Here is an interesting article by Guy Patrick Cunningham on modern digital writing, which is fragmentary in all its forms:
Fragmentary: Writing in a Digital Age (The Millions, 01, 2012).

Here is a quote from the article:
“It’s not that fragmentary writing is the only acceptable form of writing today — I have no intention of breaking this essay into tweets — but it is the form best suited to address the conundrum Carr is so concerned about in The Shallows. We all read online, and the rise of smartphones, tablets, and e-readers means we will be doing so even more. This means we will all be spending ever more time reading with a medium that encourages distracted, fragmented reading. Fragmentary writing — work that accumulates fragments of text and presents them in a way that encourages introspection and contemplation — seems like a logical response to that experience. And that makes me incredibly curious to see where people will take it.”

More and more, I read in pieces. So do you. Digital media, in all its forms, is fragmentary. Even the longest stretches of text online are broken up with hyperlinks or other interactive elements (or even ads). This is neither a good nor bad thing, necessarily — it is simply a part of modern reading. And because of that, works that deal with fragmentation, that eschew not only a traditional narrative structure but the very idea of a work comprising a single, linear whole — take on a special kind of relevance. Fragmentary writing is (or at least feels) like the one avant-garde literary approach that best fits our particular moment. It’s not that it’s the only form of writing that matters of course, just that it captures the tension between “digital” and “analog” reading better than anything else out there. And that tension, in many ways, is the defining feature of the contemporary reading experience.

What is fragmentary writing? To answer that, it helps to first look at how writers wrestled with fragmentation in an earlier, pre-digital context. The approach  played a major role in twentieth-century modernist literature, for example, and the very best modernists utilized fragments in particularly revealing ways. Few writers of the period, or any other, understood the nature of fragmentary writing better than Samuel Beckett, who experimented with short, nonlinear forms throughout his career. My favorite example of these fragmentary experiments is a series of thirteen nonlinear prose shorts he wrote called Texts for Nothing.

The Texts are not stories or essays, at least not in the traditional sense. They are instead focused on images/symbols and on the often-prevaricating “voice” (or is it “voices”?) behind each Text. Images and phrases appear in a particular context, and nearly every word is essential to understanding the Text. The voice of each Text often doubles back, contradicts itself, or moves from image to image in no discernible pattern, as in Text 2:

Is this stuff air that permits you to suffocate still, almost audibly at times, it’s possible, a kind of air. What exactly is going on, exactly, ah, old xanthic laugh, no farewell mirth, good riddance, it was never droll. No, but one more memory, one last memory, it may help, to abort again.

The images contained in Text 2 (though not necessarily the other Texts) could be interpreted as a series of “memories,” ranging from a woman digging through a trash can to a man “with only one leg and a half” ringing a bell. Memory often works piecemeal — after all, people don’t really remember an entire experience, instead they hold on to particular images, emotions, or impressions. In that way, the Texts resemble human memory — and human thinking. Their fragmentary nature therefore reflects the fragmentary nature of memory, and of the human mind.

Writing about Franz Kafka — another writer given to fragments, whose work served as a key influence on Beckett’s — Albert Camus declared, “The whole art in Kafka consists in forcing the reader to reread.” The Texts certainly live up to this dictum — they are meant to be looked at more than once, from different points of view. The attentive reader spends time with each Text as a distinct object, since there is not linear narrative or argument to follow forward. Meaning suggests itself indirectly, through the accumulation of phrases and images.

However, while Beckett wrote at a time when rereading was widely encouraged, contemporary media often pulls us in a very different direction. In his recent book about digital reading, The Shallows, Nicholas Carr calls the Net our society’s “communication and information medium of choice,” and says that, “The scope of its use is unprecedented, even by the standards of the mass media.” And he claims that this new medium has changed reading as profoundly as did the bound codex.

He points to a series of studies that indicate “people who read linear text comprehend more, remember more, and learn more than those who read text peppered with links.” Essentially, hypertext distracts the reader enough to change the reading experience — even a long, linear text becomes fragmented with the addition of links, because the unconscious mind is forced to devote energy determining the value of the link (and whether or not to click on it). In Carr’s telling, the Internet creates not fragmentary but fragmented reading, where the mind is so distracted that it is difficult to become fully immersed in a given text. This is a different process than what happens when we read a fragmentary work — as Carr explains, “When transcribed to a page, a stream of consciousness becomes literary and linear.” The structure of a print book — its existence as a discrete, finite object, the lack of distractions built in to the format — creates a contemplative atmosphere that allows the reader to “merge” with a text; or as Carr puts it, “The reader becomes the book.” Beckett’s Texts for Nothing, with their emphasis on contemplation, accumulation, and rereading, are firmly rooted in the quieter, more contemplative world of “analog” media. For a writer interested in engaging the digital world, however, there are different challenges and that calls for a different kind of fragmentary writing.

The most prominent fragmentary work in recent years is probably David Shields’ Reality Hunger, a book made up primarily of quotations from other texts. While most critics focused on its two most controversial assertions — that the linear novel is an obsolete form, and that writers should feel free to “borrow” text from other works, the way a DJ might sample a piece of music — the book’s fragmentary structure is far more compelling. It is intended as a “literary collage,” in keeping with Shields’ belief that, “Collage, the art of reassembling fragments of preexisting images in such a way as to form a new image, was the most important innovation in the art of the twentieth century.” Shields wants “a literature built entirely out of contemplation and revelation,” in effect, a literature that reflects the workings of the human mind. And his collection of fragments is his effort to produce that kind of work. If Shields fails in this effort — and I think he does, though understandably so — he is able to give the reader an idea of how his mind processes the written word. The breadth of his reading is evident not only from the wide range of writers “appropriated” into Reality Hunger — Walter Pater, James Joyce, and Walter Benjamin, among others — but from the obvious restlessness visible on the page.

Like Beckett’s Text 2, the fragmentary nature of Reality Hunger has its roots in human memory. As Shields points out, his interest in the essay stems from his belief that, “The essay consists of double translation: memory translates experience; essay translates memory.” And his essay resembles the way many of us remember the books we read — we hold on to particular ideas, images, and quotes, which hold the place of the larger work in our memories. I’ve read Hamlet three times in the last year and a half — and many times before then — but I can’t recite the entire play by heart. Instead, certain lines stand out (“The rest is silence,” etc.), and when I “remember” the play, it is those lines that spring to mind. In that way, Shields’ book gives us a window into how he reads — it shows us not only the works he gravitates too, but what pieces of those works he keeps with him.

