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

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granted their views of the potential for undergraduate scholarship once “all the sources are onl<strong>in</strong>e”
might be somewhat idealistic, they still held high hopes:
The very effort of exam<strong>in</strong><strong>in</strong>g primary sources and th<strong>in</strong>k<strong>in</strong>g about their possible mean<strong>in</strong>gs
would br<strong>in</strong>g home the reality that scholarship is always research, <strong>in</strong> the sense of f<strong>in</strong>d<strong>in</strong>g,
identify<strong>in</strong>g, <strong>in</strong>terpret<strong>in</strong>g, and present<strong>in</strong>g evidence. Students could operate as scholars, whether
through the process of verify<strong>in</strong>g the plausibility of the presentation of evidence by others, or by
present<strong>in</strong>g arguments and <strong>in</strong>terpretations that are <strong>in</strong> one way or another orig<strong>in</strong>al, <strong>in</strong> all the
various senses of that word. … When all the sources are onl<strong>in</strong>e, then we as teachers of Classics
can more effectively engage our undergraduate students as collaborators <strong>in</strong> research, whether <strong>in</strong>
the collection of, for example, themed primary source collections, or <strong>in</strong> the <strong>in</strong>terpretation of the
countless issues <strong>in</strong> Classics and ancient history that still await effective <strong>in</strong>vestigation based on
careful analysis of well-chosen and clearly def<strong>in</strong>ed data sets rather than impressionistic
assertions (Blackwell and Mart<strong>in</strong> 2009).
One salutary effect of hav<strong>in</strong>g all primary sources onl<strong>in</strong>e, Blackwell and Mart<strong>in</strong> articulated, would be
that more scholars might feel obligated to be far more meticulous about their own standards of primary
source citation. As an example, they mentioned the confus<strong>in</strong>g scholarly practice of cit<strong>in</strong>g quotes of
fragmentary authors by the standard reference system of a particular edition of collected fragments
without also cit<strong>in</strong>g the primary text from which the fragmentary quotes were orig<strong>in</strong>ally drawn, a
practice that makes it difficult for students to decipher these references. Another important method for
undergraduates to contribute to classical scholarship, Blackwell and Mart<strong>in</strong> offered, was through the
creation of lists and <strong>in</strong>dexes. They noted that as more resources became available onl<strong>in</strong>e through openaccess
publication and as more software tools were able to aggregate data from wide-rang<strong>in</strong>g sources,
the creation of lists and <strong>in</strong>dexes would become far more important.
The most significant opportunity, however, had come through the HMT project, where start<strong>in</strong>g <strong>in</strong>
2006, a grant was secured by Casey Dué of the University of Houston to pay for undergraduate
research assistants at this university as well as the College of the Holy Cross and Furman University to
beg<strong>in</strong> work<strong>in</strong>g on the project. This group of undergraduates, called the HMT fellows, were given the
task of creat<strong>in</strong>g XML transcripts and translat<strong>in</strong>g specific texts of five Byzant<strong>in</strong>e and medieval
manuscripts of the Iliad. One important research question be<strong>in</strong>g considered by the HMT editors was
how the editions of Aristarchus differed from the medieval editions and how a drift <strong>in</strong> the language
might <strong>in</strong>dicate “the notion of an ongo<strong>in</strong>g tradition of multiformity.” 630 While traditional critical
editions of Homer typically obscure these differences, the HMT editors hoped that the work of the
HMT fellows <strong>in</strong> creat<strong>in</strong>g XML transcripts would “highlight a problem <strong>in</strong> the history of the Homeric
text, thus contribut<strong>in</strong>g a po<strong>in</strong>t of conversation and analysis to the ongo<strong>in</strong>g study of the Iliad”(Blackwell
and Mart<strong>in</strong> 2009). Blackwell and Mart<strong>in</strong> submitted that this new collaborative model of research,
which produced “electronic texts (not required to be “pr<strong>in</strong>table”) <strong>in</strong> transcription (rather than
collation),” not only allowed both students and professors <strong>in</strong> a distributed geographic environment to
work with high-quality images of “primary texts, the papyri, the Byzant<strong>in</strong>e and medieval manuscripts”
but also supported a new type of scholarship that addressed the limitations of traditional critical
editions of Homer.
630 The issue of multiformity, Homeric tradition, and digital editions has been discussed earlier <strong>in</strong> this paper.