EpiDoc and TEI-XML training workshop
Dipartimento di Scienze Storiche, Giuridiche, Economiche e Sociali dell’Università Mediterranea di Reggio Calabria – BILG Project
June 4-7, 2012

The Department of Scienze Storiche, Giuridiche, Economiche e Sociali of University Mediterranea of Reggio Calabria and the Department Diritto dell’Organizzazione Pubblica, Economia e Società of University Magna Graecia of Catanzaro, within BILG (Inscriptiones Graecae et Latinae Bruttiorum) project, is organising an intensive training workshop of EpiDoc, with Monica Berti (Tufts University – Università di Roma Tor Vergata), Lou Burnard (TEI Editor) and Marion Lamè (Università di Bologna). This workshop is an introduction to the use of TEI and of EpiDoc, XML schema for the encoding and publication of literary texts and inscriptions, papyri and other documentary classical texts respectively. Participants will study the use of EpiDoc markup to record the distinctions expressed by the Leiden Conventions and traditional critical editions, and some of the issues in translating between EpiDoc and the major epigraphic and papyrological databases.

The course is targeted at scholars of historical and ancient texts, epigraphic and papyrologic ones (from advanced graduate students to professors), that are interested and want to learn some of the hands-on technical aspects in the markup, encoding, and exploitation of digital editions. The course will give a practical introduction to the Text Encoding Initiative, an introduction to EpiDoc markup and editing tools, and the text transformations with XSLT.

For more details about EpiDoc and TEI /XML, see at http://epidoc.sf.net and http://www.tei-c.org. Knowledge of Greek and/or Latin, the Leiden Conventions, the distinctions expressed by them and the kinds of data that need to be recorded by epigraphic scholars and ancient historians are of course essential. The course will be held in English with Italian tutors. No particular computer skills and technical expertise are required, even if the possession of an interest for computer know-how is preferable.

The workshop is free of charge and open to all, but spaces are limited (not more than 20 people) and registration as soon as possible is essential. To enrol in the training, please contact daria.spampinato@cnr.it or stefania.romeo@unirc.it with a brief statement of qualifications and interests.

Tufts University invites applications to “Working with Text in a Digital Age“, a three-week NEH Institute for Advanced Technology in the Digital Humanities (July 23-August 10, 2012) that combines traditional topics such as TEI Markup with training in methods from Information Retrieval, Visualization, and Corpus and Computational Linguistics.

Faculty, graduate students, and library professionals are encouraged to apply. Applicants should submit proposals by February 15, 2012. Participant proposals must include CVs and statements of purpose (no more than 1,000 words) describing how they will be able to use participation in the Institute to advance their subsequent careers. Participants must be committed to collaborative work and to publication of results from this Institute under a Creative Commons license. Participants should identify source materials with which they propose to work during the Institute and which must be in the public domain or available under a suitable license. In an ideal case, source materials would include both texts for intensive analysis and annotation and one or more larger corpora to be mined and analyzed more broadly. Statements of purpose must describe initial goals for the Institute. For more information or to submit applications, please contact lisa.cerrato@tufts.edu.

We particularly encourage participants who are committed to developing research agendas that integrate contributions and research by undergraduates, that expand the global presence of the Humanities, and that, in general, broaden access to and participation in the Humanities. Preference will be given to participants who are best prepared not only to apply new technologies but to do so as a means to transform their teaching and research and the relationship of their work to society beyond academia.

For further details see Working with Text in a Digital Age – NEH Institute at Tufts University

Announcing Working with text in a digital age, a NEH Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities. Co-directors: Monica Berti and Gregory Crane, Tufts University; Anke Lüdeling, Humboldt University.

July 23-August 10, 2012 Tufts University, Medford MA

This institute will provide participants with three weeks in which (1) to develop hands on experience with TEI-XML, (2) to apply methods from information retrieval, text visualization, and corpus and computational linguistics to the analysis of textual and linguistic sources in the humanities, (3) to rethink not only their own research agendas but also new relationships between their work and non-specialists.