Where Shields differs from earlier fragmentary writers, including Beckett, is that Reality Hunger, due to its origin in many different works, not only emphasizes its fragmentary nature, but uses it to connect with the reader. While making my way through the book, I found myself copying out Shields’ most interesting fragments into a separate notebook; when I want to “reread” Reality Hunger, I simply look at my own, private version instead. This seems at least in part to be Shields’ intention — the fragmentary style of his book forces the reader to become an active participant in the work itself. In that way, it draws from online writing styles, including blogging, which encourage readers to comment on, excerpt, or link to an existing text (which, as Carr points out, brings on even more fragmentation). Perhaps the most extreme version of this is the blogging platform Twitter, which both limits users to writing 140-chracters at a time, and encourages them to “retweet” other users’ content.

The most interesting use of the platform that I’ve seen is Masha Tupitsyn’s (print) book Laconia: 1,200 Tweets on Film, which she composed entirely on the site. The end result, however, is presented not as a mere assembly of Tweets, but as an experiment in form. As she explains in the introduction, “I avoided tweeting arbitrarily or simply churning out a collection of tweets that would result in a book. Instead, I wrote and crafted each entry as though it was for and part of a book, rather than the other way around.” One of Carr’s great worries about the digital realm is the way it appropriates and changes print forms. As he explains, “When the Net absorbs a medium, it re-creates that medium in its own image.” With Laconia, Tupitsyn attempts the reverse, re-creating a digital medium (Twitter) in an “analog” space. In a sense, Tupitsyn is appropriating a digital space into print.

What’s especially interesting about that appropriation is the way she toys with Twitter’s 140-character limit. Often, she will break multi-tweet passages abruptly, calling attention to the platform’s tendency toward fragmentation. For example, tweets 782 and 783 (each tweet in the book is numbered and time-stamped) appear this way:

Our feelings and emotions about our lives and our faces are in other people’s faces. Changing movie faces are our feelings and emotions
about our feelings and emotions.

It would be very easy to recast these tweets in a way that keeps both sentences whole:

Our feelings and emotions about our lives and our faces are in other people’s faces.
Changing movie faces are our feelings and emotions about our feelings and emotions.

This would be particularly more readable on Twitter itself, where the more recent tweet — “about our feelings and emotion” — would appear on top. But by breaking them so abruptly, by taking Twitter’s “hard” character count so literally and writing right up until it is reached, Tupitsyn underlines the digital origin of the project.

Where, at least in Carr’s telling, the Web cuts a textual whole into fragments by appropriating it, the print book (at least this particular print book) takes fragments and forces them into a kind of whole. We read tweets 782 and 783 in sequence, and the meaning is obvious. Tupitsyn plays a similar trick with the book’s content. Though the book is ostensibly a work of film criticism, it does not contain anything that resembles a conventional movie review. Instead, it appropriates what social media specializes in — quotations, personal reactions, biographical revelations, and commentary about pop culture — and turns them into something more ambitious. The different fragments are not so much about film as they are about how Tupitsyn watches film. As she puts it, the book “dramatizes the act of thinking through film.”

Reality Hunger and Laconia are very different books, but they share this desire to use fragmentary writing to dramatize the act of thinking through culture (in Shields’ case mostly books, in Tupitsyn’s mostly films). Even this desire has its roots in the digital world, where culture is constantly being repackaged and analyzed. If neither work achieves the majesty of Beckett’s Texts — to be fair, an obscenely high standard — both find an approach to fragmentary writing that pushes the form in a new direction, rather than just rehashing modernism’s innovations. They manage this by drawing on digital forms — Shields by creating a “collage” that mimics the mash-up culture that dominates online media, Tupitsyn by writing her book via Twitter. In so doing, they suggest an interesting new path for both writers and readers, one that takes the clutter of the digital world and transforms it into something quieter and more thoughtful.

It’s not that fragmentary writing is the only acceptable form of writing today — I have no intention of breaking this essay into tweets — but it is the form best suited to address the conundrum Carr is so concerned about in The Shallows. We all read online, and the rise of smartphones, tablets, and e-readers means we will be doing so even more. This means we will all be spending ever more time reading with a medium that encourages distracted, fragmented reading. Fragmentary writing — work that accumulates fragments of text and presents them in a way that encourages introspection and contemplation — seems like a logical response to that experience. And that makes me incredibly curious to see where people will take it.

We post an article by Piero Attanasio published in the last issue of the review Informatica Umanistica (5, 2011):

Valutazione delle pubblicazioni ed effetti sul settore editoriale

The paper deals with questions concerning the evaluation of Italian scholarly publications and addresses some interesting issues about citations as a criterium for evaluating editorial products.

Abstract: This paper analyses some key issues in the Italian debate about the research assessment, starting from a publishing viewpoint. Using the publications in research assessment should consider the publishing context where such publications are produced. Any assessment exercise is referred to a pre-defined publishing model, such as that based on peer review. It is useful to make it explicit, in order to consider the effects on the publishing market in terms of incentives. A key element is in the impact measures, usually based on citations: when such measures are referred to the journal (such as the impact factor) or the publishing house, rather than to specific publications or authors (such as the h index), the effects on the market consist of the creation of barriers to entry and to competitive mobility. Furthermore, the creation of quantitative measure when there is a lack of data, like in humanities, may introduce very relevant biases. When considering the Italian publishing context, where publications have a role in supporting the cultural transfer to broader audiences that is not separated to the role within the scientific debate, measures that mainly focus on the second function tend to create incentives towards a change of the publishing paradigm.

We post here a link to an interesting article by Kurt Schick (The Chronicle – October 30) on modern “citation obsession”, a problem that nowadays concerns not only scholars, but also librarians, tutors, and students. 

The author of the article mentions The Citation Project, which is  is a multi-institution research project responding to educators’ concerns about plagiarism and the teaching of writing.

The points addressed in the article and the aim of the Citation Project are very interesting and stimulating for discussing in general topics and problems raised when citing and quoting something, from ancient to modern sources.

________________________________________________

Citation Obsession? Get over it! (The Chronicle – October 30, 2011)

My university recently convened an emergency “summit” for librarians, tutors, and concerned faculty members to solve a citation crisis. Our library help desks reportedly cannot complete their core mission of assisting students with information literacy (finding, choosing, and using sources) because students keep pestering them with questions about how to format obscure citations: “I’m analyzing poetry for my ‘Punk Literature’ seminar. Using MLA style, how do I cite a limerick scribbled in the third-floor toilet?”

