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Digital Humanities 2008 _____________________________________________________________________________ The Homer Multitext Project Casey Dué casey@chs.harvard.edu University of Houston, USA Mary Ebbott ebbott@chs.harvard.edu College of the Holy Cross, USA A. Ross Scaife scaife@gmail.com University of Kentucky, USA W. Brent Seales seales@netlab.uky.edu University of Kentucky, USA Christopher Blackwell cwblackwell@gmail.com Furman University, USA Neel Smith dnsmith.neel@gmail.com College of the Holy Cross, USA Dorothy Carr Porter dporter@uky.edu University of Kentucky, USA Ryan Baumann rfbaumann@gmail.com University of Kentucky, USA The Homer Multitext Project (HMT) is a new edition that presents the Iliad and Odyssey within the historical framework of its oral and textual transmission. The project begins from the position that these works, although passed along to us as written sources, were originally composed orally over a long period of time. What one would usually call “variants” from a base text are in fact evidence of the system of oral composition in performance and exhibit the diversity to be expected from an oral composition. These variants are not well refl ected in traditional modes of editing, which focus on the reconstruction of an original text. In the case of the works of Homer there is no “original text”. All textual variants need to be understood in the historical context, or contexts, in which they fi rst came to be, and it is the intention of the HMT to make these changes visible both synchronically and diachronically. The fi rst paper in our session is an introduction to these and other aspects of the HMT, presented by the editors of the project, Casey Dué and Mary Ebbott. Dué and Ebbott will discuss the need for a digital Multitext of the works of Homer, the potential uses of such an edition as we envision it, and the challenges in building the Multitext. The works of Homer are known to us through a variety of primary source materials. Although most students and scholars of the classics access the texts through traditional editions, those editions are only representations of existing material. A major aim of the HMT is to make available texts from a variety of sources, including high-resolution digital images of those sources. Any material which attests to a reading of Homer – papyrus fragment, manuscript, or inscription in stone – can and will be included in the ultimate edition. The HMT has begun incorporating images of sources starting with three important manuscripts: the tenth-century Marcianus Graecus Z. 454 (= 822), the eleventh-century Marcianus Graecus Z. 453 (= 821), and the twelfth/thirteenth-century Marcianus Graecus Z. 458 (= 841). Marcianus Graecus Z. 454, commonly called the “Venetus A,” is arguably the most important surviving copy of the Iliad, containing not only the full text of the poem but also several layers of commentary, or scholia, that include many variant readings of the text. The second paper in our session, presented by project collaborators W. Brent Seales and A. Ross Scaife, is a report on work carried out in Spring 2007 at the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana to digitize these manuscripts, focusing on 3D imaging and virtual fl attening in an effort to render the text (especially the scholia) more legible. Once text and images are compiled, they need to be published and made available for scholarly use, and to the wider public. The third paper, presented by the technical editors Christopher Blackwell and Neel Smith, will outline the protocols and software developed and under development to support the publication of the Multitext. Using technology that takes advantage of the best available practices and open source standards that have been developed for digital publications in a variety of fi elds, the Homer Multitext will offer free access to a library of texts and images, a machine-interface to that library and its indices, and tools to allow readers to discover and engage with the Homeric tradition. References: The Homer Multitext Project, description at the Center for Hellenic Studies website: http://chs.harvard.edu/chs/homer_ multitext Homer and the Papyri, http://chs.harvard.edu/chs/homer___ the_papyri_introduction Haslam, M. “Homeric Papyri and Transmission of the Text” in I. Morris and B. Powell, eds., A New Companion to Homer. Leiden, 1997. West, M. L. Studies in the text and transmission of the Iliad. München: K.G. Saur 2001 Digital Images of Iliad Manuscripts from the Marciana Library, First Drafts @ Classics@, October 26, 2007: http://zeus.chsdc. org/chs/manuscript_images _____________________________________________________________________________ 5
Digital Humanities 2008 _____________________________________________________________________________ Paper 1: The Homer Multitext Project: An Introduction Casey Dué and Mary Ebbott The Homer Multitext (HMT) of Harvard University’s Center for Hellenic Studies (CHS) in Washington, D.C., seeks to take advantage of the digital medium to give a more accurate visual representation of the textual tradition of Homeric epic than is possible on the printed page. Most signifi cantly, we intend to reveal more readily the oral performance tradition in which the epics were composed, a tradition in which variation from performance to performance was natural and expected. The Homeric epics were composed again and again in performance: the digital medium, which can more readily handle multiple texts, is therefore eminently suitable for a critical edition of Homeric poetry—indeed, the fullest realization of a critical edition of Homer may require a digital medium. In other words, the careful construction