A call for applications will follow shortly.

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 program of a workshop on historical texts, which will be held at the Perseus Project at Tufts University on January 13 and 14, 2010:

Workshop on Historical Texts

Two papers will be devoted to the problem of editing fragments:

• Monica Berti, Fragmentary Texts & Digital Libraries

• Alexandra Trachsel, An Online Edition of Demetrios of Scepsis: A Case Study on Fragment 32

A new project (Representing Citations in the Deipnosophists of Athenaeus), directed by Monica Berti in collaboration with Virgilio Costa, aims at investigating the Deipnosophists of Athenaeus in order to

(1) carry out a systematic survey of the citations preserved in the fifteen books of Athenaeus’ work,
(2) build a fully comprehensive repository of the quotation schemes used by Athenaeus when alluding to his source of information.

The Deipnosophists (Δειπνοσοφισταί, or “Sophists at Dinner”, in fifteen books), written by Athenaeus of Naucratis in the early 3rd century AD, is the fictitious account of several banquet conversations on food, literature, and arts held in Rome by twenty-two learned men. This complex and fascinating work is not only an erudite and literary encyclopedia of a myriad of curiosities about classical antiquity, but also an invaluable collection of quotations of ancient authors, ranging from Homer to tragic and comic poets and lost historians. Since the large majority of the works cited by Athenaeus is nowadays lost, this compilation is a sort of reference tool for every scholar of Greek theater, poetry, historiography, botany, zoology, and many other topics.

Despite the importance of the Deipnosophists, we still lack a comprehensive survey of Athenaeus’ citations, and many classicists have expressed the need of such a research (see, e.g., G. Zecchini, La cultura storica di Ateneo. Milano: Vita e Pensiero, 1989; Athenaeus and His World. Reading Greek Culture in the Roman Empire, ed. D. Braund & J. Wilkins. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000; Ateneo. I Deipnosofisti, ed. L. Canfora. Roma: Salerno Editrice, 2001; Athénée et les fragments d’historiens, ed. D. Lenfant. Paris: De Boccard, 2007). The results of this investigation will enable us not only to better understand the ways of transmission of ancient literature at the time of Athenaeus, but also to make a definitive list of authors and works mentioned by him, and to draw a complete collection of citation schemes adopted in the stratified and multiform architecture of the Deipnosophists.

The primary goal of this project is to analyze the quotations of the learned banqueters with a twofold purpose: 1) to provide an inventory of all authors and works cited in the Deipnosophists; 2) to build a repository of quotation schemes used by Athenaeus when alluding to his sources of information. For this reason, the first step of the project is the realization of a TEI-compliant XML version of the Deipnosophists. The text will be based on the editions of Meineke and Kaibel, and it will be autoptically checked whenever necessary.

Given that the Deipnosophists is a mine of thousands of citations (whose exact number is still uncertain), the aim of this project is to provide a case study for drawing a spectrum of quoting habits of classical authors and their attitude to text reuse. Athenaeus, in fact, shapes a library of forgotten authors, which goes beyond the limits of a physical building and becomes an intellectual space of human knowledge. By doing so, he is both a witness of the Hellenistic bibliographical methods and a forerunner of the modern concept of hypertext, where sequential reading is substituted by hierarchical and logical connections among words and fragments of texts (cf. G. Genette, Palimpsests. Literature in the Second Degree. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997; G.P. Landow, Hypertext 2.0. The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997; J.D. Bolter, Writing Space. Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print. Second edition. Mahwah, NJ: Lea Publishers, 2001).

Quantity, variety, and precision of Athenaeus’ citations make the Deipnosophists an excellent training ground for the development of a digital system of reference linking for primary sources. In this sense, this project is consistent with the work that is currently being developed by the Technological Working Group of the Center for Hellenic Studies, in order to propose a machine-actionable but technologically independent notation for citing texts (see N. Smith, “Citation in Classical Studies.” In Digital Humanities Quarterly, 3:1, 2009).