Meanwhile, the writing center stinks of fear as students struggle to decipher APA, MLA, AP, and Chicago (or is it Turabian?) documentation styles, which seem as alien and absurd to them as using a typewriter. Academic departments and even whole colleges consistently beg the library and writing center for workshops to rehabilitate their worst citation transgressors. Bibliographic citation has apparently eclipsed perfect grammar and the five-paragraph theme as the preoccupation of persnickety professors.

What a colossal waste. Citation style remains the most arbitrary, formulaic, and prescriptive element of academic writing taught in American high schools and colleges. Now a sacred academic shibboleth, citation persists despite the incredibly high cost-benefit ratio of trying to teach students something they (and we should also) recognize as relatively useless to them as developing writers.

Professors’ obsession with citation formatting is relatively new. Many of us over the age of 40 probably cannot remember learning much about citation styles until graduate school—not because our memories have faded, but because our teachers knew better than to demand that we fret about such specialized, scholarly formalities. It’s not that they were teaching us to be sloppy scholars, either. On the contrary, they emphasized how to effectively and responsibly locate, evaluate, and integrate other writers’ words and ideas into our own writing better, perhaps, than we teach students to do today. Surely, the uneven quality of information available online makes it more important for writers to know how to evaluate the worth of their sources than how to parse pedantic rules and display their expertise in footnoting.

What I advocate here is not to dispense with teaching students how to use sources but rather to abandon our fixation on the form rather than the function of source attribution. Here’s why: We cannot control how much time and effort students invest in a particular writing assignment; we can only influence how they distribute their energies. Professors’ overattention to flawless citation (or grammar) creates predictable results: Students expend a disproportionate amount of precious time and attention trying to avoid making mistakes. Soon, they also begin to associate “good” writing with mechanically following rules rather than developing good ideas.

In contrast, experienced writers (like us) edit meticulously only after they have allocated substantial effort to more complex and consequential writing tasks, such as refining their topics, selecting and processing their sources, organizing their ideas, and drafting and revising their manuscripts to improve focus and coherence. Nitpicky professors hinder student writers’ development by effectively forcing them to invest more time and thinking in less important elements of writing.

Recent research by the Citation Project corroborates how severely teachers’ citation psychosis has diminished students’ information-literacy skills, in particular. Rebecca Moore Howard and Sandra Jamieson blame “plagiarism hysteria,” which compels teachers to punish improper citation more than reward students’ effective use of sources’ words and ideas. Thus, clever students master quotation “mining” and sloppy paraphrasing, and they rarely summarize (or, presumably, deeply read or understand) their sources. Why should they, when success equals completing a checklist (“minimum of six sources including two books, two peer-reviewed articles … proper MLA format, including a period before the parenthetical citation for block quotations”) rather than composing writing that engages readers with sophisticated content or, heaven forbid, eloquent prose? Should we not judge writing on its content and character rather than its surface features?

The intricacies and formalities of citation become useful to scholars only when they publish their work. Until then, they need a bookkeeping system to keep track of where they found things (a system that others might later use to retrace their steps), and some means of attributing their sources and thus establishing the credibility of information for their audiences. More than anything, source attribution enables students—who, by virtue of being students, don’t yet know much about a subject—to borrow knowledge and ethos from those who do. It’s just about that simple.

What might be more surprising is how simple formal citation mechanics really are. Citation contents are virtually the same across styles and disciplines: author’s name(s), title(s), publication information. As anyone who’s translated a manuscript from MLA to APA and then to Chicago format knows, the only differences are sequence, punctuation, and format. Why, then, could we not simply ask students to include a list of references with the essential information? Why couldn’t we wait to infect them with citation fever until they are ready to publish (and then hand them the appropriate style guide, which is typically no more difficult to follow than instructions for programming your DVR)?

We could then reinvest time wasted on formatting to teach more-important skills like selecting credible sources, recognizing bias or faulty arguments, paraphrasing and summarizing effectively, and attributing sourced information persuasively and responsibly.

If anything, we should abandon trivial roadblocks so that students can write more often in more classes. Recent research demonstrates how effectively and efficiently writing can improve comprehension of content in any discipline. Writing also enables students to practice analysis, synthesis, and other skills that constitute critical, creative, and even civic thinking. If writing provides one of our best means to enhance learning outcomes across the curriculum, then more writing equals more learning. Why would we design writing assignments with obstacles that discourage students from learning?

Kurt Schick teaches writing at James Madison University.

Plutarch, Athenaeus, Elegy and Iambus, the Greek Anthology, Lucian and the Scaife Digital Lbrary – 1.6 million words of Open Content Greek
(on Stoa.org by Gregory Crane)

The Perseus Digital Library is pleased to publish TEI XML digital editions for Plutarch, Athenaeus, the Greek Anthology, and for most of Lucian.

This increases the available Plutarch from roughly 100,000 to the surviving 1,150,000 words. Athenaeus and the Greek Anthology are new within the Perseus Digital Library, with roughly 270,000 and 160,000 words of Greek. The 13,000 words for J.M. Edmonds Elegy and Iambus include both the surviving poetic quotations and major contexts in which these poems are quoted. The 200,000 words of Lucian represent roughly 70% of the surviving works attributed to that author. In all, this places more than 1.6 million words of Greek in circulation.

The Need for Open Content Source Texts

It has been a decade since we published new Greek sources. There is nothing glamorous about digitizing source texts and many other more exciting research projects to explore as Classics in particular and the Humanities in general reinvent themselves within the digital world. Nevertheless, in working with our colleagues, we have come to the conclusion that the most important desideratum for the study of Greek is a library of Greek source texts that can be used and repurposed freely. Machine-readable texts are our Genome. We have therefore undertaken to help fill this vacuum. Support from various sources – including the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the Mellon Foundation, the Institute for Museum and Library Services, the UK’s Joint Information Services Council (JISC), the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), and the Cantus Foundation – put us in a position where we could begin to contribute new Greek sources. A Digital Humanities Grant from Google helped complete the work published here and will allow us to release more Greek (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/07/our-commitment-to-digital-humanities.html).

Our goal is not simply to provide services such as morphologically aware searching but to provide the field with Greek texts that they can reedit, annotate, and modify as they wish. We offer these texts both because they are useful as they stand but also as raw material on which students of Greek can build. We look forward to seeing versions of these texts in Chicago’s Philologic, the Center for Hellenic Studies’ First Thousand Years of Greek, and many other environments.

