Classicists in the 21st Century
Last week, at the ITSEE launch, I –and several other people– had the opportunity to hear Michael Reeve. He delivered a talk called “Disembodying texts: inflammatory thoughts fuelled by the editing of Pliny’s Natural History,” during which he stated that classicists, unlike New Testament scholars and those in other fields, did not readily make use of computer technologies. An alarm went off in my mind, while images of Digital Classicist and Perseus flashed in front of my eyes. Is it possible –I thought– that I have just imagined these things?
Fortunately, a quick look at the Digital Classicist Wiki makes evident that Classicists clearly are making use of electronic resources. Well, then I am not as out of touch as I thought. However, the fact that classicists might be using some electronic resources does not mean that these resources concentrate in textual scholarship. Indeed, a survey of the Projects found in the DC Wiki shows that of the 20 listed projects, only 5 appear to present edited texts (Curse Tablets from Roman Britain, Digital Nestle-Aland Prototype, Electronic Boethius, Oxyrhynchus Papyri Project and Vindolanda Tablets Online). The other 15 projects are databases, archives, concordances and other tools for the study of classical texts. But there is even more, Netither the Digital Nestle-Aland nor the Electronic Boethius really fit in the “Classical box.” The Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament is not in classical Greek and the Boethius is an Anglo-Saxon translation. Naturally, there is nothing wrong with either of these projects, it is just that counting them as Classical takes a leap of faith.
The Intute records for classics does not yet have a separate entry for textual scholarship. Despite that, several interesting resources can be found here –although, one has to work to find them among so many other projects. Notable are: the Aesop Text Project, Homer and the Papyri and The Multitext Edition of Homer.
Given the small number of textual critical projects involving electronic tools in the world of Classics, one has to wonder whether the reluctance to take on the new technologies might be directly proportional to the age of the studied texts. Fortunately, Caroline Macé’s work on Gregory of Nazianzus and especially on the applications of philogenetic software to the study of large textual traditions come to the rescue and stand as examples of the work that Michael Reeve does not seem to have noticed.
I am the cataloguer of archaeological resources at Intute, and would like to thank Dr Bordalejo for mentioning Intute in her blog. To the readers of this blog, recently mentioned also in The Stoa Consortium blog, I would like to say that the new address of the Digital Classicist Wiki is now http://wiki.digitalclassicist.org/ and that the main page for Classics in Intute is http://www.intute.ac.uk/artsandhumanities/classics/
At Intute we are currently considering to leave the Classics section principally for textual scholarship, and this is now becoming evident by having “Egyptology” in archaeology, but “Ancient Egyptian / Hieroglyphics” in Classics. There are several headings that are going to be reserved for textual scholarship in Classics, including Assyriology, Biographical Literature, Church Latin, Classical Greek Literature, Classical Greek Studies, Epigraphy, Historical Geography, Jewish Studies, Late Greek, Latin Literature, Medieval Latin, Other Prose, Palaeography, Papyrology, Poetry, and Rhetoric and Law. We do not plan a catch-it-all heading for textual scholarship. Some headings in Classics have now become duplicates of those in archaeology and our “masterplan” is to replicate in some way archaeological headings of interest to Classicists from archaeology. Unfortunately, some headings relevant to archaeology are now split with old records in Classics and new ones in archaeology instead of being properly synchronised and eventually separated from textual headings. I personally believe that textual scholarship should be the key scholarship that characterise Classics as a separate discipline from any other (including archaeology), but we had serious troubles at Intute in generating a serious debate about this. So far I have been alone on this matter and the apparent disinterest from classicists seems in line with their apparent reluctance in taking on new technologies.
To conclude, I invite all readers to explore all headings in Classics at Intute, just to give you an example the project on the Archimedes palimpsest that has made the headlines recently is in “Ancient History of Science”. And if you have time, please write to Intute using the feedback form at http://www.intute.ac.uk/artsandhumanities/feedback.html (you may wish to mention my name, Dr Andrea Vianello, to receive prompt attention) and let us know your views about how important textual scholarship is for classicists and whether you would like to see textual scholarship resources catalogued in Intute across relevant headings within Classics and then have archaeological records grouped on their own or have different ideas.
Regards,
Comment by Andrea Vianello — February 25, 2007 @ 1:53 pmDr Andrea Vianello
http://www.intute.ac.uk/artsandhumanities/archaeology/
This is a very important update. I will write a short entry in reference to it, so it does not get lost in the comments.
Comment by bbordalejo — February 26, 2007 @ 11:17 amThree further projects from the digClass Project list that “present edited texts” seem to have escaped your radar:
- Inscriptions of Aphrodisias Project (InsAph), which, of course, includes the a;ready published Aphrodisias in Late Antiquity
- The Online Critial Pseudepigrapha
- The Perseus Digital Library
Epidoc represents a markup scheme (local user guidelines for epigraphers marking up in TEI) for the edition of inscriptions and will soon be extended to be used with papyri.
The rest of the projects, of course, has been focussing on textual metadata.
Comment by Juan Garces — February 27, 2007 @ 9:34 pm