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

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briefly explore issues that are now major discussion po<strong>in</strong>ts, particularly the challenges of electronic
publication to the traditional pr<strong>in</strong>t <strong>in</strong>frastructure and the new level of technical <strong>in</strong>frastructure and
support required to create, dissem<strong>in</strong>ate, and preserve electronic texts.
Ruhleder concluded by identify<strong>in</strong>g a number of larger issues about the impact of comput<strong>in</strong>g on
classics. To beg<strong>in</strong> with, she contended that the ways <strong>in</strong> which the TLG has “flattened,” and <strong>in</strong> some
ways “misrepresented,” the corpus of Greek negatively affects the amount of <strong>in</strong>formation available to
scholars. In addition, as the TLG moved scholars another step away from the orig<strong>in</strong>al source text,
Ruhleder criticized scholars for simply accept<strong>in</strong>g other scholars’ read<strong>in</strong>gs of a text and never
consult<strong>in</strong>g the primary text to draw their own conclusions. This second criticism <strong>in</strong> particular has
<strong>in</strong>spired projects such as Demos, 11 an electronic publication of the Stoa Consortium on Athenian
Democracy, where every statement is l<strong>in</strong>ked back to the primary textual evidence (mak<strong>in</strong>g particular
use of the Perseus Project) on which it is based. Ruhleder wondered why more scholars didn’t
challenge the nature of the TLG corpus or explore larger questions of how comput<strong>in</strong>g was affect<strong>in</strong>g
their discipl<strong>in</strong>e:
Fundamental paradigmatic questions, methodological discussions, and mechanisms for
resource allocation and <strong>in</strong>frastructural development that are appropriately discussed at the level
of the community-of-practice often masquerade as <strong>in</strong>dividual problems of skill or resources.
“We need to reth<strong>in</strong>k what it means for our discipl<strong>in</strong>e to take on a technological character” is
reduced to “I feel detached from the text” (Ruhleder 1995).
Ruhleder hoped that larger discussions would beg<strong>in</strong> to take place and concluded that the ma<strong>in</strong> problem
was not so much <strong>in</strong> what systems could or could not do but <strong>in</strong> their users’ unwill<strong>in</strong>gness to explore the
limitations of such systems and set them <strong>in</strong> a broader discipl<strong>in</strong>ary context. Many of the challenges
raised by Ruhleder are explored <strong>in</strong> our discussion of the various discipl<strong>in</strong>es of digital classics.
By the early part of this century, many explorations of classics and computers had turned from
<strong>in</strong>dividual considerations of particular databases to broader exam<strong>in</strong>ations of the Internet. In 2000,
Hardwick argued that the impact of the Internet on classics had been largest <strong>in</strong> the areas of
communication, publication, dissem<strong>in</strong>ation of research, and the development of specialist research
tools. She listed several important advances, <strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g improved access to primary texts and secondary
research, rapid search tools, research databases, rapidly updated specialist bibliographies, electronic
journals, more quickly reviewed academic publications, and new potential with electronic discussion
lists and conferences. Teach<strong>in</strong>g <strong>in</strong> classical studies had also changed over the past 30 years, Hardwick
argued, with an <strong>in</strong>creas<strong>in</strong>g focus on history and culture and less focus on language-based learn<strong>in</strong>g.
Hardwick noted that whereas students used to enter college with a fair amount of l<strong>in</strong>guistic learn<strong>in</strong>g,
many were now first encounter<strong>in</strong>g Greek and Roman culture and history <strong>in</strong> a variety of venues, which
had consequently re<strong>in</strong>vigorated their <strong>in</strong>terest <strong>in</strong> language learn<strong>in</strong>g. Hardwick also observed that the
grow<strong>in</strong>g availability of data onl<strong>in</strong>e was “blurr<strong>in</strong>g the l<strong>in</strong>es” between teach<strong>in</strong>g and research, and help<strong>in</strong>g
support a grow<strong>in</strong>g movement toward new forms of undergraduate research and teach<strong>in</strong>g. McManus
and Rub<strong>in</strong>o (2003) also provided a brief overview of the state of Internet resources available <strong>in</strong>
classics, po<strong>in</strong>t<strong>in</strong>g to the impact of these resources on pedagogy. 12
Instead of focus<strong>in</strong>g on the uniqueness of classical comput<strong>in</strong>g, Greg Crane proposed that classical
studies no longer needed its own separate comput<strong>in</strong>g history. He noted that the study of antiquity has
11 http://www.stoa.org/projects/demos/home.
12 For an earlier discussion of both the pitfalls and promise of technology <strong>in</strong> the teach<strong>in</strong>g of classics see Neal (1990).