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

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This manuscript, the oldest and best, on which all modern editions are ultimately based,
conta<strong>in</strong>s <strong>in</strong> its marg<strong>in</strong>al commentaries a wealth of <strong>in</strong>formation about the history of the text.
These commentaries <strong>in</strong> the marg<strong>in</strong>, or scholia, derive ma<strong>in</strong>ly from the work of scholars at the
Library at Alexandria <strong>in</strong> Egypt dur<strong>in</strong>g the Hellenistic and Roman eras. It has been a central
goal of the project to obta<strong>in</strong> and publish high-resolution digital images of the manuscript,
together with an electronic edition of the Greek text of the scholia along with an English
translation. 123
In order to represent such a complicated manuscript, Blackwell and Smith reported that “the HMT has
focused not on build<strong>in</strong>g a s<strong>in</strong>gle-purpose application to support a particular theoretical approach, but
on def<strong>in</strong><strong>in</strong>g a long-term generic digital library expressly <strong>in</strong>tended to encourage reuse of its contents,
services, and tools.”
As was earlier observed by Bodard and Garcés, the twentieth century began a movement from
scholarship based on manuscripts toward the creation of critical editions. Blackwell and Smith listed
some of the most prom<strong>in</strong>ent Homeric editions, <strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g editions of the scholia, and argued that they
all suffer from the same major flaw, namely, they are works based on selection where the ma<strong>in</strong> goal of
the editors was to present a unified text that represented their best judgment, with the result be<strong>in</strong>g that
many scholia or variants were often excluded. Recent changes <strong>in</strong> Homeric textual criticism and the
development of digital technology, however, have allowed these questions of textual variation and
types of commentary to be revisited:
The very existence of variation <strong>in</strong> the text has become a matter of historical <strong>in</strong>terest (rather than
a problem to be removed). The precise relationship between text and commentary, as expressed
on the pages of <strong>in</strong>dividual manuscripts, hold promise to shed light on the tradition that
preserved these texts, the nature of the texts <strong>in</strong> antiquity, and therefore their fundamental
nature. … The best scholarly environment for address<strong>in</strong>g these questions would be a digital
library of facsimiles and accompany<strong>in</strong>g diplomatic editions. This library should also be
supplemented by other texts of related <strong>in</strong>terest such as non Homeric texts that <strong>in</strong>clude relevant
comments and quotations and other collections of data and <strong>in</strong>dices. Thus our focus on both
collection of data and on build<strong>in</strong>g a scalable, technologically agnostic, <strong>in</strong>frastructure for
publish<strong>in</strong>g collections of data, images, texts, and extensions to these types (Blackwell and
Smith 2009).
Thus, the HMT stresses the importance of provid<strong>in</strong>g access to the orig<strong>in</strong>al data used to create critical
editions such as manuscript images, the need for diplomatic transcriptions that can be reused, and a
related body of textual and other material that helps more firmly place these manuscripts <strong>in</strong> their
historical context and better supports the exploration of their textual transmission. The HMT makes
extensive use of the CTS protocol and its related Reference Index<strong>in</strong>g service, both of which exist as
“JavaServlets and Python applications runn<strong>in</strong>g <strong>in</strong> the Google AppEng<strong>in</strong>e.” The HMT has also
developed PanDect, its own web-based <strong>in</strong>terface to their library. 124
The HMT’s <strong>in</strong>clusion of scholia (and work done by the related Homer and the Papyri projects) 125 also
highlights the fact that manuscripts <strong>in</strong>cluded many “paratexts” as previously described by Monella
(2008). In fact, Blackwell and Smith noted that the Venetus A, like many Byzant<strong>in</strong>e codices, conta<strong>in</strong>ed
123 http://chs.harvard.edu/wa/pageRtn=ArticleWrapper&bdc=12&mn=1381
124 http://pandect.sourceforge.net/
125 http://chs.harvard.edu/wb/93/wo/1DSibj9gCANI20WSihcJNM/0.0.0.0.19.1.7.15.1.1.0.1.2.0.4.1.3.3.1