Credits
This map is made of other people's cataloguing. The libraries and projects below did the work of describing the scholarship on Origen; what is added here is an arrangement of their metadata and a vocabulary for reading it.
Romain Girardi · August 2026
Where the project comes from
At the closing round table of Origeniana XIV, in Boston on 14 August 2026, a participant asked the question the field asks itself: how does one say anything new about Origen, given the mass of what has been written and the impossibility of reading it all. Origenality is one answer, proposed publicly that afternoon — map the ground already covered, so that the uncovered ground can be seen. It is a doctoral side project, kept deliberately modest in scope: metadata, not full text.
The source behind this version
Everything on the map today comes from one catalogue.
| Source | What it gives | Licence |
|---|---|---|
| Index Theologicus (IxTheo), Universitätsbibliothek Tübingen, with K10plus | the 1 632 records mapped here: titles, authors, years, languages, containers, subject headings, identifiers. Harvested through the authority record for Origen (GND 118590235) on 15 August 2026. | Metadata under CC0 1.0. Summaries carried by the catalogue are shown with this credit and a link to the record. |
Harvested, and credited where they are read
No record of theirs is mapped or counted yet, while their relevance filtering is settled. Where one of them summarises a publication IxTheo also catalogues, that summary appears on the record with the credit below and a link back to its notice.
| Source | Role | Licence or terms |
|---|---|---|
| OpenAlex | citation counts and open identifiers | CC0 1.0 |
| Crossref | DOI skeleton | Open metadata policy |
| Semantic Scholar | summaries and open-access enrichment | ODC-BY 1.0 — attribution required, and carried on every record that shows one of its summaries |
| Isidore (Huma-Num) | French-language scholarship, aggregating Persée, OpenEdition and HAL | Terms of the aggregator and of each provider |
| theses.fr | French doctoral theses and their juries | Licence Ouverte / Open Licence |
| Dialnet | Spanish-language scholarship | Terms of Dialnet, Universidad de La Rioja |
| SBN (ICCU) | Italian monographs | Terms of ICCU |
| Adamantius — repertorio bibliografico (GIROTA) | the current Origen bibliography since 1994, the section headings that shaped the theme vocabulary, and the analytical notes shown on 77 records | Morcelliana / GIROTA — written to on 15 August 2026; credited on every record, removed on request |
| BIBP, Université Laval | patristic notices with weighted descriptors and analytical summaries | Written to on 15 August 2026; no BIBP summary is shown on this version |
Summaries: credit, and removal on request
A summary is someone's prose. It is shown with their name on it, and it comes down when they ask.
Every summary displayed in the Explorer names the database that wrote it and links to the record there. 381 of the 1 632 mapped records carry one. 166 were written by IxTheo itself and 215 by another database that describes the same publication: OpenAlex, GIROTA / Adamantius, ISIDORE (Huma-Num), Crossref, Semantic Scholar. A summary written for this project, where one exists, says so instead of naming a database.
How to have summaries removed. Write to romain.girardi@univ-cotedazur.fr, naming the database, the imprint or the article. No justification is needed and none will be asked for. The summaries come off the site and out of the next data release, and the record keeps its bibliographic metadata and its link, so nothing is lost to the reader but the paragraph. Requests are answered as they arrive, and each one is logged in the project's data policy with its date and its scope.
The partner databases were written to on 15 August 2026, before any of this went up: BIBP at Laval, GIROTA for the Adamantius repertorio, and IxTheo at Tübingen. The same offer stands for any publisher or author who finds their prose here.
Reference works the vocabulary leans on
- Clavis Origenis, ed. Samuel Fernández and Alfons Fürst (Adamantiana 30, Münster, 2024): the register of Origen's works, their sigla and their transmission, behind the thirty-three identifiers of the works axis.
- Adamantius, repertorio bibliografico (GIROTA): its published sections gave the axis of author and milieu in the theme vocabulary.
- GND and VIAF authority files, for the identity of Origen and for the guard against the homonym Origenes Platonicus.
- BiblIndex (Lyon): not a source of records here, but a standing precedent for what a reference index of patristic citation can be.
Typefaces and code
- EB Garamond, by Georg Duffner and Octavio Pardo, and
Literata, by TypeTogether — both under the SIL Open Font Licence 1.1.
Their licences travel with the files, in
assets/fonts/. - The map, the charts and the packing are written for this site in plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript. There is no third-party code on any page, and no page makes a request to any host other than the one serving it.
Author and standing
Origenality is written and maintained by Romain Girardi, doctoral candidate, University of Geneva. Sole author of the site, the vocabulary and the code.
The project is academic and non-commercial. It cites rather than replaces: every record links back to the catalogue that describes it, and the point of the exercise is to send readers to the work of others.
Corrections are welcome, particularly on the vocabulary. A term that is wrong in a controlled vocabulary is wrong on every record that carries it, which is a good reason to publish the vocabulary rather than hide it.