The Leipzig Open Fragmentary Texts Series (LOFTS) is going to participate in a DH2014 Panel on Rethinking Text Reuse as Digital Classicists.
DH 2014 – July 10, 9:00 (Room 410 – Amphimax)

1. Participants

• Panel conveners:
  • Aurélien Berra (Université Paris-Ouest & EHESS)
  • Matteo Romanello (German Archaeological Institute & King’s College London)
  • Alexandra Trachsel (University of Hamburg)

• Further participants:
  • Monica Berti (University of Leipzig)
  • Neil Coffee (University at Buffalo, SUNY)
  • Annette Geßner (University of Leipzig)
  • Charlotte Tupman (King’s College London)

2. Description of the panel

2.1 Why rethink text reuse

Text reuse is the meaningful reiteration of text, usually beyond the simple repetition of common language. Such a broad concept can naturally be understood at different levels and studied in a large variety of contexts. This diversity of approaches is to some extent explained by the fact that the phenomenon exists in almost all disciplines of the Humanities, and is crucial in those which focus on texts.

At one end of this spectrum we find the methods developed by computational linguistics. Research projects in this field study text reuse through automatic analyses within large corpora that often come from widely different backgrounds. The approaches range from the automatic detection of allusions and intertextual phenomena, for example in historical texts, to the detection of plagiarism in modern ones. At the other end, the concept also designates a core scholarly activity, connected to most of the “scholarly primitives” – this meta-level being obviously our own practice, and having its roots in Antiquity. Furthermore, any kind of citation constitutes an indirect way of transmitting knowledge, either consciously or unconsciously, as well as a rhetorical or narrative device allowing an author to communicate with his audience beyond the level of the linguistic content. As a result, this notion shows how deeply intertwined objectivity and subjectivity are when one handles texts.

Digital approaches often aim at highlighting or defining these complex links between an initial statement and its multiple occurrences (often translations) in later contexts. Indeed, especially when the text reuse of ancient elements in corpora of more recent texts is studied, the fact that the statements are given in translation is an important issue and introduces an additional difficulty. This, however, is not a completely new problem. It can be observed each time that two cultures meet and borrow elements from each others’ cultural heritage. A further notion of text reuse is reached when not only the interconnections between the different reuses of a given textual element are investigated, but also the connections between the contexts in which they occur, whether in the form of unabbreviated quotations or as references within a more conventional citation system.

This panel proposes to gather researchers from different projects focusing on text reuse in order to create an inventory of the possible approaches to and understandings of the notion. Our objective is to highlight the historical dimension of the phenomenon and, ultimately, find some common features that could lead to a more systematic study. Texts are data indeed, but text reuse provides an excellent demonstration that they must be studied also and at the same time as intentional, sophisticated and reflexive cultural products. The emergence of Digital Classics, and of Digital Humanities in general, is an occasion to rethink text reuse and work towards the integration of – or at least foster dialogue and interconnection between – various perspectives.

2.2 Studying text reuse in Digital Classics

A panel on text reuse at the Digital Humanities 2014 Conference seems a very timely initiative, because several projects are currently addressing the question and developing new tools to deal with its different aspects.

The Perseids platform can be mentioned first. As a project of the Perseus Digital Library, it aims at creating a collaborative online environment for the edition of a great variety of ancient documents, privileging the requirements of the editing of fragmentarily preserved sources (especially if they are transmitted through quotations) – a specific case of text reuse. Indeed current digital libraries, like the Perseus Digital Library or the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, have started with the wholly preserved ancient texts and deal with fragmentary works as if they were independent entities at the same level as the others. This clearly creates conceptual difficulties, since we only have indirect access to most of the fragmentarily preserved work: some parts of a lost initial work have been reused in the form of quotations in later texts. This reuse may have left some traces in the rewording of the quotation and therefore it is essential to keep the link to the context in which a given passage has been embedded when editing fragmentarily preserved texts.

