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

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Philologists use digital corpora but they must verify results on pr<strong>in</strong>ted editions, <strong>in</strong> order to
evaluate if the text retrieved is attested <strong>in</strong> every manuscript, only <strong>in</strong> the codex optimus, <strong>in</strong> an
error prone family of manuscripts, <strong>in</strong> a scholium, <strong>in</strong> the <strong>in</strong>direct tradition or if it is conjectured
by a modern scholar. In short, the text of the reference edition has no scientific value without
the apparatus. … (Boschetti 2007).
He noted that two exceptions to this phenomenon are the Homer Multitext Project and Musisque
Deoque, 140 both of which are seek<strong>in</strong>g to enrich the corpora they create with variants and conjectures.
Boschetti articulated that there were two basic methods to add apparati critici to digital critical
editions. The first method was based on the automatic collation of diplomatic editions, where digital
diplomatic editions are def<strong>in</strong>ed as “complete transcriptions of s<strong>in</strong>gle manuscripts” with encoded
<strong>in</strong>formation about text layout and position (typically encoded <strong>in</strong> TEI-XML). In agreement with
Monella (2008), Boschetti commented that one of the most useful features of markup such as TEI is
that it makes it “possible to separate the actual text of the manuscript from its <strong>in</strong>terpretations.” This
method is particularly useful, Boschetti argued, for texts with a limited number of manuscripts. The
second method <strong>in</strong>volves the manual fill<strong>in</strong>g of forms by data entry operators, an approach utilized by
Musisque Deoque that, accord<strong>in</strong>g to Boschetti, is “useful if the aim is the acquisition of large amounts
of apparatus’ <strong>in</strong>formation, on many texts of different authors.” Both approaches have shortcom<strong>in</strong>gs,
Boschetti po<strong>in</strong>ted out, for the collation of diplomatic editions must be <strong>in</strong>tegrated with other techniques,
and manual form fill<strong>in</strong>g is subject to human error.
Neither approach would be feasible for an author like Aeschylus, whose work is accompanied by an
extensive body of secondary analysis and large numbers of conjectures registered <strong>in</strong> various
commentaries and reviews. Boschetti thus proposed a third approach comb<strong>in</strong><strong>in</strong>g automatic collation
and <strong>in</strong>formation extraction:
The automatic pars<strong>in</strong>g of apparatuses and repertories, <strong>in</strong> addition to the automatic collation for
a group of relevant diplomatic transcriptions, should be an acceptable trade-off. Subjective
choices by operators <strong>in</strong> this case is limited to the correction phases. This third approach has a
double goal: on one hand it aims to parse automatically exist<strong>in</strong>g critical apparatuses and
repertories of conjectures of Aeschylus and on the other hand it aims to discover heuristics
useful for any collection of variants and/or conjectures with a similar structure (Boschetti
2007).
Boschetti designed a complete methodology that began with the automatic collation of three reference
editions for Aeschylus so that there would be a unified reference edition on which to map the
apparatuses and repertories of conjectures. The second step was to conduct a manual survey of various
apparatuses <strong>in</strong> order to identify typical structures (e.g., verse number, read<strong>in</strong>g to substitute a word <strong>in</strong>
text, manuscript, and scholar). After identify<strong>in</strong>g references to verses, Boschetti developed a typology
of read<strong>in</strong>gs and sources for the <strong>in</strong>formation <strong>in</strong> the apparatus. He noted the most frequent case <strong>in</strong>volved
read<strong>in</strong>gs where an orthographic or a morphological variant would “substitute a s<strong>in</strong>gle word <strong>in</strong> the
reference edition.” The most common other operations were deletion, addition, and transposition of
text. In terms of sources, they were typically “one or more manuscripts for variants” and “one or more
scholars for conjectures,” occasionally followed by accurate bibliographical <strong>in</strong>formation. One major
difficulty, Boschetti noted, was that the same manuscript or author could be abbreviated differently <strong>in</strong>
140 Musisque Deoque is “a digital archive of Lat<strong>in</strong> poetry, from its orig<strong>in</strong>s to the Italian Renaissance” that was established <strong>in</strong> 2005 and is creat<strong>in</strong>g a Lat<strong>in</strong>
poetry database that is “supplemented and updated with critical apparatus and exegetical equipments.” http://www.mqdq.it/mqdq/home.jspl<strong>in</strong>gua=en.