Rome Wasn't Digitized in a Day - Council on Library and Information ...

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3 <strong>in</strong> the check<strong>in</strong>g of all the texts, both to correct transcriptional errors and to provide a consistent markup scheme. 5 This generation also saw the development of BetaCode by classicists to capture ancient languages such as Greek and Coptic. A third class of corpora, which evolved <strong>in</strong> the 1980s, <strong>in</strong>volved tak<strong>in</strong>g professionally entered text and semantically mark<strong>in</strong>g it up <strong>in</strong> SGML/XML, such as with the markup designed by the Text Encod<strong>in</strong>g Initiative (TEI); 6 an example is the Perseus Digital Library (PDL). A fourth generation of corpora <strong>in</strong>volved image-front collections that provided users with page images that <strong>in</strong>cluded hidden uncorrected optical character recognition (OCR) that could be searched. This strategy, popularized <strong>in</strong> the 1990s, has driven mass-digitization projects such as Google Books 7 and the Open Content Alliance (OCA). 8 Stewart et al. call for a fifth generation of corpora that synthesize the strengths of the four previous generations while also allow<strong>in</strong>g decentralized contributions from users; us<strong>in</strong>g automated methods to create both scalable and semantic markup; and synthesiz<strong>in</strong>g “the scholarly demands of capital <strong>in</strong>tensive, manually constructed collections” such as Perseus, the TLG, and the PHI databank of Lat<strong>in</strong> literature, with “the <strong>in</strong>dustrial scale of very large, “million book” libraries now emerg<strong>in</strong>g.” In an article written <strong>in</strong> 1959, James McDonough explored the potential of classics and comput<strong>in</strong>g. He opened by not<strong>in</strong>g that it took James Turney Allen almost 43 years to create a concordance of Euripides, a task that a newly available IBM computer could do <strong>in</strong> 12 hours. McDonough cont<strong>in</strong>ued with the now-canonical example of how Father Roberto Busa used a computer to create a concordance to the works of Thomas Aqu<strong>in</strong>as. 9 McDonough used these examples to expla<strong>in</strong> that computers could help revolutionize studies by perform<strong>in</strong>g exceptionally time-consum<strong>in</strong>g manual tasks such as the creation of concordances, textual emendation, auto abstraction of articles, and, most important, the collection and collation of manuscripts. Although McDonough observed, “mach<strong>in</strong>es now make economically feasible a critical edition <strong>in</strong> which the exact read<strong>in</strong>g of every source could be pr<strong>in</strong>ted <strong>in</strong> full,” this phenomenon has yet to occur, a po<strong>in</strong>t to which we return <strong>in</strong> our discussions of digital critical editions and manuscripts. McDonough optimistically predicted that new comput<strong>in</strong>g technologies would conv<strong>in</strong>ce classicists to take on new forms of research that were not previously possible, argu<strong>in</strong>g that classicists were enter<strong>in</strong>g “a new era <strong>in</strong> scholarship, a golden age <strong>in</strong> which mach<strong>in</strong>es perform the servile secretarial tasks, and so leave the scholar free for his proper function, <strong>in</strong>terpretive scholarly re-search. ...” He concluded with three recommendations: (1) all classicists should request that the mach<strong>in</strong>e tape for their editions be given to them; (2) classical studies associations should work together to found and support a center that will record the complete texts of at least all major Lat<strong>in</strong> and Greek authors; and (3) relevant parties should <strong>in</strong>crease their comprehensive bibliographic efforts. As a f<strong>in</strong>al thought, McDonough returned to the lifetime work of James Turney Allen. “That such techniques as this article attempts to sketch were not available to Professor Allen at the turn of the century is tragic,” McDonough offered, add<strong>in</strong>g that “if they be not extensively employed from this day forth by all <strong>in</strong>terested <strong>in</strong> scholarship, it will <strong>in</strong>deed by [sic] a harsh commentary on our <strong>in</strong>telligence” (McDonough 1959). McDonough’s po<strong>in</strong>ts about the importance of mak<strong>in</strong>g all primary data such as manuscripts and texts available, the need for classical 5 A special open-source tool named Diogenes (http://www.dur.ac.uk/p.j.hesl<strong>in</strong>/Software/Diogenes/) was created by Peter Hesl<strong>in</strong> to work with these two corpora (TLG, PHI Lat<strong>in</strong> databank), as many scholars had criticized the limited usability as well as search<strong>in</strong>g and brows<strong>in</strong>g features of these two “commercial” databases. 6 http://www.tei-c.org/<strong>in</strong>dex.xml 7 http://books.google.com 8 http://www.archive.org 9 The work of Father Busa is typically considered to be the beg<strong>in</strong>n<strong>in</strong>g of classical comput<strong>in</strong>g (Crane 2004) as well as of literary comput<strong>in</strong>g and corpus l<strong>in</strong>guistics (Lüdel<strong>in</strong>g and Zeldes 2007).