One way of addressing this issue has been explored by the Sharing Ancient Wisdoms project. The project’s goal was to provide digital editions of several texts belonging to the so-called tradition of wisdom literature, by analysing the quoted sayings or proverbs and creating an ontology allowing to describe their diverse relationships 14. Still another approach must be chosen when the focus is shifted from the edition of a text with many quotations in it, such as those dealt with in the SAWS project, to the edition of a set of quotations that come from different source texts, but belong to one lost work, as is currently being explored in Alexandra Trachsel’s research on Demetrios of Scepsis.

In a complementary fashion, the study of single works of considerable size as webs of quotations should enable us to deal better with the reflexive dimension of encyclopaedic writings. Such a perspective is being built in the Digital Athenaeus project, which will explore the combination of digital and philological means of analysis in the preparation of a new edition of the Deipnosophists – a complex literary construction which sets scholarly discussions and pastimes in the context of an Imperial symposium and thus witnesses to the dynamics of text reuse.

Further projects, such as Tesserae or Eumaios move beyond the concept of quotation and focus on more hidden or less acknowledged forms of intertextuality. Tesserae, in particular, is devised to help scholars find previously unexplored intertextual parallels by means of automatic text reuse detection. This work has employed small benchmark sets of recognised parallels against which search techniques are measured and methods are improved. But having at hand a large and systematic repertory of already studied loci paralleli is something from which a tool like Tesserae will benefit immensely and that can be built, to a large extent automatically, by extracting from the literature the text passages that were already studied in relation to one another. These parallels are usually signalled in journal articles and other types of secondary sources by means of canonical citations, whose automatic extraction from large corpora of unstructured texts, such as those of JSTOR or the Internet Archive, is a topic that is currently being explored.

The identification and extraction of text reuse is central in eTRACES, a project which just developed a tool named GERTRUDE (Göttingen E-Research Text-Re-Use for Digital Editions). Working on extremely heterogeneous corpora and primarily on German literature written between 1500 and 1900, it actually reflects on and solves similar problems.

All these projects, though they have the concept of text reuse in common, can be distinguished either by the type of corpus they use (texts from Antiquity, German literature, modern scholarly writings) or by their starting point (working on source texts where quotations are preserved, establishing relationships between different works in which the same textual elements occur, or focusing on quoted or reused elements). However, they have accumulated a great amount of knowledge on how to deal with the multiple forms of this cultural practice. The panel therefore aims at bringing together these efforts and should allow each of the projects to benefit from the expertise of the others, so that the solutions already found may be discussed and in the hope that our desiderata may lay the ground for further research.

3. Practical organisation of the panel

Besides the conveners, who will introduce and moderate the discussion, the panel will involve four speakers. After a brief presentation of the participants and of the main issues of the topic (10 minutes), short talks will be given by the four panel participants, illustrating different aspects of text reuse (40 minutes). The remaining time will be devoted to a discussion among all the participants and will be focused on the challenges and desiderata for further projects dealing with text reuse, in Digital Classics and beyond this field (40 minutes).

References

1. Bamman, D., & Crane, G. (2008). The logic and discovery of textual allusion. In: Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Language Technology for Cultural Heritage Data (LaTeCH 2008), Marrakesh.

2. Büchler, M. (2013). Informationstechnische Aspekte des Historical Text Re-use. PhD Thesis, Universität Leipzig. Retrieved from nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bsz:15-qucosa-108515.

3. Bamman, D. & Crane, G. (2009). Discovering Multilingual Text Reuse in Literary Texts. Available at www.perseus.tufts.edu/publications/2009-Bamman.pdf

4. Lee, J. (2007). A Computational Model of Text Reuse in Ancient Literary Texts. In Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics, pp. 472–479. Prague, Czech Republic: Association for Computational Linguistics. Retrieved from acl.ldc.upenn.edu/P/P07/P07-1060.pdf.