of a digital library of Homeric texts, plus tools and accompanying material to assist in interpreting those texts, can help us to recover and better realize evidence of what preceded the written record of these epics. In this presentation we will explain how the oral, traditional poetry of these epics and their textual history call for a different editorial practice from what has previously been done and therefore require a new means of representation. We will also demonstrate how the Homer Multitext shares features with but also has different needs and goals from other digital editions of literary works that were composed in writing. Finally, we will discuss our goal of making these texts openly available so that anyone can use them for any research purpose, including purposes that we can’t ourselves anticipate. The oral traditional nature of Homeric poetry makes these texts that have survived different in important ways from texts that were composed in writing, even those that also survive in multiple and differing manuscripts. We have learned from the comparative fi eldwork of Milman Parry and Albert Lord, who studied and recorded a living oral tradition during the 1930s and again in the 1950s in what was then Yugoslavia, that the Homeric epics were composed in performance during a long oral tradition that preceded any written version (Parry 1971, Lord 1960, Lord 1991, and Lord 1995; see also Nagy 1996a and Nagy 2002). In this tradition, the singer did not memorize a static text prior to performance, but would compose the song as he sang it. One of the most important revelations of the fi eldwork of Parry and Lord is that every time the song is performed in an oral composition-in-performance tradition, it is composed anew. The singers themselves do not strive to innovate, but they nevertheless compose a new song each time (Dué 2002, 83-89). The mood of the audience or occasion of performance are just two factors that can infl uence the length of a song or a singer’s choices between competing, but still traditional, elements of plot. The term “variant,” as employed by textual critics when evaluating witnesses to a text, is not appropriate for such a compositional process. Lord explained the difference this way: “the word multiform is more accurate than ‘variant,’ because it does not give preference or precedence to any one word or set of words to express an idea; instead it acknowledges that the idea may exist in several forms” (Lord 1995, 23). Our textual criticism of Homeric epic, then, needs to distinguish what may genuinely be copying mistakes and what are performance multiforms: that is, what variations we see are very likely to be part of the system and the tradition in which these epics were composed (Dué 2001). Once we begin to think about the variations as parts of the system rather than as mistakes or corruptions, textual criticism of the Homeric texts can then address fresh questions. Some of the variations we see in the written record, for example, reveal the fl exibility of this system. Where different written versions record different words, but each phrase or line is metrically and contextually sound, we must not necessarily consider one “correct” or “Homer” and the other a “mistake” or an “interpolation.” Rather, each could represent a different performance possibility, a choice that the singer could make, and would be making rapidly without reference to a set text (in any sense of that word). Yet it is diffi cult to indicate the parity of these multiforms in a standard critical edition on the printed page. One version must be chosen for the text on the upper portion of the page, and the other recorded variations must be placed in an apparatus below, often in smaller text, a placement that necessarily gives the impression that these variations are incorrect or at least less important. Within a digital medium, however, the Homer Multitext will be able to show where such variations occur, indicate clearly which witnesses record them, and allow users to see them in an arrangement that more intuitively distinguishes them as performance multiforms. Thus a digital criticism—one that can more readily present parallel texts—enables a more comprehensive understanding of these epics. An approach to editing Homer that embraces the multiformity of both the performative and textual phases of the tradition—that is to say, a multitextual approach—can convey the complexity of the transmission of Homeric epic in a way that is simply impossible on the printed page. We know that the circumstances of the composition of the Homeric epics demand a new kind of scholarly edition, a new kind of representation. We believe that a digital criticism of the witnesses to the poetry provides a means to construct one. Now the mission is to envision and create the Multitext so that it is true to these standards. The framework and tools that will connect these texts and make them dynamically useful are, as Peter Robinson has frankly stated (Robinson 2004 and Robinson 2005), the challenge that lies before us, as it does for other digital scholarly editions. How shall we highlight multiforms so as to make them easy to fi nd and compare? We cannot simply have a list of variants, as some digital editions have done, for this would take them once again out of their context within the textual transmission and in many ways repeat the false impression that a printed apparatus gives. Breaking away from a print model is, as others have observed (Dahlström 2000, Robinson 2004), not as easy as it might seem, and digital editions have generally not succeeded yet in doing _____________________________________________________________________________ 6
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