4 associations to work together, and the need for scholars to give up obsess<strong>in</strong>g over “slavish” tasks and return to the more important work of humanistic <strong>in</strong>terpretation of sources, still r<strong>in</strong>g true. More than 30 years later, J. D. Bolter offered a detailed analysis of how one feature of the Internet— hypertext—offered great new potential for record<strong>in</strong>g and present<strong>in</strong>g scholarship (Bolter 1991). Bolter contended that studies for the past two centuries had been def<strong>in</strong>ed by the qualities of the pr<strong>in</strong>ted book where the ma<strong>in</strong> goal of scholarship had been to “to fix each text of each ancient author: to determ<strong>in</strong>e the authenticity of works ascribed to an author and for each work to establish the Urtext—what the author actually wrote, letter for letter.” This is the essential work of a classical philologist or creator of a critical edition: to study all the extant manuscripts of an author, to “reconstruct” a text, and then to list all the text variants (or at least the most important) found <strong>in</strong> the orig<strong>in</strong>al sources with explanations <strong>in</strong> an apparatus criticus. While postmodern literary theory had challenged the ideal of the Urtext <strong>in</strong> many discipl<strong>in</strong>es, Bolter submitted, classical studies had rema<strong>in</strong>ed largely unaffected. Nonetheless, Bolter believed that the nature of hypertext was affect<strong>in</strong>g how classicists perceived the nature of their texts. “Hypertext now challenges the Urtext not <strong>in</strong> the jargon of postmodern theory,” he expla<strong>in</strong>ed, “but practically and visibly <strong>in</strong> the way that it handles text.” Hypertext, he posited, might lead scholars to focus less on establish<strong>in</strong>g an exact Urtext and more on explor<strong>in</strong>g the connections between texts to “emphasize the cont<strong>in</strong>uity between the ancient text and its ancient, medieval, and modern <strong>in</strong>terpretations.” The need for digital editions to reflect a more sophisticated tradition of textual transmission and textual variation is a theme that is echoed throughout the literature of digital classics. An even more extensive exploration of how new technologies might affect the discipl<strong>in</strong>e of classics was provided by Karen Ruhleder (Ruhleder 1995), albeit with an exclusive focus on the TLG. One challenge Ruhleder underscored was that “humanists themselves have been more <strong>in</strong>terested <strong>in</strong> apply<strong>in</strong>g comput<strong>in</strong>g technologies to their work <strong>in</strong> detailed studies of the impact of comput<strong>in</strong>g technologies on their discipl<strong>in</strong>es.” Christ<strong>in</strong>e Borgman echoes this criticism <strong>in</strong> her recent exam<strong>in</strong>ation of the digital humanities (Borgman 2009). Ruhleder surveyed how us<strong>in</strong>g the TLG had affected the daily work of classicists, how it had changed their relationship to the textual materials they used, and how it affected both social relations among classicists and their discipl<strong>in</strong>ary <strong>in</strong>frastructures. She conducted 60 unstructured <strong>in</strong>terviews with classicists and concentrated on work <strong>in</strong> literary scholarship and textual criticism. Ruhleder observed that the work of classical scholarship was often like detective work, and that scholars’ questions typically <strong>in</strong>cluded “manuscript authorship and authenticity, social relationships between different groups or classes <strong>in</strong> ancient Greek society, and the different mean<strong>in</strong>gs of a word or phrase over time.” Classical scholars used analytical techniques to weigh and <strong>in</strong>terpret evidence and used tools “to locate particular pieces of evidence with<strong>in</strong> texts,” Ruhleder noted. As Bolter expla<strong>in</strong>ed previously, the nature of textual evidence for classicists is complicated because materials are often fragmentary or questionable, their transmission is disputable, and the “reconstruction of the orig<strong>in</strong>al, or urtext, is an important primary activity with<strong>in</strong> classical scholarship.” While the TLG did offer amaz<strong>in</strong>g new search<strong>in</strong>g opportunities as well as both breadth and depth of material, Ruhleder criticized its unexam<strong>in</strong>ed use by classicists. The TLG uses one “best edition” chosen by a special committee of the American Philological Association (APA) 10 for each Greek author and <strong>in</strong>cludes no commentaries or apparatus criticus, a practice challenged by Ruhleder: The TLG has altered not only the form (book to electronic medium) but also the content and the organization of materials presented <strong>in</strong> the package. It <strong>in</strong>cludes neither critical notes nor other 10 http://www.apaclassics.org/
Page 1 and 2: "Rome Wasn
Page 3 and 4: ii ISBN 978-1-932326-38-3 CLIR Publ
Page 5 and 6: iv EpiDoc-Based Digital Epigraphy P
Page 7 and 8: vi ABOUT THE AUTHOR Alison Babeu ha
Page 9 and 10: viii PBW PCA PDB PDL PHI PLANETS PN
Page 11 and 12: x pursuit of knowledge about the an
Page 13: 2 and intellectual
Page 17 and 18: 6 briefly explore issues that are n
Page 19 and 20: 8 for English translations of Greek
Page 21 and 22: 10 is created of the entire bibliog
Page 23 and 24: 12 directory of more than 2,100 cat
Page 25 and 26: 14 generated by the decision tree p
Page 27 and 28: 16 The image-registration algorithm
Page 29 and 30: 18 Schibel and Rydberg-Cox argued t
Page 31 and 32: 20 information ret
Page 33 and 34: 22 In ancient manuscripts, Sanskrit
Page 35 and 36: 24 algorithms; ins
Page 37 and 38: 26 Markov Models (MEMM) 82 and outp
Page 39 and 40: 28 One major project to recently em
Page 41 and 42: 30 developed a cuneiform sign reper
Page 43 and 44: 32 and prayers), and edited texts a
Page 45 and 46: 34 Digital critical editions, howev
Page 47 and 48: 36 While these requirements may see
Page 49 and 50: 38 many discrete texts, in<
Page 51 and 52: 40 examine how l<s
Page 53 and 54: 42 The second fact that Rob
Page 55 and 56: 44 “multimedia scholarly editions
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Page 61 and 62: 50 In these cases we must provide a
Page 63 and 64: 52 First, it utilizes a nearest nei
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54 entirely pre-searched for each l
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56 As this research in</str
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58 the inscription
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60 Text Min<strong
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62 This manual analysis provided a
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64 As illustrated by this def<stron
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66 archaeology as a discipl
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68 funded with public money <strong
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70 for re-use is a simple slogan, b
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72 framework to in
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74 then mapped to the CRM-EH so tha
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76 tDAR also stores all resources <
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78 Many look to their in</s
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80 Although the multidiscipl<strong
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82 computer science can make it pos
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84 were created after this time. A
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86 transparency, accessibility, ava
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88 (Research Archive for Ancient Sc
