragments, the Copenhagen Ugaritic Corpus (alphabetic cuneiform), and TLHdig shared with the Hittitologist.
egyptian
The Egyptologist — hieroglyphs to Coptic, one language across four millennia of script.
The Egyptian-Coptic continuum: the TLA corpora and word list (tla-hf, aes, aed), the Coptic lexicon with its egy-cop crosswalk, and Coptic Scriptorium.
iranian
The Iranologist — the Avesta to the Achaemenid inscriptions, Old Iranian liturgy toward Middle Persian.
The Iranian-language lane, Zoroastrian canon at its heart: the TITUS Avesta (Old Iranian liturgy — grant-gated private research, not a public holding) and the Old Persian of the Achaemenid royal inscriptions, which ride the ORACC and CDLI cuneiform shelves whole — their trilinguals’ Old Persian column the desk’s shared lane with the tablet world — classical Persian literature (Hafez’s Divan with its aligned English, perseus-farsilit) — and the Middle Iranian east: Skjærvø’s British Library Khotanese editions, the Invisible East catalog’s Khotanese/Sogdian/Bactrian/Judeo-Persian documents, and the trilingual ŠKZ inscription with its Parthian and Middle Persian columns.
indic
The Indologist — Veda to sastra, the Sanskrit library and its instruments.
The Sanskrit, Prakrit and Pali lane: GRETIL and SARIT, the DCS treebank, Monier-Williams, the Vedic UD treebank, and SuttaCentral’s canon.
buddhist
The Buddhologist — the dharma across the Pali, Sanskrit, Chinese and Tibetan canons.
Cross-cutting by design: SuttaCentral, CBETA, SARIT, and GRETIL whole — membership is whole-source, so GRETIL rides here although only part of its shelf is Buddhist — and the Derge Kangyur and Tengyur: the fourth canon leg.
tibetan
The Tibetologist — the Land of Snows from Dunhuang documents to the complete Derge canon.
The Tibetan desk opens with the canon whole: the Public-Domain Digital Derge Kangyur and Tengyur (Esukhia’s exact-representation of the woodblocks, Toh numbers as the crosswalk key), 84000’s English translation layer, OTDO’s Old Tibetan documents, and the gold-annotation lane (SOAS POS, the Annals and Chronicle); the lexicon shelves join as their packets land.
korean
The Koreanist — the hanmun state record and the first hangul vernacular.
The Korean desk opens on the dynastic record itself: the Veritable Records of Joseon (sillok) in the original hanmun via NIKH’s open XML dumps, joined by the Goryeosa family on the same DTD (the pre-Joseon dynastic history, its chronological digest, and the state council’s daily register), with the Seungjeongwon ilgi and the ITKC classics to follow, and the Middle Korean Wikisource shelf as the vernacular leg. The OKHC historical slice widens the desk beyond the state record: the Samguk sagi (the oldest Korean history), the Ilseongnok, the ITKC munjip mass, and the AKS/Kyujanggak/NHM old-literature shelves, each record carrying its own PD-vs-nc label.
sea
The Southeast Asianist — the Indic cosmopolis at its eastern edge: Sanskrit charters beside the vernaculars they seeded.
Epigraphy-first, opening on the DHARMA corpora: the Old Khmer inscriptions (the Cœdès K-numbers), the Campā corpus, the Nusantara charters (Old Malay, Old Javanese, Old Sundanese), the Pyu corpus, and the Bagan Old Burmese inscriptions — with the kakawin critical editions as the literary wing and the Old Javanese Wordnet as its glossary, joining as their packets land.
sinitic
The Sinologist — the classical Chinese written world and its phonological deep past.
Literary and classical Chinese with its reconstruction instruments: Kanripo and CBETA, TLS, Baxter-Sagart and the Qieyun-system database, Unihan, the Heian hanzi dictionaries, the UD lzh treebanks, SuttaCentral’s Agamas, the kaikki zh extract riding wiktionary-recon — the Đại Việt classical shelf (the sinographic cosmopolis reaching Vietnam, as sillok reaches Korea) — and the desk’s instruments: the CHGIS historical gazetteer (TGAZ placenames, 221 BCE–1911) and the CBDB prosopography artifact (~658k persons, held for the persons-layer ruling).
japonic
The Japanologist — Old Japanese song to the Sino-Japanese dictionary tradition.
The Japanese lane, premodern-first: Genji in Ikeda’s critical edition at manuscript-line grain, the Kokinshū and two Man’yōshū witnesses in NIJL’s TEI, the みんなで翻刻 crowd-transcription mass, and the NRCT historical gazetteer — beside the ONCOJ corpus and lexicon, EDRDG’s dictionaries, HDIC and Unihan shared with the Sinologist, and the kaikki ojp extract riding wiktionary-recon.
turkic
The Turkologist — the runiform steppe to the Chagatai chancery, one literary continuum.
The Turkic historical lane, opening on ATMO’s Jarring-collection Turki manuscripts (line-by-line TEI, Perso-Arabic with transliteration) and the kaikki Old Turkic / Old Uyghur / Chagatai extracts — the Wilkens Old Uyghur dictionary and the runiform inscriptions joining as their packets and asks land.
mongolic
The Mongolist — the Secret History’s empire in its own words, hanzi transcription beside romanization.
The Mongolic-Tungusic lane, opening on Street’s romanized Secret History via Monumenta Altaica (use granted by the site’s maintainer, 2026-09-27) — the kaikki Manchu extract, the zh.wikisource hanzi transmission text and the Manchu corpus asks joining as they land.
americas
The Americanist — the colonial record of the indigenous Americas, Zapotec testaments to the Andean chronicle.
The indigenous-Americas lane, colonial-era first: Ticha’s Valley Zapotec TEI (Córdova’s 1578 Arte, Agüero’s 1666 Miscelaneo, the testaments and their period Spanish translations), the Royal Danish Library’s Guaman Poma Nueva corónica (Spanish with Quechua and Aymara passages), and the UD Tupinambá and Old Guaraní treebanks of the Jesuit grammars and catechisms — the modern UD treebanks of American languages deliberately out.
africa
The Africanist — Ajami manuscripts beyond the Nile–Ethiopia axis, Hausa praise poems to Wolof Murid verse.
Africa beyond the Egyptian and Ethiopic desks: the NEH Ajami collection’s Hausa, Mandinka, Fula and Wolof manuscripts in romanized transcription, the public-domain reference shelf in archive.org’s uncorrected OCR — Griffith’s Old Nubian texts, the Swahili of Steere, Taylor, Büttner and Velten, Schön’s and Robinson’s Hausa, Hanoteau’s Tuareg grammar and Kabyle poetry, Koelle’s Vai — and the Old Nubian UD treebank, the medieval Nile kingdoms’ language parsed word by word.
baltic
The Balticist — the Lutheran-print littoral, Mancelius’ Latvian to Agricola’s Finnish.
The early vernaculars of the eastern Baltic shore, where the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation first put Baltic and Finnic languages into print: SENIE’s Old Latvian (1507–1800 — the catechisms, Mancelius, Glück’s Bible, the manuscript dictionaries), with the Old Literary Finnish and the Old Lithuanian, Old Prussian and Old Estonian shelves joining as their packets land.
local
The Librarian — the owner’s own shelves: dossiers, library, notes, and the sources’ own records.
The canonical-memory shelves (architecture §16): local-language, local-lemmas, local-library, local-notes, local-source.
The desk listing on this page is a projection of the live registry
(config/axes.yml), regenerated with rake site:axes and pinned to the
registry by the suite — it can never silently drift from the sources it
documents.