Creative Commons License

This is not the first time that these authors have been placed in digital form but this is the first time that they have been published under an open content license. All of the print sources are in the public domain. In creating these new digital editions we have chosen to apply a Creative Commons (CC) (http://creativecommons.org/) license with minimal restrictions. We have removed the non-commercial restriction that we adopted in March 2006 when we first began making our XML source texts available under a CC license. We expect those who use these digital texts to attribute their source to Perseus and to make any changes that they make to these texts available under the same conditions. Perseus will provide credit for any changes that it integrates into its versions of these texts. Projects such as Chicago’s Perseus under Philologic, the Open University’s Hestia Project, and the Center for Hellenic Studies First Thousand Years of Greek, as well as (outside of Classics) the Nameless Shakespeare and the University of Richmond’s Digital Scholarship Lab have already used sources contributed by Perseus as the starting point for additional work. We hope to see such efforts expand even more greatly in the future.

We have not created these digital editions to generate revenue or to underlie a proprietary service. In the now classic 1922 student textbook Argonauts of the Western Pacific, the Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski described with wonder and admiration the complex system of gift exchange that obtained among the Trobriand people of the Kiriwina islands. Students of Homer and of Archaic Greek culture will find in this society echoes of the generosity and gift-giving in which Greeks took pride. We take these texts out of the sphere of market exchange. We offer them both as a gift and as a challenge for students of Greek to improve what we have done. You may use texts to make money but you must share your versions of these texts as gifts to others.

Generations of scholars worked on these texts and it is our privilege to make these sources available to students of Greek at all levels and throughout the world. Copyright and licensing restrictions have prevented us from drawing upon the most recent editions for these works – we particularly mention Konrat Ziegler, the editor of Plutarch. Ziegler was in 1938 sentenced to two years imprisonment for helping a Jewish friend escape Nazi Germany and, after his release, hid the daughter of a Jewish friend.

We are confident that the contributions of recent scholars such as Ziegler will find their just place in subsequent versions of these digital sources. Our goal was to create digital sources with which those who love Greek could work and on which they could build without fear. You should not have to worry that a project director will cut off your access to the sources on which your research depends. Scholars should not have to work in fear of lawsuits from commercial publishers or their agents, for working with public domain data, which was digitized by federal money, is protected by a proprietary license and used to generate commercial revenue. You are free to change them and to create new works. You are free to act as students and as scholars, enabling the words of these ancient texts to take life again within the minds of our contemporaries and of future generations. The Trobriand islanders whom Malinowski knew would have understood the spirit of scholarship immediately. This is not mere gimwali, the game of commercial exchange, but kula, an exchange of gifts and a challenge to the generosity of those who make use of this.

Preservation and Curation

We consider preservation to be a problem that is, for practical purposes, solved. The texts that we are publishing now – as well as all the texts and other objects of persistent value in Perseus – are parts of the permanent digital collections at Tufts University and will be preserved, along with other university collections, by the Digital Collections and Archives and whatever organizations may succeed it. The best thing that scholars can do is to create objects that librarians can preserve, for it is libraries that have preserved our collections for generations in the past and are designed to do so in the future. Our digital repositories cannot yet work very well with the content of these XML files but they are quite capable of preserving the files as sequences of bits. At the same time, the open license means that anyone can replicate these sources and that there can be many copies of these sources outside of the preservation systems that our librarians develop.

Curation involves modification and improvement of the content. This can involve formal transformations (e.g., the conversion, hopefully automatic, to a future version of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines). A great deal of work needs to be done. Some of this work is fairly basic in nature and is easily defined. But most of the work to be done is open-ended and involves the evolution of truly digital annotations that subsume and supersede the outmoded instruments of print editions.

All of the print editions on which we draw are in the public domain and most are available for free download as PDF files either from Archive.org or from Google Books. We have encoded the page numbers of the print sources in the digital files so that readers can compare digital editions with their print sources and can consult the textual notes for any given passage (as well as the introduction and other information).

Textual notes

The decision not to enter textual notes warrants additional explanation. Classicists have bemoaned the absence of variant readings in their digital source texts since the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG) began development almost forty years ago, but no project has emerged to create a comprehensive database of variants.

We at Perseus have worked on textual variants over the years. In the 1990s, we used the then new TEI Guidelines to create dynamic editions in which readers could compare different versions of the same text. We chose to begin work with English sources because these had a broader immediate audience and thus seemed better suited as a demonstration project.

Hilary Binda created a digital edition for the surviving plays of Christopher Marlowe. For works with minor textual variants (such as Dido or Tamburlaine the Great) she encoded the variants in a machine actionable form.

<sp who=”myce”>
<speaker>Mycetes</speaker>
<l>Brother, I see your meaning well enough.</l>
−
<l>
And thorough your
−
<app>
<lem>Planets</lem>
<rdg wit=”Coll”>plainness</rdg>
</app>
I perceive you thinke,</l>

Marlowe was appealing because his work not only allowed us to examine the problems of representing variants on a single more-or-less uniform source but also challenged us to think about cases where more than one very different version exists. Two versions of Doctor Faustus survive and neither can be easily reduced to the other nor to a single text. In this case Binda encoded links between the versions so that we could compare the texts to each other. David A. Smith, now a member of the Computer Science Faculty at UMass Amherst, then developed visualization tools within the Perseus Website so that readers could dynamically explore both minor variants and the two versions of Doctor Faustus.

Since we were not able to convert variants into a machine actionable form, we included textual notes as footnotes, with the idea that others could then systematize this data (e.g., http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.02.0010:text=Catil.). But even when we have a clean transcription of the textual notes, we often cannot match notes to the relevant sections of the text, much less parse the notes themselves (Boschetti 2007). Human editors are much less consistent in their practice than they realize – a phenomenon that surprised and slowed those who, a generation ago, created a digital version of the Oxford English Dictionary (Raymond and Tompa 1987). The TEI, recognizing this problem, created for print dictionaries a much looser document type definition than that recommended for born-digital dictionaries. In a significant number of cases, we were not able to understand the notes ourselves – a phenomenon reported also by members of the Homer Multitext Project.

With the rise of vast collections with high-resolution images of each page in a printed book, the situation changed. Scholars can simply consult page images of print resources. We need searchable text so that we can find the variants on a page. During 2006/2007, support from the NSF allowed Gordon Stewart, then a recent BA in Classics and now a PhD candidate at Princeton, to publish an evaluation of optical character recognition (OCR) software for Classical Greek. Stewart used systems optimized for modern Greek and trained them for Classical Greek – in effect, Stewart trained the systems to ignore accents and found that, for a modern typeface such as that used by the Loeb Classical Library, OCR could generate text that captured the alphabetic data (i.e., unaccented Greek) with an accuracy of 99.7% and with accuracy of 98.5% for a range of Greek fonts (Stewart et al. 2007).