Athenaeus’ standard citation includes (a) the name of the author with additional information like ethnic origin and literary category, (b) the title of the work, and (c) the book number (e.g., Deipn. ii 71b). He often remembers the amount of papyrus scrolls of huge works (e.g., vi 229d-e; vi 249a), while distinguishing various editions of the same comedy (e.g., i 29a; iv 171c; vi 247c; vii 299b; ix 367f) and different titles of the same work (e.g., i 4e). He also adds biographical information to identify homonymous authors and classify them according to literary genres, intellectual disciplines and schools (e.g., i 13b; vi 234f; ix 387b). He provides chronological and historical indications to date authors (e.g., x 453c; xiii 599c), and he often copies the first lines of a work following a method that probably goes back to the Pinakes of Callimachus (e.g., i 4e; iii 85f; viii 342d; v 209f; xiii 573f-574a).

Last but not least, the study of Athenaeus’ “citation system” is also a great methodological contribution to the domain of fragmentary literature, since one of the main concerns of this field is the relation between the fragment and its context of transmission. Having this goal in mind, the textual analysis of the Deipnosophists will make possible to enumerate a series of recurring patterns, which include a wide typology of textual reproductions and linguistic features helpful to identify and classify hidden quotations of lost authors.

This project is meant as a tool coherent with the work on Greek fragmentary historians, which is being conducted at the University of Rome Tor Vergata (see the series “I frammenti degli Storici Greci”, ed. in chief E. Lanzillotta). Moreover, it is also an effort to develop the model devised by the Perseus Project for representing fragmentary texts in a digital library of classical sources (see M. Berti et al., “Collecting fragmentary authors in a digital library”. In Proceedings of the 2009 Joint International Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL ’09). Austin, TX. New York, NY: ACM Digital Library, 2009, 259-262).

I post a document with some notes on the main characteristics of fragmentary texts to be represented in a digital library of classical sources:

• Fragmentary Texts and Digital Libraries

Digital technologies and on-line repositories are providing classicists with new tools for collecting and studying ancient sources. Digital philology is devising models and instruments for representing critical texts with variants of manuscripts and conjectures of philologists. It is now possible to develop also tools for realizing digital corpora of fragments of lost authors and works, in order to preserve an inestimable cultural heritage built across the centuries.

I write here some remarks on the main characteristics of fragmentary texts that should be represented in digital format. These remarks are part of the work which is being conducted at the Perseus Digital Library for a project on fragmentary authors.

The first question is to remind that textual fragments refer to a particular phenomenon, because they are not portion of an original larger whole like material fragments, but the result of a work of interpretation conducted by scholars, who extract and collect information pertaining to lost works embedded in other surviving texts. This use of the term fragment may be misleading, because the original text of the excerpt is usually covered by the context of transmission and distorted by the style and purpose of the author who has extracted and quoted it (usually called the “witness” of the fragment).

Print collections of fragmentary texts consist of textual excerpts drawn from many different sources and arranged according to various criteria, such as chronological order or thematic disposition. The length of these excerpts can be significantly different from one edition to another and depends on the editor’s choice. Moreover, when an extracted portion of text is printed, it immediately acquires a sort of materiality due to its typographical representation: it has very definite margins like a real fragment, but it is actually the result of a modern extraction and interpretation; it can give false illusions because the fragment in itself doesn’t exist, and it is only like a shadow, whose shape is blurred and can lead to a distorted perception of reality.

Secondly, one of the main concern when raising evidence of lost works is reconstructing the complex relationship between the fragment and its source of transmission, which means weighing the level of interference played by the author who has reused and transformed the original context of the fragment, measuring therefore the distance between the source text and the derived text, and trying to perceive the degree of text reuse and its effect on the resulting target text.

This interpretative process is usually explained in the commentary of a fragment edition or in papers and monographs pertaining to various aspects of fragmentary authors and works, but it is completely lost in the print representations of the fragments, which are simply typographical reproductions of extracts of derived texts.