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90 This challenge of not just digit
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92 Part of the research of the Plei
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94 After correctin
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96 Epigraphy Overview: Epigraphy Da
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98 step, because epigraphic texts s
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100 text and to previous annotation
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104 original); typ
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106 To begin this
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108 better set the in</stro
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110 Another related project that ha
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114 names in texts
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116 and Manuscripts (VRE-SDM) 378 s
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118 level of storage in</st
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120 simplicity, and sensible file n
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122 compliant DTD and schema. 393 I
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124 While the advanced document-rec
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126 Another significant manuscript
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128 compelled to operate in
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130 Cayless thus developed a method
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134 standard developed for the desc
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138 present an extension and comb<s
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140 scholars in th
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142 described as the amicitia papyr
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144 to a full text transcription wh
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146 The final majo
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148 One is toward openness; the oth
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150 this idea of personal ownership
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152 prototype 512 in</stron
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154 other assertions made about par
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156 The conclusion drawn from this
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160 philology available at the webs
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162 descriptions that provides scho
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164 of multilingua
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168 ancient historians. Network ana
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174 sources used and their abbrevia
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176 resources, inc
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178 materials could be found, a rec
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180 or more documents (69 percent)
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182 This work tends to focus on des
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184 A related poin
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186 “infer user
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188 accessed; few providers, if any
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190 information so
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192 features. In addition, while pa
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194 postdoctoral students, who were
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196 computers by ancient historians
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198 Demos (a growin</strong
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200 database of this encyclopedia c
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202 academia.” At the same time,
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206 science and use ICT occasionall
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208 also declared that the m<strong
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210 were exceptionally diverse, as
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214 tradition of European literatur
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216 the related MILARQ project, 649
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218 initial fund<s
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220 SPQR—Supportin</stron
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222 environments in</strong
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224 become less “localized” wit
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226 methods,” Cohen et al. expla<
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228 One might have presumed that ou
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230 This lack of deeper understand<
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232 expertise, tools, experience, a
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234 All link<stron
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236 of architecture, tools and serv
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238 reported that eSAD was develop<
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240 semantic tools that would make
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242 Sustainable Pr
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244 A recent ARL report that explor
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246 organizations and fundi
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248 throughout this review, i.e., o
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250 commercial providers. At the sa
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252 representations beyond the bord
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254 such as Vindol
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256 that the question of in
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260 resources and technology overvi
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266 Interoperability”). 763 The m
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270 This architecture makes it easy
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272 [Aschenbrenner et al. 2008]. As
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274 Editions.” Advances i
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276 [Bodard et al. 2009]. Bodard, G
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278 [Bulger et al. 2011]. Bulger, M
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280 [Choudhury and Stin</st
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282 [Crane et al. 2009a]. Crane, Gr
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284 [Dué and Ebbott 2009]. Dué, C
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286 [Flaten 2009]. Flaten, Arne R.
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288 [Hardwick 2000]. Hardwick, Lorn
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290 Conference on E-Science Worksho
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292 [Lockyear 2007]. Lockyear, Kris
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294 Cambridge, MA: Association for
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296 [Ntzios et al. 2007]. Ntzios, K
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298 [Reddy and Crane 2006]. Reddy,
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300 [Rydberg-Cox 2009]. Rydberg-Cox
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302 [Smith 2010]. Smith, D. Neel.
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304 and the Canadian Academic Commu
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306 [Wallom et al. 2009]. Wallom, D
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