Stewart also measured the number of Greek words that only occurred in the textual notes. An exploratory survey of 10 Oxford Classical Text and Teubner Editions showed that 14% of the Greek words on a given page only occurred in textual notes. For Loeb editions, which report only what the editor considers to be the most important variants, he found that 4% of the Greek words only appeared in the notes.

The results of these measures are significant. Even when we have perfect transcriptions of a reconstructed text, we only have at most 96% of the relevant text. Put another way, scholars will find more of the relevant data searching text that contains a few errors but also includes output for the source text and variants.

Methods to perform OCR on Greek have also improved. During the 2008/2009 academic year, Federico Boschetti, working as a member of the Mellon-funded Cybereditions Project was able to generate accurate results for accented Greek and he developed methods to compare the output of multiple OCR engines to detect and correct errors (Boschetti et al. 2009). Accents remain challenging, with accuracy for accented Greek that have not exceeded 97%. The vast majority of these errors, however, involve accentuation and many of these can be corrected automatically.

In light of the above, we have decided on a two-fold approach. First, we continue to create accurate transcriptions of the reconstructed texts but we include as well page numbers that become dynamic links to the digital images of those pages in collections such as Google Books or the Internet Archive. Second, we will rely upon OCR-generated text for searching the textual notes themselves.

But if automated methods do not lend themselves to analyzing textual notes they are much more successful at comparing different versions of the same text. The venerable diff utility in Unix has provided serviceable text comparison software for a generation. Programs such as Collate and the Versioning Machine have been developed to support humanists working with different versions of the same text.

For twenty-one of Plutarch’s Moralia we have provided, in addition to Bernadakis’ Teubner Edition, the Greek text that Babbitt prints in the Loeb Classical Library so that readers can experiment with text comparison systems such as Collate and the Versioning Machine.

Even when we have only error-filled OCR text, we may have enough intact strings so that we can align texts together so that scholars can compare page images of the same chunk of text in many editions. Ultimately, our editions can and should include the full history of the text, including not only manuscripts and other witnesses but also printed editions and published conjectures. Scholars can then browse, mine, and visualize this data according to their needs. These needs include not only reconstruction of the source text but also seeing how printed texts of important works changed over time and analyzing the relationship between editions. The Homer Multitext Project and Aeschylus Project, led by Vittorio Citti, Federico Boschetti, Francesco Mambrini, Matteo Romanello, and others, are among those efforts that are exploring such data driven editions.

English Translations

We have included English translations for some but not all of the Greek texts that we are publishing. In part, this reflects the fact that it is much easier to digitize English translations than Greek texts. While we hope to be able to add the translations, members of the community could download the source texts for Athenaeus, the Greek Anthology, and Lucian, and create clean XML from the OCR.

How these digital editions were produced

OCR software, applied to scanned images of the print sources, produced the raw material for these digital editions. In correcting these texts we worked closely with our colleagues at Digital Divide Data (DDD), a non-profit company in Cambodia developed to engage workers in the global economy. Members of the DDD team quickly refined the raw OCR output, marking the boundaries between headers, text, and notes, while correcting and marking the citation data in the source texts. We then analyzed the document structures and encoded them in TEI XML. We also drew upon the Morpheus Greek morphological analysis system to identify words with possible errors in the Greek OCR – from 5 to 15% of the words in each text. Members of the DDD team then went through and added corrections. We are grateful to Linda Thomas, the US representative for DDD, and to Sambo Sdok, our colleague in Cambodia who bore with our requests and whose team toiled to make freely available to the world a part of our shared cultural heritage. Rashmi Singhal, the lead programmer at Perseus from 2007 through late 2010, developed the workflow and did a great deal of work improving the TEI XML, while Bridget Almas, who succeeded Rashmi in November 2010, has improved the markup and loaded the new texts into the Perseus Digital Library system. Lisa Cerrato has for years managed the operation as a whole, scanning books where sources from Google or the Internet Archive were unavailable or illegible, correcting and adding XML markup to the English translations of Plutarch, and performing innumerable tasks that make this work possible.

Readers of these electronic texts will, for now, find evidence of their origin from OCR software. The words of the text still contain some errors but most remaining problems are with punctuation and encoding. Error detection software does a much better job of identifying spelling errors than missing colons and commas, while random apostrophes, commas and periods are still to be found – usually a testimony to specs on the scanned page image.

Other errors involve markup. We have not always included the paragraph breaks of original editions (nor were these necessarily a high priority for us). We often include more than one citation scheme for each text (e.g., both book/chapter/section numbers and Stephanus pages). It is easy to detect when we jump from section 3 to section 5 but harder to detect when we have missed the citation marker for section 5 where 5 is the last section marker in a chapter.

We wanted to provide texts that would distinguish between quotations of external sources and the core text – students of Plutarch or Athenaeus need to be able to filter out quotations of Homer or Greek Comedy when they are analyzing the prose of these authors. We have therefore labeled quotations of poetry wherever possible. Our colleagues at DDD are not experts in Classical Greek and there were times where the distinction between poetry and prose is not entirely clear. We have corrected many instances where quoted poetry was not marked and where prose was marked as poetry but more surely remain. We have begun to use the TEI QUOTE tag to indicate a quotation that comes from some other source.

Authors such as Athenaeus often quote passages from drama and a number of poems in the Greek Anthology contain speakers. We have only begun to provide the TEI markup for speeches and speakers.

Likewise, we tried to use the TEI Q tag to mark quotations within the text such as:

“O Solon,” he said, “I do not think this is wise.”

The goal is to facilitate the analysis of different linguistic registers such as narrative and conversational prose – the Powell lexicon of Herodotus, for example, distinguishes between words that appear in quoted text from those that appear in the narrative. This distinction often breaks down, however, especially when we find, particularly in dialogues, long speeches that quickly shift in style to expository prose.

Readers will quickly see that the distinction between Q and QUOTE tags is far from consistent. Those analyzing these texts will, however, get good results if they assume that any tag that contains within it lines of poetry (marked as or tags) is not part of the main narrative and comes from an external source. Quotations and paraphrases from prose sources in authors such as Plutarch and Athenaeus are a much more complex topic.

Beyond interpretation and representation of previous sources

Much of what has been described so far involves interpreting and then representing in machine actionable form. As we realize more of the possibilities of digital publication, we soon find ourselves adding information that is not implicit on the print page (such as the syntactic analyses found in the Greek and Latin Treebanks and available at http://nlp.perseus.tufts.edu/syntax/treebank/). At some point, we may have a perfect transcription of the print source but the digital edition has its own logic.

