Today is held one of the many intersting sessions at the Digital Classicist Work-in-Progress seminars:

20 June (STB3) Dot Porter (University of Kentucky), The Son of Suda On Line: a next generation collaborative editing toolI am looking forward to seen the outcomes of this session.

I hope I may soon be able to read the outcome of this session.

As my project on Demetrios is concerned I mainly thought about pictures as illustrations within the commentary written for each fragment. The previous posts are written from this point of view. There are however at least two extremely convincing examples using pictures at another stage of a scholarly work, more precisely at the very first stage of an edition.

CHS: Manuscripts from the Marciana Library

Corpus Medicorum Graecorum

Last week I was reading two interesting contributions.

The first was written on be-virtual 7.2.08 . It is about the usage of internet in Asia and is displayed as a summary of part of the LIFT08 conference. According to this review, young people in Asia use internet to be in touch with their peers and to present themselves, their activities, their interests quasi permanently and instantaneously. It is then, it seems, much about self-presentation through a personally created profile, whit its shape left entirely to the authors (with all the risk of excess).

The second is an ongoing discussion on the Ancient World Bloggers Group (i.e. PD(Q) from Comments to a Post: What are we blogging for? , but there are several other related comments). The points I would like to single out here are the notes on two issues: the question of citations in, and of, a blog and then the issues of how and wherefore differentiate blogs from scholarly writings. Among the interesting points about blogging, as different from scholarly writing, are mentioned, among others, the opportunity of instantaneous conversation and the thematic coherence of some of them.
Both of those issues seem to me to be surprisingly close to what has been described in the first blog. As there seems not yet to be well-established guidelines and rules about blogs (even if it is no longer as naïve as I am simplifying here and there are a great number of ways allowing to guide a reader through the mass of information available, as proves the mentioned discussion) it is still basically an empty space one can shape and use in accordance with one’s thoughts, or habits. It appears therefore again to be a way of self-presentation, of sharing thoughts and news or reading about, or following, a topic of interest in a shape and at a speed oneself chooses. On the other hand, while reading the discussion and writing this comment, I found myself thinking about scholarly writings as a standard in itself one tries to achieve for one’s researches.

Since the Library of Alexandria, and notoriously there, the main task for libraries was to collect as many book as possible in order to show the wealth, literary commitment and the political influence of a Hellenistic sovereign. Soon this huge amount of rolls became however difficult to handle and methods for storage and cataloging had to be found. Otherwise the rolls or the texts they contained were lost again as soon as they entered the library.

In our modern age of digitization, this problem remains relevant and it could become the major task for librarians, as suggests Greg Crane in a paper given at the APA in Chicago. In fact, in future the role of the libraries could shift from the one of acquiring and collecting books, journal and texts to the one of exporting the texts already in their institutions and making them available to a readership, which will no longer come to them but read the sources from their homes through their computer.

To come back to the comparison with the Alexandrian library, the community of scholars living in the buildings of the Library seems, in this modern perspective, also a reality that may disappear. The major question would then also switch from the one asking who is allowed to enter an institution in order to consult books, to the one of who the institution is able to reach.

For Greg Crane’s paper, see “Planning a Digital Library for Classics from Image Books” (Gregory Crane, Tufts University) at The Stoa Consortium

Among many tools, blogs and web-pages on and about the ancient Greek language, I just want to emphasize two. One is based in Europe and the other in the US.
Greek Grammars and Other Resources for Learning Ancient Greek
CIRCE

There are now quite a few electronic journals for Classics. Some of them are listed by the Digitalclassicist.

Here is another example, which is slightly different in scope. It is devoted to didactics and methodology in the field of Greek and Latin and the contributions demonstrate this in a convincing way (Pegasus).

There are two article, which could be highlighted in relation to the present project:

• First there is the contribution by Lars Fengler on the recent movie on Troy. This modern reading and reshaping of an old story has, of course, its predecessors and can be added to the now long list of such revisions or re-makings of the Homeric story. Besides providing an useful tool for classrooms, Fengler’s contribution makes two interesting points: the table shows clearly how much of the Trojan story is not told in the Iliad. According to Fengler, we have to wait for 50 min before the film shows a scene referring to the first lines of the Homeric text. This statement leads us the the second contribution of Pegasus we shall discuss. The second interesting point in Fengler’s table, is the emphasis on the settings in his second column. For a project focusing on the topographical elements of the Homeric text and how there were read in Antiquity like the present one, a new list of settings from the Troad or from the Homeric text is very interesting. The choice of the mentioned places made by Petersen raises several questions. First of all, it is interesting to see that for a movie (not a book neither for an oral performance) the settings seem to be the most important elements to create the outline of the story. Second, making a choice always involves leaving out some items. This is true for Antiquity and for modern times. Having now this subjective choice made by a modern movie-maker, we could compare it to the choices ancient authors or commentators made and ask the question why some settings are thought to be more relevant to modern movie-watchers and other more appropriate for ancient audiences. One important difference is, of course, the presence of the Homeric poems in everyday life. This leads us again to the second article from Pegasus. (see Fengler, Pegasus-Onlinezeitschrift 2+3, 2005, 80-87).

