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

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tradition of European literature and cont<strong>in</strong>ues through the present.” This is important, the authors note,
for:
An <strong>in</strong>frastructure that provides advanced services for primary and secondary sources on
classical Greek and Lat<strong>in</strong> <strong>in</strong>cludes <strong>in</strong>scriptions, papyri, medieval manuscripts, early modern
pr<strong>in</strong>ted books, and mature editions and reference works of the 19th and twentieth centuries.
Even if we restrict ourselves to textual sources, those textual sources provide heterogeneous
data about the ancient world. If we <strong>in</strong>clude the material record, then we need to manage videos
and sound about the ancient world as well (Blackwell and Crane 2009).
Classics is such a broad discipl<strong>in</strong>e that the various <strong>in</strong>frastructure challenges it raises will also be
important for the development of any larger cyber<strong>in</strong>frastructure for the humanities. The f<strong>in</strong>al reason
Blackwell and Crane give for lett<strong>in</strong>g classics help def<strong>in</strong>e the development of a broader
cyber<strong>in</strong>frastructure is that classicists have devoted at least a generation to develop<strong>in</strong>g tools and services
and now “need a more robust environment and are ready to convert project-based efforts <strong>in</strong>to a shared,
permanent <strong>in</strong>frastructure” (Blackwell and Crane 2009)
To move from project-based efforts to a shared digital <strong>in</strong>frastructure, the authors list numerous
specialized services developed by <strong>in</strong>dividual digital classics projects that will need to be supported,
<strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g canonical text services, OCR and page layout, morphological analysis, syntactic analysis,
word sense discovery, named entity analysis, metrical analysis, translation support, CLIR, citation
identification, quotation identification, translation identification, text alignment, version analysis, and
markup projection. In addition to these services, two types of texts are required to support ePhilology
<strong>in</strong> particular: (1) multitexts, or “methods to track multiple versions of a text across time”—these
methodologies allow for the creation of “true digital editions” that <strong>in</strong>clude all images of their source
materials, various versioned and reconstructed editions, and multiple apparatus critici that are mach<strong>in</strong>eactionable;
and (2) parallel texts—or texts that exist both <strong>in</strong> an orig<strong>in</strong>al language version and multiple
translations—methodologies to work with these texts extend the idea of a multitext across languages
and multiple versions. Other collections required to support ePhilology <strong>in</strong>clude wordnets, treebanks,
l<strong>in</strong>guistic annotations, mach<strong>in</strong>e-actionable <strong>in</strong>dexes and commentaries.
Blackwell and Crane (2009) end their piece with thoughts on what is needed for true digital publication
<strong>in</strong> cyber<strong>in</strong>frastructure and the announcement of the Scaife Digital Library (SDL). The authors
conv<strong>in</strong>c<strong>in</strong>gly assert that “just because <strong>in</strong>formation is on-l<strong>in</strong>e does not mean that that <strong>in</strong>formation has
exploited the full potential of the digital medium” (Blackwell and Crane 2009). Classical materials,
they argue, need to be available <strong>in</strong> <strong>in</strong>teroperable formats and with open licenses (e.g., almost all of the
TEI-XML texts <strong>in</strong> the PDL have been available for downloaded under a CC license s<strong>in</strong>ce 2006).
Similarly, the Center for Hellenic Studies (CHS) announced a plan <strong>in</strong> 2008 to create a digital library of
new, TEI-compliant XML editions “for the first thousand years of Greek.”
In order for an item placed onl<strong>in</strong>e to be useful <strong>in</strong> a digital world, Blackwell and Crane propose that it
must meet four conditions of digital scholarly publication: (1) the content must be of <strong>in</strong>terest to persons
other than its creators; (2) it must have a format that can be preserved and used for a long period of
time; (3) it needs at least one long-term home; and (4) it must be able to circulate freely. All objects
that will be placed <strong>in</strong> the SDL must meet these requirements, and the authors also state that the SDL
will not provide services to its end users, but rather provide access to digital objects that can be
repurposed. In their conclusion, Blackwell and Crane outl<strong>in</strong>e three issues to be faced or perhaps
accepted. First, <strong>in</strong> this new world, “all classicists are digital classicists,” or at least they must become