If we take seriously the issue of identifying quotations and paraphrases, then we rapidly move beyond encoding features implicit in the print source and into the study of historical sources and of fragmentary historians. The PhiloGrid Project (funded by NEH and JISC) and the Cybereditions Project (funded by Mellon) allowed Monica Berti, a Classicist and editor of Greek fragmentary historians, and Matteo Romanello, a Digital Classicist, to spend six months studying the opportunities and challenges involved in working with Greek and Latin works which survive only insofar as surviving works quote them. Most Greek and Latin sources, in fact, only survive in fragmentary forms, which can include verbatim quotations, paraphrases or allusions. The German eAqua Project helped Computer Science PhD-candidate Marco Büchler spend six months at Perseus as well, where he began a collaboration with Monica Berti, applying methods to detect text reuse, developed to find quotations of Plato, to the analysis of fragmentary authors (Berti and Büchler 2010). None of this work is feasible, however, unless the researchers are able to analyze and republish in annotated form the source texts that quote, paraphrase and cite lost works. Digital editions of fragmentary authors must be hypertextual databases that link reconstructed fragments to the various sources in which they occur (Berti et al. 2009). Print editions of fragmentary authors are static collections of excerpts. Editors of fragmentary works must have access to digital versions of the sources that preserve those fragments.

We therefore chose to enter all of Plutarch and Athenaeus precisely because these authors quote, paraphrase, and cite thousands of passages from works that no longer survive. We have published these works so that not only Marco, Matteo and Monica but all students of fragmentary authors and of Plutarch and Athenaeus can use them (for more on the importance of quotations within Athenaeus see Braund and Wilkins 2000, Lenfant 2007, and Jacob 2001).

While fragmentary collections should, in our view, consist of annotated links on top of authors such as Plutarch and Athenaeus, we cannot work only with Plutarch and Athenaeus. In order to experiment with a collection that references a more comprehensive set of sources for particular authors (as opposed to mining exhaustive references to authors from selected sources), we have included a digital version of J. M. Edmonds edition of Elegy and Iambus. In this case, we have used embedded TEI CIT tags to represent two basic structures. A tag marked with an identifier marks what Edmonds has designated as the fragment. This CIT is placed within a larger CIT structure that represents the content from the surviving author who quotes this fragment.

For example:

<div2 type=”elegiac” n=”6,7″>
<cit id=”tlg-0266.cit.23″><quote>e)s timwri/as de\ a(\s u(/brizon e)s tou\s *messhni/ous *turtai/w| pepoihme/na e)sti/n:
<cit id=”tlg-0266.cit.24″><quote>
<l>w(/sper o)/noi mega/lois a)/xqesi teiro/menoi,</l>
<l>desposu/noisi fe/rontes a)nagkai/hs u(/po lugrh=s</l>
<l>h(/misu panto\s o(/son<note n=”p.66.n.3″/> karpo\n a)/roura fe/rei.</l></quote><bibl>CURFRAG.tlg-0266.4</bibl></cit>
<p>o(/ti de\ kai\ sumpenqei=n e)/keito au)toi=s a)na/gkh, dedh/lwken e)n tw=|de:</p>
<cit id=”tlg-0266.cit.25″><quote>
<l>despo/ta=s oi)mw/zontes o(mw=s a)/loxoi/ te kai\ au)toi/,</l>
<l>eu)=te tin’ ou)lome/nh moi=ra ki/xoi qana/tou.</l></quote> <bibl>CURFRAG.tlg-0266.5</bibl></cit>
</quote> <bibl>Paus. 4. 15.5</bibl></cit>
</div2>

Thus in the passage above, a larger CIT represents an excerpt from Pausanias which contains two quotations of Tyrtaeus.

We chose to include the Greek Anthology both because of its inherent interest and because it constitutes a technical challenge analogous to that of fragmentary authors. Support from the Cybereditions Project has allowed Alison Babeu, the Digital Librarian at Perseus, to develop an extensible and growing catalogue of Greek and Latin sources. Reference works such as the TLG Canon are not so much bibliographies as they are checklists of editions currently included in the TLG. They are thus closer in spirit and substance to the lists of cited editions at the start of the Liddell Scott Jones Lexica and Lewis and Short for Greek and Latin. Library catalogues, by contrast, provide catalogue records and unique identifiers for authors, and these work in large and complex systems, but library catalogues focus on authors and subjects of whole books. The Greek Anthology provides an example of the kind of work that emerging library systems need to support. Readers are often less interested in books and pages and want instead to find all works attributed to a particular author, whether these are prose speeches or epigrams scattered throughout a larger collection. The Digital Greek Anthology illustrates how such a work can be structured.

Where Plutarch and Athenaeus quote and paraphrase many sources, the Greek anthology is not a work by a single author but a collection of works by many different poets. While we have followed the Loeb as a source text we have generally followed the attributions of poems to individual authors as they appear in the Beckby edition (Beckby 1965-1968). Others may wish to add competing attributions, while access to an unencumbered text will help researchers apply computational methods to the author attribution problem.

The work on Plutarch, Athenaeus, Elegy and Iambus, and the Greek Anthology builds on, and provides the raw material to continue, work with fragmentary authors in the NEH/JISC PhiloGrid Project. A summer 2010 Google Digital Humanities Award contributed to the digitization of Athenaeus and the Greek Anthology, and has allowed us to begin adding new authors to the Perseus collections. The works of Lucian published here represent the first offerings in a series of new authors made possible by Google.

The Scaife Digital Library

These authors do not just expand what Perseus can offer but are also preliminary offerings for the Scaife Digital Library, a distributed collection of open content named after the late Ross Scaife. Hellespont, a new project funded by NEH and DFG, will allow us to upgrade our texts to TEI P5 and, even more importantly, to revise and document the markup. The texts published here will be the first such texts, with the rest of the Perseus collections following. Support from the Bamboo Project is also allowing us to work on the infrastructure needed to dynamically integrate sources from Perseus with those from other projects.

References

Hermann Beckby. (1965-1968). Anthologia Graeca. München : Heimeran.