Digital libraries and hypertext models allow to rethink the  fundamental  question  of  the  relation  between  the  fragment  and  its  context,  representing  and  expressing  every  element  of  print  conventions  in  a  more  dynamic  and  interconnected  way.

Representing  Fragments

Print  editions  of  fragments  contain  extracts  from  many  different  sources  and  are  thus  paper  representations  of  hypertexts. Now  that  the  source  editions  from  which  fragments  are  extracted  are  becoming  available  in  digital  form,  it  is  possible  to  construct  editions  that  are  truly  hypertextual,  including  not  only  excerpts  but  links  to  the  scholarly  sources  from  which  those  excerpts  are  drawn.

Encoding  fragments  is  first  of  all  the  result  of  interpreting  them,  developing  a  language  appropriate  for  representing  every  element  of  their  textual  features,  thus  creating  meta-information  through  an  accurate  and  elaborate  semantic  markup.  Editing  fragments,  therefore,  signifies  producing  meta-editions  that  are  different  from  printed  ones  because  they  consist  not  only  of  isolated  quotations  but  also  of  pointers  to  the  original  contexts  from  which  the  fragments  have  been  extracted.

On  a  broader  level,  the  goal  of  a  digital  edition  of  fragments  is  to  represent  multiple  transtextual  relationships  as  they  are  defined  in  literary  criticism  (cf.  Gérard  Genette),  which  include  intertextuality  (the  presence  of  a  text  inside  another  text,  such  as  quotations,  allusions,  and  plagiarism),  paratextuality  (i.e.,  all  those  elements  which  are  not  part  of  the  text,  like  titles,  subtitles,  prefaces,  notes,  etc.),  metatextuality  (critical  relations  among  texts,  i.e.  commentaries  and  critical  texts),  architextuality  (which  means  the  generic  quality  and  status  of  a  text),  and  hypertextuality  (i.e.,  the  derivation  of  a  text  from  a  preexisting  hypotext  through  a  process  of  transformation  or  imitation).  Designing  a  digital  edition  of  fragments  also  means  finding  digital  paradigms  and  solutions  to  express  information  about  printed  critical  editions  and  their  editorial  and  conventional  features.  Working  on  a  digital  edition  means  converting  traditional  tools  and  resources  used  by  scholars  such  as  canonical  references,  tables  of  concordances,  and  indexes  into  machine  actionable  contents.

Standards,  protocols,  and  tools  now  available  permit  us  to  express  the  hypertextual  and  hermeneutical  nature  of  fragmentary  texts,  providing  scholars  with  an  interconnected  corpus  of  primary  and  secondary  sources  of  fragments  that  also  includes  critical  apparatuses,  commentaries,  translations,  and  modern  bibliography  on  ancient  texts.  The  first  requirement  for  building  a  digital  collection  of  fragmentary  texts  then  is  to  make  the  semantic  contents  of  critical  print  editions  machine  readable,  defining  a  general  architecture  for  representing  at  least  the  following  main  elements  pertaining  to  the  domain  of  fragmentary  texts  in  a  digital  library:

• Fragment  as  machine  actionable  link

The  fragment  should  be  linked  to  the  whole  text  of  the  source  in  which  it  is  transmitted.  This  is  the  first  function  for  a  proper  representation  of  fragmentary  texts:  in  this  way  it  is  possible  to  see  the  excerpt  directly  inside  its  context  of  transmission,  avoiding  the  misleading  idea  of  an  independent  material  existence  of  fragmentary  texts,  which  derives  from  typographical  representation  of  excerpts  that  are  actually  the  result  of  modern  reconstructions  of  lost  works.

• Start  and  end  of  a  fragment

Linking  the  fragment  to  its  source  means  collocating  it  again  in  its  original  context.  The  next  step  is  providing  a  mechanism  for  marking  the  beginning  and  the  end  of  a  fragment  in  this  context  according  to  the  choices  of  different  editors.  The  result  is  that  the  reader,  while  visualizing  the  excerpt  inside  its  source  of  transmission,  is  able  to  see simultaneously  the  representation  of  different  lengths  of  the  same  fragment  based  on  editions  that  have  adopted  different  textual  criteria.