5. Unsworth, J. (2000). Scholarly Primitives: What Methods Do Humanities Researchers Have in Common, and How Might Our Tools Reflect This? Formal methods, experimental practice. King’s College, London. people.lis.illinois.edu/~unsworth/Kings.5-00/prim

6. Almas, B. & Berti, M. (2013). Perseids Collaborative Platform for Annotating Text Re-Uses of Fragmentary Authors. In F. Tomasi & F. Vitali, eds. DH-Case 2013. Available atdx.doi.org/10.1145/2517978.2517986.

7. Perseids. A collaborative editing plaftorm for source documents in Classics, sites.tufts.edu/perseids

8. Perseus Digital Library, www.perseus.tufts.edu (Accessed on November 1, 2013).

9. Romanello, M., Berti, M., Boschetti, F., Babeu, A., & Crane, G. (2009). Rethinking Critical Editions of Fragmentary Texts by Ontologies. In. S. Mornati, ed., Rethinking Electronic Publishing: Innovation in Communication Paradigms and Technologies – Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Electronic Publishing held in Milano, Italy 10-12 June 2009, pp. 155-174.

10. Romanello, M. (2011). The Digital Critical Edition of Fragments: Theoretical Problems and Technical Solution. In P. Kurras Cotticelli, ed., Linguistica e Filologia Digitale: Aspetti e Progetti, pp. 147–155. Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso. Retrieved from eprints.rclis.org/handle/10760/15592.

11. Trachsel, A. (2012). Collecting Fragments Today: What Status Will a Fragment Have in the Era of Digital Philology? In C. Clivaz, J. Meizoz, F. Vallotton, & J. Verheyden, eds., Lire demain – Reading Tomorrow, pp. 415-429 (ebook). Lausanne: Presses polytechniques et universitaires romandes.

12. Berti, M. (2013). Collecting Quotations by Topic: Degrees of Preservation and Transtextual Relations among Genres. Ancient Society, 43, pp. 269–288.

13. Sharing Ancient Wisdoms, www.ancientwisdoms.ac.uk (Accessed on November 1, 2013).

14. Dunn, S., Hedges, M., Jordanous, A., Lawrence, K. F., Roueché, C., Tupman, C. & Wakelnig E (2012). Sharing Ancient Wisdoms: Developing Structures for Tracking Cultural Dynamics by Linking Moral and Philosophical Anthologies with their Source and Recipient Texts. In Digital Humanities Conference, Hamburg, Germany. Available in the Book of Abstracts at www.dh2012.uni-hamburg.de/conference/programme/abstracts, pp. 176-179.

15. Romanello, M., & Berra, A. (2011). The Critical Step in Open Content Greek: Towards a Digital Edition of Athenaeus. In TEI Members Meeting, Würzburg, Germany. Available in the Book of Abstracts at www.zde.uni-wuerzburg.de/tei_mm_2011, pp. 43-47, and philologia.hypotheses.org/512.

16. Tesserae, tesserae.caset.buffalo.edu (Accessed on November 1, 2013).

17. Eumaios: a collaborative website for Early Greek epic, panini.northwestern.edu/AnaServer?eumaios+0+frame.anv (Accessed on November 1, 2013)

18. Coffee, N., Koenig, J.-P., Poornima, S., Forstall, C. W., Ossewaarde, R., & Jacobson, S. L.(2013). The Tesserae Project: Intertextual Analysis of Latin Poetry. Literary and Linguistic Computing, 28(2), pp. 221–228. DOI: 10.1093/llc/fqs033.

19. Romanello, M. (2013). Creating an Annotated Corpus for Extracting Canonical Citations from Classics-Related Texts by Using Active Annotation. In A. Gelbukh, ed., Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing. 14th International Conference, CICLing 2013, Samos, Greece, March 24-30, 2013, Proceedings, Part I. Springer, Berlin Heidelberg, pp. 60–76.

20. Romanello, M., Boschetti, F. & Crane, G. (2009). Citations in the Digital Library of Classics: Extracting Canonical References by Using Conditional Random Fields. In Proceedings of the 2009 Workshop on Text and Citation Analysis for Scholarly Digital Libraries. Morristown, NJ, USA: Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 80–87.

