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

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database of this encyclopedia complete with translations, annotations and bibliography as well as
automatically generated l<strong>in</strong>ks to other electronic resources. More than 170 scholars from 18 countries
have contributed to this project, and 25,000 of the 30,000 entries have been translated. As expla<strong>in</strong>ed by
Anne Mahoney (2009), this collaborative translation project has made the Suda text available to
nonspecialists and the on-l<strong>in</strong>e edition is far easier to use than the pr<strong>in</strong>t. “As a collaboration,” Mahoney
declared, “SOL demonstrates open peer review and the feasibility of a large, but closely focused,
humanities project” (Mahoney 2009).
In her brief history of the SOL, Mahoney reported that it was one of the first collaborative
encyclopedias and predated Wikipedia by several years. Many of the orig<strong>in</strong>al encyclopedia entries <strong>in</strong>
this unique reference work were filled with <strong>in</strong>correct <strong>in</strong>formation, so each digital entry conta<strong>in</strong>s
explanatory commentary and references. The SOL also serves as an important source of both
fragmentary texts and text variants. “Its authors had access to some texts that are no longer extant, so
there is material <strong>in</strong> the Suda that cannot be found anywhere else,” Mahoney noted; “they also had
different editions of some of the texts we still read, so quotations <strong>in</strong> the Suda may reflect variants that
are not preserved <strong>in</strong> our textual tradition” (Mahoney 2009).
The SOL was implemented onl<strong>in</strong>e as a semistructured text, and the translation and edit<strong>in</strong>g of the
encyclopedia are still ongo<strong>in</strong>g. Prospective translators have to register and then ask to be assigned
specific entries. While many translators work on this project, only a subset are designated editors who
have the authority to change translations. All editors have significant ability <strong>in</strong> Ancient Greek and
many are college and university professors. The primary responsibilities of editors are to augment
bibliographies, add commentaries, and verify that translations are correct for SOL entries. The editorial
mechanisms of SOL also serve, accord<strong>in</strong>g to Mahoney, as a “type of peer review process.” Each entry
credits not only its orig<strong>in</strong>al translator but also the editors who have worked on it. This process allows
the recognition of all scholars <strong>in</strong>volved and serves as a clear contrast, Mahoney notes, to the bl<strong>in</strong>d
review<strong>in</strong>g found <strong>in</strong> many classics journals. The most critical po<strong>in</strong>t of this process, Mahoney asserted, is
that it demonstrates the ongo<strong>in</strong>g nature of scholarship:
Perhaps more important, SOL shows how scholarship progresses. A translation or commentary
published <strong>in</strong> a book appears f<strong>in</strong>al and f<strong>in</strong>ished; readers are not given any clues about how it
came <strong>in</strong>to be<strong>in</strong>g. SOL's translations and commentaries show the process of successive
ref<strong>in</strong>ements, demonstrat<strong>in</strong>g that first drafts are almost never perfect, and that even senior
scholars' work can benefit from editorial attention (Mahoney 2009).
Interest<strong>in</strong>gly, Arne Flaten (2009) made similar arguments regard<strong>in</strong>g how the creation of digital
architectural models <strong>in</strong> the Ashes2Art project that represented uncerta<strong>in</strong>ty and various scholarly
<strong>in</strong>terpretations illustrated to students the ongo<strong>in</strong>g nature of scholarly arguments.
Mahoney also po<strong>in</strong>ted out that the SOL demonstrates how the digital environment often provides a far
more natural way to exploit the knowledge found with<strong>in</strong> a complicated reference work. While the SOL
is not a completely new work, it is not simply a digital reproduction of the pr<strong>in</strong>ted one. The
environment of the web makes it possible to better illustrate the “commentary nature of the Suda,” as
Mahoney details, because quotations can be identified and labeled, explicit references to primary
source texts can be hyperl<strong>in</strong>ked to, and bibliographies can be expanded to <strong>in</strong>clude modern relevant
scholarship. At the same time, translators can add l<strong>in</strong>ks to any onl<strong>in</strong>e resources they f<strong>in</strong>d useful,
<strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g ones far beyond the traditional bounds of classical scholarship. Mahoney concluded that the
most important accomplishment of SOL was that this material was now available to a far wider