Monica Berti, Matteo Romanello, Alison Babeu, Gregory Crane. (2009). “Collecting Fragmentary Authors in a Digital Library (Greek Fragmentary Historians). In Proceedings of the 9th ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries (JCDL 2009), pages 259-262. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/publications/JCDL09_sp.pdf

Monica Berti and Marco Büchler. (2010). “Fragmentary Texts and Digital Collections of Fragmentary Authors.” Digital Classicist 2010 Works in Progress Seminar, http://www.digitalclassicist.org/wip/wip2010-08mb.pdf

Federico Boschetti. (2007) “Methods to Extend Greek and Latin Corpora with Variants and Conjectures: Mapping Critical Apparatuses onto Reference Text.” In CL 2007: Proceedings of the Corpus Linguistics Conference (27-30 July 2007) http://corpus.bham.ac.uk/corplingproceedings07/paper/150_Paper.pdf

Federico Boschetti, Matteo Romanello, Alison Babeu, David Bamman, Gregory Crane. (2009). “Improving OCR Accuracy for Classical Critical Editions.” In Proceedings of the 13th European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries (ECDL 2009), pages 156-167, Corfu Greece: Springer Verlag, 2009-09. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/publications/ecdl2009-preprint.pdf

David Braund and John Wilkins (eds.). (2000). Athenaeus and His World. Reading Greek Culture in the Roman Empire. Exeter: University of Exeter Press.

Christian Jacob. (2001). “Ateneo o il Dedalo Delle Parole.” in L. Canfora (ed.), Ateneo. I Deipnosofisti. Roma: Salerno Editrice.

Dominique Lenfant (ed.) (2007). Athénée et les Fragments d’historiens. Paris: De Boccard.

Darrell R. Raymond and Frank Wm. Tompa. (1987). “Hypertext and the New Oxford English Dictionary.” In HYPERTEXT ’87: Proceedings of the ACM conference on Hypertext, http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=317438.

Gordon Stewart, Gregory Crane, and Alison Babeu. (2007). “A New Generation of Textual Corpora: Mining Corpora from Very Large Collections. In Proceedings of the 7th ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries (JCDL 2007), pages 356-365, Vancouver, British Columbia: ACM Digital Library, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/10427/14853

Here is the link to  a new open-access and peer-reviewed journal devoted to the study of ancient and medieval pasts: Fragments.

Particulary interesting is the aim of the journal and the meaning of its title: “The broadest aim of Fragments is to transcend fragmentation: to foster research that overflows the boundaries of various well-established and vital traditions and generates new, integrated ways of thinking about the premodern past”.

From the homepage of Fragments:

The editorial board is pleased to announce the establishment of Fragments, a new, open-access and peer-reviewed journal, which will be published through the Office of Scholarly Publishing at the University of Michigan. The first issue will appear in May 2011.

Fragments will provide a forum for dialogue and exchange between scholars in all fields of the humanities and social sciences who study the premodern world. The journal encourages scholars to engage issues of broad interest to colleagues working in other places and times, and to pursue comparative and connective approaches in investigating the past. The editors also invite scholars to explore interdisciplinary approaches to evidence and analysis, such as those that synthesize the insights of textual scholarship and archaeology, or history and sociology. We also welcome articles that introduce methodologically innovative approaches to the shared challenges of interpreting and understanding bodies of premodern evidence that are distinct in kind and quantity from the evidence of the more recent past. The broadest aim of Fragments is to transcend fragmentation: to foster research that overflows the boundaries of various well-established and vital traditions and generates new, integrated ways of thinking about the premodern past.

In order to foster dialogue, the editorial board will commission three published commentaries from scholars working outside of the author’s field. The commentaries will seek to expand the scope and import of the article by introducing perspectives from other subfields and disciplines.

Digital Research in the Study of Classical Antiquity, edited by Gabriel Bodard (King’s College, London, UK) and Simon Mahony (University College London, UK), Ashgate 2010, ISBN 978-0-7546-7773-4 £ 55.00

This book explores the challenges and opportunities presented to Classical scholarship by digital practice and resources. Drawing on the expertise of a community of scholars who use innovative methods and technologies, it shows that traditionally rigorous scholarship is as central to digital research as it is to mainstream Classical Studies. The chapters in this edited collection cover many subjects, including text and data markup, data management, network analysis, pedagogical theory and the Social and Semantic Web, illustrating the range of methods that enrich the many facets of the study of the ancient world. This volume exemplifies the collaborative and interdisciplinary nature that is at the heart of Classical Studies.

Contents: Introduction, Simon Mahony and Gabriel Bodard; Part I Archaeology and Geography: Silchester Roman town: developing virtual research practice 1997–2008, Michael G. Fulford, Emma J. O’Riordan, Amanda Clarke and Michael Rains; Diversity and reuse of digital resources for ancient Mediterranean material culture, Sebastian Heath; Space as an artefact: a perspective on ‘neogeography’ from the digital humanities, Stuart Dunn. Part II Text and Language: Contextual epigraphy and XML: digital publication and its application to the study of inscribed funerary monuments, Charlotte Tupman; A virtual research environment for the study of documents and manuscripts, Alan K. Bowman, Charles V. Crowther, Ruth Kirkham and John Pybus. One era’s nonsense, another’s norm: diachronic study of Greek and the computer, Notis Toufexis. Part III Infrastructure and Disciplinary Issues: Digital infrastructure and the Homer multitext project, Neel Smith; Ktêma es aiei: digital permanence from an ancient perspective, Hugh A. Cayless; Creating a generative learning object (GLO): working in an ‘ill-structured’ environment and getting students to think, Eleanor O’Kell, Dejan Ljubojevic and Cary MacMahon; The digital classicist: disciplinary focus and interdisciplinary vision, Melissa Terras; Bibliography; Index.

About the Editors: Dr Gabriel Bodard is Research Associate at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, KCL and Simon Mahony is at the University College London, UK

Promotional flyer of the book

Extracts from the book:

Full Contents List

Introduction

Index

From Domenico Fiormonte:

We are happy to announce the publication of our new book: L’umanista digitale, by Teresa Numerico, Domenico Fiormonte and Francesca Tomasi (Il Mulino, Bologna, 2010).

This work follows the collective Informatica per le discipline umanistiche (ed. by Teresa Numerico and Arturo Vespignani, 2004), a small best-seller in our field, as it was widely used in many humanities computing courses across Italy. In the last six years so many things have changed, so we decided to write a completely different book, and organized it around the idea of an essential “digital trivium”. Not just an introduction to DH, but a critical reflection on current tools (Google, among others) and practices.