21. eTRACES, etraces.e-humanities.net (Accessed on November 1, 2013).

Intertextualité et humanités numériques: approches, méthodes, tendances – Intertextuality and digital humanities: approaches, methods, trends

February 14-15, 2014, Fondation Hardt, Vandœuvres, Genève

Program (PDF)
Materials from the workshop are available through the Tesserae blog. 

February 14

Presentation of Digital Projects

9:00
Opening of the workshop
Pierre Ducrey, Director of the Fondation Hardt

9:15
Intertextuality beyond words
David Bamman, Carnegie Mellon University

9:45
eTraces
Marco Büchler (University of Göttingen)

10:15
Break

10.45
TESSERAE
Neil Coffee (University at Buffalo, State University of New York), Neil Bernstein (Ohio University), Chris Forstall (University at Buffalo, State University of New York)

11:15
Leipzig Open Fragmentary Texts Series (LOFTS)
Monica Berti (University of Leipzig)

11:45
Musisque Deoque
Paolo Mastandrea (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice)

12:15
Lunch

Existing Problems in the Study of Intertextuality

13:45
Time reserved for individual participants to bring texts/problems/issues they have been working on

15:15
Break

15:45
Time reserved for individual participants to bring texts/problems/issues they have been working on

16:15
Full group discussion: The practical study of intertextuality and the importance of digital methods for traditional philology. How can digital methods be useful today? Where will they lead in the future?

17:15
Informal presentations of digital projects

February 15

Intertextuality and Digital Humanities: Theory, Practice and Goals

9:20
Breakout groups: What are the consequences, if any, of digital methods for intertextuality theory?

10:30
Break

11:00
Full group discussion: Digital publishing and traditional publishing. Can we assemble digital texts showing intertextual links? What should a future commentary on a classical text look like?

12:00
Lunch

13:30
Full group discussion: What can digital technologies not capture or represent? Could we imagine them eventually doing so?

14:30
Blog entry writing time: Reflections on the workshop

15:30
Break followed by breakout groups: How should digital approaches to intertextuality be developed further? What should be the common goals of digital researchers and literary scholars?

16:30
Full group discussion: An agenda for future intertextual study

17:00
Concluding remarks

2. Workshop – Digital Humanities and Social Sciences
30. – 31. Januar 2014
Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg

Anmeldung
Programm (PDF)

Donnerstag 30. Januar 2014
14.00 Uhr
Begrüßung
Prof. Dr. Heidrun Stein-Kecks, FAU
Prof. Dr. Günther Görz, FAU

14.15 Uhr
Europeana Collections 1914 – 1918. Digitising on nations‘s heritage from the wartime. Case of the National Library of Serbia
Stanislava Gardašević, National library of Serbia

15.15 Uhr
Pelagios: Linking together the places of our past through the documents that refer to them
Dr. Elton Barker, Open University, Southhampton, GB

16.15 Uhr
Kaffeepause

16.45 Uhr
The Leipzig Open Fragmentary Texts Series (LOFTS)
Dr. Monica Berti, Universität Leipzig

17.45 Uhr
Building Trust in Simulations
Prof. Dr. Nicole Saam, FAU

18.15 Uhr
Abschlussdiskussion

19.30 Uhr
Gemeinsames Abendessen

Freitag 31. Januar 2014
9.00 Uhr
Begrüßung
Prof. Dr. Heidrun Stein-Kecks, FAU

9.15 Uhr
Der Behaim-Globus und seine aktuelle Bearbeitung
Prof. Dr. Günther Görz, FAU

10.00 Uhr
Fallbeispiele zum Einsatz von IT in der Archäologie
Dr. Felix Schäfer, DAI Berlin

11.00 Uhr
Kaffeepause

11.15 Uhr
Corpus der mittelalterlichen (vorbarocken) Wandmalerei in Bayern
Prof. Dr. Heidrun Stein-Kecks, FAU

12.00 Uhr
Vorstellung einer Online-Edition der Lyrik des hohen Mittelalters
PD Dr. Sonja Glauch, FAU
Prof. Dr. Florian Kragl, FAU

12.45 Uhr
Kaffeepause

13.00 Uhr
Abschlussdiskussion

14.00 Uhr
Gemeinsames Mittagessen

15:00 Uhr
Ende der Veranstaltung

We are very pleased to announce the Tbilisi State University Winter School in Digital Philology funded by The Ministry of Education and Sciences of Georgia. The Winter school will be held on January 14-18, 2014 at TSU and will be addressed to Georgian MA and PhD students from Tbilisi, Kutaisi and Batumi.