• Numbering  and  ordering  fragments

Numbering  and  ordering  fragments  may  vary  in  a  significant  way  from  one  edition  to  another.  These  differences  depend  on  the  choices  of  the  editor,  who  can  decide  to  order  the  fragments  -  and  consequently  number  them  -  according  to  different  internal  or  external  characteristics  of  the  fragments  themselves  or  of  their  sources.  A  digital  representation  of  fragments  should  provide  the  possibility  of  encoding  this  kind  of  information,  which  is  usually  registered  in  the  table  of  concordances  of  a  printed  edition:  aligning  multiple  references  to  the  same  textual  object  can  help  the  reader  visualize  different  numberings  and  orderings  of  fragments  in  different  editions,  including  new  data  if  new  editions  are  added.

• Representing  information  on  fragmentary  authors  and  works

Within  the  source  transmitting  the  fragment,  it  is  necessary  to  specify  that  a  given  segment  of  the  text  is  the  name  of  the  author  to  which  the  fragment  is  attributed,  and  in  some  cases  also  the  title  of  the  work  and  the  book  number  to  which  the  fragment  originally  belonged.  Attributing  a  fragment  to  an  author  and  a  work  can  be  a  difficult  task,  because  we  can  have  homonymous  authors  and  also  because  managing  titles  of  ancient  works  can  be  quite  challenging:  in  most  cases,  witnesses  do  not  cite  the  title  of  the  work  from  which  they  have  drawn  the  fragment;  moreover,  in  ancient  sources,  the  title  of  a  work  may  be  attested  with  more  or  less  significant  variants,  and  the  result  is  that  different  editors  may  attribute  the  same  fragment  to  different  authors  and  works.  The  goal  is  to  develop  a  comprehensive  catalog  of  unique  identifiers  for  every  fragmentary  author  and  work  that  will  include  multiple  expressions  of  the  same  author  and  work  and  where  each  entry  will  have  associated  meta-data,  providing  the  scholar  with  a  sort  of  canon  that  simultaneously  includes  all  available  information  on  fragmentary  authors  and  works,  with  pointers  to  primary  and  secondary  sources.  This  function,  beside  providing  the  scholar  with  an  innovative  tool,  can  be  very  helpful  in  enhancing  one  of  the  “theoretical  questions”  suggested  by  Glenn  Most  when  collecting  fragments,  i.e.  the  relationship  between  fragmentary  authors  and  the  “shifting  boundaries  of  canon  formation  over  time.”

• Classifying  fragments

Fragments  are  classifiable  according  to  multiple  criteria  ranging  from  internal  to  external  factors.  The  first  classification  is  based  on  literary  genre,  which  ancient  fragments  of  classical  literature  cover  almost  entirely,  from  epic  and  poetry  to  oratory  and  historiography.  Inside  the  same  collection,  fragments  are  usually  distinguished  as  “testimonia”  (i.e.,  fragments  providing  biographical  and  bibliographical  information  about  fragmentary  authors)  and  “fragmenta”  (i.e.,  fragments  of  lost  works).  Other  criteria  for  classifying  fragments  belonging  to  the  same  literary  genre  can  also  be  applied,  as  is  shown  by  the  monumental  work  of  Felix  Jacoby  in  editing  Greek  historical  fragments,  which  is  one  of  the  most  important  results  achieved  in  the  field  of  ancient  historiography.  Nevertheless,  the  print  representation  of  these  categories  has  many  limitations,  because  it  is  impossible  to  draw  a  demarcation  line  among  many  different  genres  of  fragmentary  authors  and  works  that  can  be  inserted  in  different  overlapping  categories,  and  the  result  is  that  the  same  fragment  is  often  repeated  in  many  different  sections  corresponding  to  different  categories.  A  digital  collection  in  which  every  fragment  is  preserved  in  its  original  context  and  represented  with  multiple  pieces  of  meta-data  can  express  the  complexity  of  modern  classifications,  while  not  scattering  and  repeating  the  same  excerpt  many  different  times.  In  this  way  it  is  possible  to  avoid  the  strictness  of  printed  categories,  allowing  scholars  to  compare  a  fragment  with  many  other  excerpts  and  visualizing  its  belonging  to  different  categories  in  a  more  dynamic  and  simultaneous  way.