Accordingly, the volume is divided in three main sections: Writing & producing content (Scrivere e produrre, by D. Fiormonte); Representation and preservation (Rappresentare e conservare, by F. Tomasi); Searching and organizing (Cercare e organizzare, by T. Numerico). The book was conceived from a genuinely interdisciplinary perspective, as we all work in different fields: Teresa is a philosopher of science and CS historian, Francesca is a computer scientist and digital archivist, and Domenico is a linguist and new media student. Perhaps the most challenging output of this collaboration is the first chapter on the “humanistic roots” of computer science, written by T. Numerico, but discussed among us at length. Teresa, who has been working for years on this topic, describes an epistemological turn: from the computer as “computing machine” to idea of “interface” and communicative
tool, explaining how this idea derived from people and scholars who had a humanistic approach to knowledge.

Interesting to the DH community would be also the Appendix: The international scenario of digital humanities, a concise summary of geo-political trends, research scenarios and projects in our field. The prospect provided here is deliberately international, but also attentive to the specific cultural needs of each national DH community.

Finally, registered readers can access the publisher’s online environment AulaWeb, where they can find more material, i.e. unpublished chapters, tests, slides, and tutorials.

So, you’ll say, another Italian HC/DH book that nobody outside Italy will ever read? Maybe. Or may be you can help us to translate bit & pieces, summarise, and abridge paragraphs and chapters, and post them in your blog and web sites. We can send you the italian text and help you to translate anything you’re interested in. Especially the introduction Storia dell’interazione tra tecnologia e sapere umanistico is something quite new in our field: we don’t remember many publications, except perhaps Willard ‘s “Humanities Computing”, reflecting on how important has been our theoretical and practical contribution to the birth of Informatics and Computer Science. If you need more info, or want a review copy of the volume, please contact the publisher at universita@mulino.it, or feel free to write us:

Teresa Numerico
Domenico Fiormonte
Francesca Tomasi

Here is the publication of the fragments of the works of Xenophon, edited in the series “Corpus dei papiri storici greci e latini”:

8 – Corpus dei papiri storici greci e latini. Parte A. Storici greci. 1. Autori noti. I frammenti delle opere di Senofonte, a cura di Natascia Pellé, 2010, pp. 226, Fabrizio Serra Editore, 2010 ISBN 978-88-6227-276-6

From the webpage of Libraweb:

Il presente lavoro comprende l’edizione critica degli undici papiri che conservano passi frammentari delle opere senofontee di carattere storiografico. Di essi, sette contengono passi degli Hellenica e quattro brani dell’Anabasis. Tutti i papiri tranne uno (databile al IV secolo d.C.) appartengono ad un periodo compreso tra il I e il III secolo d.C. Essi, per il modo in cui sono redatti, riescono a fornire numerose indicazioni riguardo all’estensore del testo, al committente, al lettore e all’ambito di circolazione della copia cui il frammento appartiene. Unendo tali dati all’analisi paleografica e testuale, l’autrice traccia un quadro complessivo del contributo dei papiri ai modi ed alle forme della diffusione del testo di Senofonte come storico nell’Egitto romano e bizantino, ricostruendo, sulla base dell’analisi dei manoscritti esaminati, gli apporti dei papiri delle opere storiche di Senofonte alla storia del libro antico, alla storia della scrittura ed alla ricostruzione del testo senofonteo. I frammenti presi in esame sono ordinati in base alla posizione nel testo tràdito dalla paradosi medievale del brano in essi conservato. L’edizione del testo contiene ciò che è attualmente leggibile nel singolo frammento e le integrazioni, per lo più dovute ai precedenti editori, che sono sembrate opportune. Il testo è preceduto da una descrizione bibliologica e paleografica del frammento e seguìto da un apparato paleografico, da un apparato critico e da un apparato dei codici. Nell’apparato paleografico sono segnalati i fenomeni grafici (segni di lettura, punteggiatura, accenti etc.) ed ortografici (fenomeni di iotacismo, geminazione, semplificazione etc.). L’apparato critico rende conto di letture ed integrazioni degli editori precedenti. L’apparato dei codici mette a confronto il testo del papiro con quello tramandato dai testimoni medievali, evidenziando discordanze e concordanze.

Sommario: Natascia Pellé, Premessa; Premessa al testo; Abbreviazioni bibliografiche; Riviste; Sigle papirologiche; Abbreviazioni; Segni critici. Introduzione: Papiri e ricezione di Senofonte storico nell’Egitto romano e bizantino. La tradizione manoscritta degli Hellenica. Sigla. I papiri degli Hellenica. 1F PVindob inv. G 257 + 24568 + 29781; 2F Pprinc III 112; 3F POxy I 28; 4F PLaur inv. PL III /273 H; 5F Pyale II 100; 6F PSI XI 1197 + PSI XVII Congr. 8 + POxy II 226; 7F PMich inv. 6650 + PKoln VII 305. La tradizione manoscritta dell’Anabasis; Sigla. I papiri dell’Anabasis; 1F PSI XI 1196 + PSI XV 1485; 2F POxy III 463; 3F POxy IX 1181; 4F PBerol inv. 11904. Indice dei termini greci presenti nei papiri. Tavole.

Athina Papachrysostomou (ed.), Six Comic Poets: A Commentary on Selected Fragments of Middle Comedy. Drama: Studien zum antiken Drama und seiner Rezeption; N.S., 4.  Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 2008. Pp. 303. ISBN 9783823363781. €58.00

This book provides a commentary on the most important remains of several of the key poets of the Athenian Middle Comedy.

A major asset of this book is the Introduction, where the author discusses two controversial issues; the periodisation of Greek Comedy and the validity of the term Middle Comedy itself. The Introduction also deals with the issue of the sources for the comic remains and their reliability. The rest of the book is divided into six sections, each devoted to one of six major Middle Comedy playwrights respectively. For each fragment a critical apparatus, a translation and a commentary are provided. The commentary for every fragment is meticulous and thorough, enriched with cross-references to parallels, in the form of either antecedents or precedents, both from within Greek Comedy and from other genres. The commentary is primarily literary; however, wherever the different readings affect the meaning textual issues are also discussed and at times new readings are proposed. The comprehensive analysis of individual fragments is intended to help the reader to understand both the work of the individual poets and the nature of Middle Comedy. As well as demonstrating that the first half of the fourth century is an epoch of extreme experimentation, the commentary also illustrates the complex process of innovation and continuity which characterises Athenian Comedy over two centuries.

Read the review by Leonardo Fiorentini on BMCR (2010.02.39).

Here is the first complete commentary to the 91 fragments of the Attic comic poet Strattis (ca. 410-380 BC):

Christian Orth (ed.). Strattis: die Fragmente. Ein Kommentar. Studia comica. Berlin: VA, Verlag Antike, 2009. Pp. 328. ISBN 9783938032329. € 54.90.