Winter School in Digital Philology

Irine Darchia (TSU)
Monica Berti and Simona Stoyanova (Chair of Digital Humanities at the University of Leipzig – Germany)

Aims of the Winter school: teaching the basics, the aims and goals, basic terms and methods of digital philology – one of the most important and crucial fields of contemporary humanities.
ECTS: 3 ECTS,  22 contact hours, 53 independent working hours (needed for homework)
Prerequisites: The MA and PhD students of the Faculties of Humanities of Tbilisi, Batumi and Kutaisi State Universities may participate in the Winter School. Priority will be given to the students of Classical Studies (Classical Philology, History, Ancient Languages and Civilizations etc.). The enrolled students should know English at least on B2 level.
Learning Outcomes: Knowledge and Understanding: The students will know: aims and goals, basic terms, notions and methods of digital philology; (methods of computer and corpus linguistics, XML, EpiDoc, linguistic annotations – Treebank, fragmentary texts etc.). Practical Skills: The students will apply the basic methods of digital philology in learning and research. Learning abilities: The students will be able to improve themselves their knowledge in digital philology.
Learning and Teaching Methods: The group will be consisted from 24 students. 22 lectures and seminars will be provided by Georgian and foreign lecturers. The following methods will be applied: group work, collaborative teaching, demonstrative, explanatory methods etc.
Assessment Criteria: Attendance and activities during the lectures: 30 % – Activities at the seminars: 30 % – Final Exam (Homework): 40 %
Assessment will be based on the following criteria: knowledge of the basics of digital philology, practical skills in digital humanities.

Obligatory Teaching Material:
http://www.fragmentarytexts.org/
http://demo.fragmentarytexts.org/
http://perseids.org/sites/berti_demo/
http://sites.tufts.edu/perseids/
http://sourceforge.net/p/epidoc/wiki/Home/
http://wiki.digitalclassicist.org/EpiDoc
http://www.stoa.org/epidoc/gl/latest/
http://nlp.perseus.tufts.edu/syntax/treebank/
http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~treebank/

Non Obligatory Teaching Material:
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/
http://www.dh.uni-leipzig.de/wo/

Additional Information: The winter school is based on 5 credit elective interdisciplinary course Overview of Digital Philology conducted by Monica Berti and Simona Stoyanova at the University of Leipzig in Winter Semester of the academic year 2013-2014.

Syllabus

I Day – January 15

09.30-11.30: Irine Darchia, Introductory Remarks on Digital Philology
11.30-12.00: Coffee Break
12.00-14.00: Monica Berti, The Open Philology Project
14.00-15.00: Lunch
15.00-17.00: Monica Berti, Fragmentary Texts and the Leipzig Open Fragmentary Texts Series

II Day – January 16

09.30-11.30: Simona Stoyanova, Introduction to Digital Epigraphy (EpiDoc)
11.30-12.00: Coffee Break
12.00-14.00: Simona Stoyanova, Setting up Oxygen and Practice
14.00-15.00: Lunch
15.00-17.00: Monica Berti and Simona Stoyanova, Practice with Metadata Including the Digital Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum (DFHG) Project

III Day – January 17

09.30-11.30: Monica Berti and Simona Stoyanova, Discuss Homework and Continue Practice
11.30-12.00: Coffee Break
12.00-14.00: Monica Berti and Simona Stoyanova, More Practice on Epigraphy and DFHG
14.00-15.00: Lunch
15.00-17.00: Monica Berti and Simona Stoyanova, Questions, Comments, and Feedback