Representing  Textual  Variants  and  Conjectures

Print  collections  of  fragments  often  include  a  critical  apparatus,  which  is  normally  not  based  on  a  new  examination  of  the  original  manuscripts  that  bear  witness  to  the  text,  but  on  a  selection  of  variants  and  conjectures  drawn  from  the  best  critical  editions  of  fragment  sources.  This  choice  is  principally  due  to  the  fact  that  it  would  take  too  much  time  to  examine  every  manuscript,  and  also  because  a  work  of  this  kind  would  go  beyond  the  competencies  and  purposes  of  the  editors  of  fragments,  who  are  primarily  interested  in  reconstructing  content  and  characteristics  of  lost  works.

Both  the  emerging  cyberinfrastructure  for  the  humanities  and  the  research  conducted  in  the  field  of  ePhilology  have  devised  a  new  concept  of  Greek  and  Latin  textual  corpora,  where  the  aim  is  to  provide  scholarly  services  and  methods  for  tracking  and  comparing  multiple  versions  of  the  same  text  across  time,  affecting  in  a  fundamental  way  as  well  future  work  on  fragmentary  texts:

• Multiple  editions  and  alignment  of  citation  schemes

The  first  step  is  to  collect  every  edition  of  the  sources  preserving  fragments  as  well  as  collections  of  fragmentary  works,  so  that  a  particular  passage  can  be  visualized  in  different  versions  of  the  same  text  reconstructed  by  different  editors.

• Dynamic  collation  of  multiple  editions  and  digital  criticism

Collecting  multiple  critical  editions  of  the  same  text  means  building  a  “multitext”,  which  is  a  “network  of  versions  with  a  single,  reconstructed  root”,  so  that  scholars  can  compare  different  textual  choices  and  conjectures  produced  by  philologists  (the  concept  of  multitext  is  the  result  of  work  conducted  by  the  Homer  Multitext  Project  of  the  Center  for  Hellenic  Studies,  which  aims  at  producing  a  new  digital  representation  of  the  textual  tradition  of  the  Homeric  poems:  see  Blackwell-Crane and  Dué-Ebbott in  DHQ  2009.3.1).  This  process  involves  a  new  way  of  conceiving  literary  criticism  because  it  produces  a  representation  and  visualization  of  textual  transmission  completely  different  from  print  conventions,  where  the  text  that  is  reconstructed  by  the  editor  is  separated  from  the  critical  apparatus  that  is  printed  at  the  bottom  of  the  page.  In  addition,  the  inclusion  of  images  of  manuscripts,  papyri,  and  other  source  materials  allows  the  reader  to  have  a  dynamic  visualization  of  the  textual  tradition  and  to  perceive  the  different  channels  of  both  the  transmission  and  philological  production  of  the  text  that  is  usually  hidden  in  the  static,  concise,  and  necessarily  selective  critical  apparatuses  of  standard  printed  editions.  Producing  a  multitext,  therefore,  means  producing  multiple  versions  of  the  same  text,  which  are  the  representation  of  the  different  steps  of  its  transmission  and  reconstruction,  from  manuscript  variants  to  philological  conjectures.  This  process  has  fundamental  consequences  for  the  study  of  ancient  sources  in  general  and  for  fragmentary  ones  in  particular,  given  that,  while  studying  fragments  and  evaluating  their  distance  from  the  original  version,  it  is  imperative  to  examine  the  manuscript variants  of  the  source  text,  in  order  to  see  what  can  be  attributed  to  the  witness  or  to  the  transmission  of  the  text  across  centuries.