• The second contribution is written by Gerson Schade on the classrooms in Antiquity. He discusses the new insights given by papyrological findings. In our discussion here, his article, as well as many others, emphasizes once again the importance Homer had in ancient education and how much the Trojan story was well-known in Antiquity. This is a major difference one has to bear in mind when creating or commenting on new version of the Tojan war (see Schade, Pegasus-Onlinezeitschrift IV/2 (2004), 55).

JSTOR has conducted a study on needs, challenges and missions of University presses in a digital age and has published its report. The study is based on interviews of several institutions involved in university publishing, coming however mainly from the US.

The authors of the study believe that University presses could play a more substantial role in the new publishing schemes than in the traditional ones. According to them Universities’ missions, as non-profit organizations, should also involve publishing scholarly results, besides producing them and transmitting them through eduction. They also emphasize that the new means promote sharing of information and results among scholars and create further discussion for specialists, which could again be of great interest for Universities. Another important aspect of these activities is a closer link to librarians and their needs for storage and creating new repositories for the electronic publications. And finally the authors believe that these changes could be a great opportunity for smaller institutions to be more attractive.

The study shows also that one should not create a too clear-cut distinction between printed books and new electronic publications. The documented change does not mean the end of the book, which still -and always may have- some advantages over electronic publications. It is therefore not the scholarly monographs, which will be the main target of electronic publications. There are other forms of scholarly writings, which are more suitable for electronic publications and the authors of the article mention for instance electronic journals as a good starting point (maybe relying on their own point of view). They also draw attention to the fact that there is also a wide range of methods to give access to these electronic publications, reaching from suscription-based publications to open access documents, each of these methods having advantages and inconvenients for scholars, readers and publishers.

One striking though could however be added:

- according to the graphs following the article, the part taken by publications from the fields of Humanities (books or journals) is amazingly high in the institutions selected for the study.

Scholarly research based in Humanities could then take an important part in shaping the development of the new medias for their own needs. But often, as their own domains of research do involve less technological aspects, the fields of Humanities are the most reluctant to move to electronic publications. There are no doubts good reasons for this situation. For the Humanities, the book has always be central, as source for information, object of study and goal to achieve. And the question remains of how much value a printed book may always have as objet of study and evidence of scholarly activity in the field of Humanities. There lays then another important challenge for electronic publications.

L. Brown, R. Griffiths, M. Rascoff, K. Guthrie, “University Publishing in a Digital Age”, JEP 10, 2007

The annual meeting of the TEI was held at the University of Maryland, College Parke last week. It allowed project from all kind of disciplines to be presented and to learn the latest development in the field.

see:
TEI@20
TEI

There has been much thinking about the way the new tools available on the WWW could or would influence old forms of writings. Commentaries are not excluded from these changes and their availability on Internet will transform radically their form and their scope. Some of the possible changes have been discussed by classical scholars themselves. Most of the transformations are ambiguous in their impact on scholarly works.

The infinite space available, for instance, is a great opportunity to go beyond the boundaries of a printed book. As Fowler puts it, the WWW “provides ourselves with infinite large margins to our text”. It allows also an interactivity between texts and visual or aural material and could be seen as a kind of virtual museum where the difference between exposed objects and texts tend to disappear. The new commentaries could also be seen as everchanging fluids of information built by layers and layers of (more or less personal) readings and comments, this in opposition to a monumental work aiming at becoming an long-lasting authority in the field. On the other hand, the absence of a “printed” or fixed version raises the question of authorship, of what a document is and of how to refer to it. Finally the huge amount of material that can be displayed on Internet gives more weight to the questions of order and hierarchy helping the reader to find his way in a chaotic variety, but without imposing on him a too ideologized view.

see:

Fowler D., Critisism as Commentary and Commentary as Criticism, in G.W. Most (ed.), Commentaries-Kommentare, Göttingen 1999, 426-442

Goldhill Simon,Wipe Youor Gloss in G.W. Most (ed.), Commentaries-Kommentare, Göttingen 1999, 380-425

McCarty W., A Network with a Tousand Entrances: Commentary in an Electronic Age?, in Gibson R.K./Shuttleworth Kraus Chr. (ed.), The Classical Commentaries, Histories, Practices, Theories, Leiden-Boston-Köln, 2002, 359-402

Shuttleworth Kraus Ch., Introduction: Reading Commentaries/Commentaries as Readings, in Gibson R.K./Shuttleworth Kraus Chr. (ed.), The Classical Commentaries, Histories, Practices, Theories, Leiden-Boston-Köln, 2002, 1-27