IV Day – January 18

09.30-11.30: Monica Berti, Digital Philology Now and Tomorrow
11.30-12.00: Coffee Break
12.00-14.00: Irine Darchia
14.00-15.00: Lunch
Concluding remarks, Q & A

The Leipzig Open Fragmentary Texts Series (LOFTS) will be presented at the Digital Classics Panel at the 2014 APA Annual Meeting – Chicago, January 3, 2014:
Getting Started with Digital Classics, organized by the Digital Classics Association (Joint APA/AIA Panel)
Neil Coffee, University at Buffalo, State University of New York, Organizer
Session #26, 1:30 pm – 4:30 pm, Regency Ballroom B

Digital approaches to the study of antiquity are opening up new perspectives on the classical world and bring with them an inherent focus on methodology. The mission of the Digital Classics Association (DCA) is to explore the potential of digital methods for the study of classical antiquity by fostering dialogue on their use in research and teaching. This first of four planned DCA workshops aims to introduce some of the latest scholarship to the broad membership of the AIA / APA, highlighting work within and beyond the rapidly evolving field of the digital humanities.

Program

Neil Coffee, University at Buffalo, State University of New York
Introduction

Diane Cline, George Washington University
Social Network Analysis and Ancient History

Neil Bernstein, Ohio University and Monica Berti, University of Leipzig
Approaches to Greek and Latin Text Reuse

Adam Rabinowitz, The University of Texas at Austin
Living Pictures: Computational Photography and the Digital Classics

Francesco Mambrini, Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, Berlin
The Ancient Greek Dependency Treebank

Ryan Baumann, Hugh Cayless, and Joshua D. Sosin, Duke University
After Integrating Digital Papyrology

Gregory Crane, Tufts University and University of Leipzig
Respondent

An interdisciplinary conference organized by the Digital Classics Association
University at Buffalo, SUNY, North Campus, Center for the Arts Screening Room, Buffalo, NY 14261
April 5-6, 2013

Archaeological GIS, digital historical mapping, literary text mining, and other computational techniques are increasingly shaping how we understand classical antiquity. Digital methods are breaking down sub-disciplinary barriers, allowing literary scholars to more easily explore epigraphical inscriptions, archaeologists to place their findings on digital historical maps, and philosophers to explore style and argument with sophisticated search techniques. Digital tools also offer new ways to explain aspects of classical antiquity in the classroom and to the public at large.
The aim of the inaugural Digital Classics Association (DCA) conference is to provide a survey of current approaches to digital methods of research, teaching, and outreach across classical sub-disciplines, with the goals of further opening inter-disciplinary perspectives and establishing common objectives for digital research and education.

Conference Program

Friday, April 5

Session 1: Mining Texts and Mining Images

Session 2: Historical Mapping

Session 3: Posters / Demos

Session 4: Textual Corpora and Conventions

Saturday, April 6

Session 5: Visualizing the Built Environment and Lived Space

Session 6: Instruction and Outreach

Session 7: Workshops / Networking

Workshop seating limited. Sign up at registration.

Session 8: Literary Criticism and Digital Methods

Greg Crane – The Humanities in a Digital Age
November 27, 2012 – Digital Humanities McGill – Leacock 232 – 4:00 – 5:30 pm
855 rue Sherbrooke Ouest, Montreal, Quebec, H3A2T7, Canada

We now live in a pervasively digital world and Humanists have an opportunity to rethink our goals. On the one hand, we can now develop research projects that are broader and deeper in scope than was feasible in print culture.

First, we can trace ideas across dozens of languages and thousands of years. Second, the explosion of high-resolution digital representations of source texts, objects, and archaeological data sets has, in some quarters, transformed the traditional (and out of fashion) task of editing. At the same time, the shift to a digital world does not simply allow professors to produce more specialist publications. Rather the explosion in source materials available to a global net public requires advanced researchers and library professionals to draw upon student researchers and citizen scholars as essential collaborators. One possible outcome is a new, decentralized and cosmopolitan republic of letters supporting a global dialogue of civilizations. No particular outcomes are guaranteed and our actions and decisions as Humanists in the present can have far-reaching consequences.