Secondary  and  Tertiary  Sources

Collecting  fragments  also  means  looking  for  many  other  kinds  of  information  directly  or  indirectly  connected  to  fragmentary  authors.  These  data  are  usually  labelled  as  “secondary”  and  “tertiary  sources,”  and  may  be  summarized  into  the  following  fundamental  categories:  1)  Loci  Paralleli,  i.e.  secondary  ancient  sources  parallel  to  the  witness  of  a  fragment.  Even  if  the  relationship  of  a  locus  parallelus  to  the  main  quoter  of  a  fragmentary  text  may  involve  many  aspects,  loci  paralleli  form  two  principal  groups:  a)  sources  quoting  or  paraphrasing  the  same  fragment  (in  most  cases  these  sources  are  chronologically  later  than  the  witness);  b)  sources  treating  the  same  subject  of  the  fragment.  2)  Tertiary  Sources,  i.e.  modern  bibliography  consisting  of  monographs,  papers,  encyclopedia,  grammars,  translations,  and  other  bibliographical  tools  giving  information  and  commentaries  on  a  wide  range  of  materials  pertaining  to  the  fragment,  its  author,  and  its  source  of  transmission.

A  digital  representation  of  fragmentary  texts  should  provide  links  to  secondary  and  tertiary  sources,  identifying  passages  in  articles  and  monographs  related  to  the  fragment  and  the  context  from  which  the  fragment  has  been  drawn.  Mass  digitization  projects  like  Google  Books,  Google  Scholar,  and  Internet  Archive are  providing  many  collections  of  secondary  and  tertiary  sources  useful  to  classicists.  Moreover,  repositories  like  JSTOR and  Project  MUSE offer  access  to  the  titles  of  leading  academic  journals  within  a  variety  of  disciplines,  as  well  as  monographs  and  other  materials  fundamental  for  scholarly  activities:  these  archives  are  full-text  searchable  and  offer  many  possibilities  of  interdisciplinary  research,  including  high-quality  images  and  interlinked  citations  and  references.

In  addition  to  these  resources,  there  are  other  projects  and  electronic  publications  for  digital  classicists  developed  by  organizations  such  as  The  Stoa  Consortium and  founded  on  the  principle  of  open  access.  One  of  the  most  significant  Stoa  projects  is  the  Suda  On  Line  (SOL),  which  is  particularly  important  for  those  interested  in  building  a  digital  collection  of  Greek  fragmentary  authors,  because  the  Suda  preserves  a  lot  of  fragments  of  classical  authors,  which  in  most  cases  can  be  classified  as  loci  paralleli.  The  aim  of  the  project  is  to  create  an  on-line  version  of  this  encyclopedic  lexicon,  providing,  for  the  first  time,  a  translation  and  interpretive  apparatus  for  each  entry  thanks  to  the  international  cooperative  efforts  of  many  scholars.  All  of  these  resources  represent  the  types  of  sources  that  should  be  included  when  devising  a  digital  representation  of  fragmentary  texts,  in  order  to  build  a  dynamic  and  interconnected  corpus  of  primary,  secondary,  and  tertiary  sources.

Translation  and  Commentary

Two  other  fundamental  elements  of  modern  collections  of  fragmentary  works  that  may  receive  a  great  improvement  in  digital  libraries  are  translations  and  commentaries.  Translating  texts  means  not  only  providing  a  service  for  those  who  do  not  have  a  good  knowledge  of  ancient  languages,  but  it  is  first  of  all  an  essential  part  of  the  scholarly  interpretation  produced  by  the  editor.  Through  the  collection  of  multiple  editions  of  the  same  work,  a  digital  library  will  allow  scholars  to  also  consult  multiple  translations  into  multiple  languages,  comparing  different  interpretations  and  linguistic  restitutions  of  the  same  passage.  At  a  deeper  level,  aligning  multiple  editions  enables  us  to  create  machine  actionable  dictionaries  and  dynamic  lexica  of  Greek  and  Latin  words  and  their  corresponding  terms  in  modern  languages,  providing  an  inestimable  tool  for  scholars  and  for  a  wide  range  of  linguistic,  grammatical,  and  syntactic  analyses.