Gregory Crane is Professor of Classics and Adjunct Professor of Computer Science, Winnick Family Chair of Technology and Entrepreneurship at Tufts University. He is also Editor in Chief of the Perseus Project. He has been elected a Humboldt Professor in Digital Humanities at the University of Leipzig and hopes to establish the first transatlantic laboratory in the Digital Humanities.

Ritorno ad Alessandria. Storiografia antica e cultura bibliotecaria: tracce di una relazione perduta
Incontro Internazionale di Studi
Università di Roma Tor Vergata
28-29 novembre 2012

Per info contattare Monica Berti o Virgilio Costa

La storia della Biblioteca di Alessandria e la letteratura che su di essa è fiorita costituiscono un punto di partenza imprescindibile per tutti coloro che intendono ripercorrere le vie della trasmissione della storiografia classica dall’antichità sino ad oggi. E questo non soltanto perché la filologia alessandrina ha posto le prime basi scientifiche dell’edizione dei testi, ma anche perché in quell’ambiente si delinearono le caratteristiche fondamentali di ogni fenomeno bibliotecario, inteso sia nel senso letterale del termine (cioè di collezione libraria) che in quello più ampio e metaforico di organizzazione del sapere.

Quando si parla di Alessandria, infatti, si toccano temi concernenti la formazione del canone, la catalogazione e la classificazione in generi della letteratura classica e la sopravvivenza del suo patrimonio contenutistico. Obiettivo del convegno è di “tornare” ad Alessandria compiendo a ritroso il percorso della tradizione e focalizzando lo sguardo sulla relazione tra la storiografia antica e il formarsi e dissolversi delle biblioteche nel corso del tempo. Con “biblioteca” si allude tanto alla raccolta materiale delle opere storiografiche e al loro inserimento in un catalogo, quanto alla rielaborazione dei loro contenuti nella forma della citazione e del riuso testuale in opere che si configurano come vere e proprie biblioteche del sapere: si pensi alla Biblioteca storica di Diodoro, ai Deipnosofisti di Ateneo, alla Biblioteca di Fozio e alle grandi collezioni lessicografiche di età imperiale e bizantina.

L’indagine non vuole dunque limitarsi alla biblioteca sorta nel Museo di Alessandria, ma intende partire dal modello di questo straordinario centro di studi per esplorare le tracce della relazione perduta tra la storiografia antica e le biblioteche di ogni epoca, estendendo l’attenzione anche al fenomeno contemporaneo delle grandi raccolte librarie digitali.

PROGRAMMA

MERCOLEDÌ 28 NOVEMBRE

SESSIONE MATTUTINA

9:30
Eugenio Lanzillotta
Saluti

Monica Berti e Virgilio Costa
Introduzione al convegno

10:10
Roberto Nicolai – Università di Roma Sapienza
I paradossi del canone alessandrino

10:50
Cinzia Bearzot – Università Cattolica di Milano
Prima di Alessandria: libri e pregiudizi

11:30
Pausa

11:50
Franca Landucci – Università Cattolica di Milano
Dalla Biblioteca di Alessandria al Museo virtuale. Intellettuali e cultura alla corte di Antigono Gonata

12:30
Discussione

SESSIONE POMERIDIANA

14:30
Stefan Schorn – Katholieke Universiteit, Leuven
I Pitagorei nella Biblioteca di Diodoro. Citazioni, fonti, tradizioni

15:10
Ilaria Sforza – Università di Roma Tor Vergata
Visioni di sogno di un viaggiatore bibliofilo. Ecateo di Abdera nella terra degli Iperborei

15:50
Pausa

16:10
José María Candau Morón – Universidad de Sevilla
Entre fidelidad textual y solicitudes retóricas. Las citas historiográficas en el De malignitate Herodoti de Plutarco

16:50
Concetta Bianca – Università di Firenze
Mattia Palmieri e la traduzione della Lettera di Aristea

17:30
Discussione

GIOVEDÌ 29 NOVEMBRE

SESSIONE MATTUTINA

9:30 
Giuseppe Squillace – Università della Calabria
Lo studio della scienza medica nella Biblioteca di Alessandria attraverso Erofilo ed Erasistrato

10:10
Monica Berti – Università di Roma Tor Vergata; Tufts University, Boston MA
Ateneo fruitore di Istro: echi di critica storiografica e cultura bibliotecaria

10:50
Alessandro Campus – Università di Roma Tor Vergata
Leggere scrivere insegnare a Cartagine: la Biblioteca

11:30
Pausa

11:50
Virgilio Costa – Università di Roma Tor Vergata
La fine è fuoco? La sorte delle biblioteche nella storiografia antica

12:30
Discussione

SESSIONE POMERIDIANA

14:30
Maria Accame – Università di Roma Sapienza
Librorum inquisitio. Petrarca e le biblioteche antiche

15:10
Federicomaria Muccioli – Università di Bologna
La fortuna del modello alessandrino nel Quattrocento. Le biblioteche dei Malatesti a Rimini e a Cesena e di Federico da Montefeltro a Urbino

15:50
Pausa

16:10
Alfredo Valvo – Università Cattolica di Brescia
Cultura alessandrina e paideia cristiana nel pensiero di Werner Jaeger

16:50
Raul Mordenti – Università di Roma Tor Vergata
La forma biblioteca in quanto paradosis

17:30
Discussione

18:00
Conclusioni

On November 6-8, 2012, the 4th international conference of Aliento will be held in Nancy (MSH Lorraine) and Paris (INALCO):
Énoncés sapientiels brefs, traductions, traducteurs et contextes culturels et historiques.

On that occasion, Ute Pietruschka and Monica Berti will present an attempt to study the possible Greek origin of the so-called “Laments” of the philosophers at the tomb of Alexander the Great.

The Syriac text of the laments is preserved in a manuscript (Mingana syr. 47 – fol. 267a-b) copied in 1907 in Alqōš and has been edited by Sebastian Brock (‘Notes on Some Texts in the Mingana Collection’, JSS 14 (1969), p. 216 and ‘The Laments of the Philosophers over Alexander in Syriac’, JSS 15 (1970), pp. 205-218).

The names of the “philosophers” who pronounced the laments go back to the Greek tradition (Aristotle, Theon, Philotas, Demetrios and possibly Polemon) and the syntactic structure of the Syriac text reveals a “mirror translation” of the language of the original, which was possibly Greek.

This presentation is part of a project that aims at exploring text re-uses across languages and times, combining both traditional and modern tools as the Alpheios Translation Alignment Editor and the Alpheios Treebank Editor.

Humanities Hackathon on editing Athenaeus and on the Reinvention of the Edition in a Digital Space
October 10-12, 2012
Universität Leipzig (ULEI) & Deutsches Archäologisches Institut (DAI) Berlin

Co-directors: Monica Berti – Marco Büchler – Gregory Crane – Bridget Almas

The University of Leipzig will host a hackathon that addresses two basic tasks. On the one hand, we will focus upon the challenges of creating a digital edition for the Greek author Athenaeus, whose work cites more than a thousand earlier sources and is one of the major sources for lost works of Greek poetry and prose. At the same time, we use the case Athenaeus to develop our understanding of to organize a truly born-digital edition, one that not only includes machine actionable citations and variant readings but also collations of multiple print editions, metrical analyses, named entity identification, linguistic features such as morphology, syntax, word sense, and co-reference analysis, and alignment between the Greek original and one or more later translations.

Where
Augustusplatz 10, Leipzig (Paulinum building) – room P818 and P905

Twitter
#AthenaeusHackathon

Program

Wednesday, October 10th (Hackathon):

Thursday, October 11th (Hackathon):

Friday, October 12th (Hackathon & Necessary infrastructure: What can we learn?):