As  far  as  concerns  fragments,  Guido  Schepens  has  pointed  out  that  the  commentary  to  the  text  is  constituted  by  two  fundamental  tasks:  the  first  is  the  effort  to  “deconstruct”  the  context  that  preserves  the  quotation  in  order  to  find  the  original  characteristics  of  the  fragment,  and  the  second  one  is  to  try  to  “reconstruct”  the  fragment  and  the  lost  work  to  which  it  belonged.  As  for  textual  variants,  conjectures  and  translations,  a  digital  library  should  provide  every  passage  with  links  to  multiple  commentaries  drawn  from  the  editions  of  fragments  and  source  texts.  A  true  digital  commentary,  however,  can  be  conceived  as  something  broader  than  that,  because  it  can  include  every  possible  annotation  identifying  every  phenomenon  pertaining  to  the  text,  thus  providing  traditional  commentaries  with  a  wide  series  of  services,  ranging  from  morphological  and  syntactic  analysis  to  named  entity  identification  and  different  explanations  or  disputes  on  every  aspect  of  the  textual  content.

Conclusion

Devising  a  model  and  an  architecture  for  representing  fragmentary  texts  in  a  digital  library  is  a  fundamental  contribution  toward  a  systematic  and  structural  analysis  of  the  multiple  layers  of  production  and  interpretation  that  constitute  a  textual  fragment.  In  particular,  the  two  most  important  goals  of  such  a  work  are:  1)  Representing  a  textual  fragment  as  a  hypertext,  i.e.  as  a  text  derived  from  another  text  and  interconnected  to  many  other  different  typologies  of  texts:  this  means  envisioning  and  building  an  expansible  set  of  links  that  express  multiple  relations  of  the  text  of  the  fragment  with  itself  (i.e.,  with  the  text  embedding  and  transmitting  the  fragment)  and  with  a  wide  range  of  secondary  and  tertiary  sources  (i.e.,  ancient  evidence,  commentaries,  and  many  other  kinds  of  bibliographical  tools).  2)  Representing  a  textual  fragment  as  a  multitext,  i.e.  as  the  result  of  a  work  of  stratification  of  manuscript  variants  and  scholarly  conjectures  that  form  the  path  through  which  the  fragment  has  survived  and  without  which  it  wouldn’t  exist  as  evidence.

Gregory Crane, editor in chief of the Perseus Digital Library, was invited as a Visiting Professor to the University of Rome Tor Vergata on October 20-27, 2009.

On that occasion, he gave three seminars in Italian on the following topics:

• La storia di Perseus Digital Library e la nascita delle Digital Humanities negli Stati Uniti
• Presente e futuro di Perseus Digital Library
• Frontiere delle Digital Humanities in epigrafia e filologia classica

The seminars were followed by two conferences of Monica Berti and Matteo Romanello on:

• Esempi di marcatura dei frammenti nei Deipnosofisti di Ateneo
• Le tecnologie digitali e l’epigrafia: esempi applicativi

See the Program

Monica Berti, Istro il Callimacheo, I, Testimonianze e frammenti su Atene e sull’Attica, Edizioni Tored, Tivoli (Roma) 2009

This is the first volume of the edition of the fragments of Istrus the Callimachean. Istrus was a pupil of the great Hellenistic poet Callimachus and worked in the Alexandrian Library. He was interested in many aspects of classical antiquities and wrote several works, covering a wide range of historical and literary topics. The tradition has preserved more than seventy-seven fragments of Istrus, and this edition is a collection of the thirty-eight fragments pertaining to Athens and Attica. The book is part of the series I Frammenti degli Storici Greci.

See the Index of the book