Lack of fixity is compounded by the problem of managing the content, quite apart from the abiding and unresolved question of long-term digital preservation. Books such as the Glasgow Homer can be placed on a shelf and left for hundreds of years, while a website needs perpetual—and I mean perpetual—editorial control and curation, if the content is going to live up to the expectations of its creators and customers, who themselves may also be contributors and creators of content. Research suggests that users expect websites, such as the one we are discussing here, to be dynamic. We should, perhaps, not be too surprised: after all, we expect libraries, museums and archives to be dynamic with accessions of new content to whet our appetites and stimulate our thinking. However much we might like to imagine that the digital order has changed the publication and curatorial paradigms, these processes have to be managed, particularly if critical standards are to be maintained. Content, particularly a scholarly edition of the kind proposed here, will—probably because of the way browsers work—require a much greater level of design and referencing than was the case in the print culture, quite apart from the continual checking of hyperlinks and embedded behaviors. Digital technology by its very nature is itself dynamic and in constant flux. For the Harvard Homer to still be available in 250 years’ time in the way that the Glasgow Homer is, it will need to be repeatedly migrated to new platforms and to be checked to ensure that there has been no degradation of the bit stream. All of this costs money and represents a long-term commitment on the part of Harvard that is on a completely different scale to the curation of the physical entity that is the Glasgow Homer.
Although there is an awareness that digital preservation takes the curatorial profession into a completely new financial paradigm, there is as yet little understanding of what this implies, except that it is going to cost a great deal more and that archives, libraries and museums will need a whole new range of skills (Currall and Moss 2010). In the uncertain economic environment that is likely to subsist for some time, this lack of understanding is of concern. In the United Kingdom, universities and even national institutions have made commitments to make available and preserve websites and their content with few if any identifiable revenue streams, which in many cases they are finding it hard to honor (Education for Change 2006: 61-66). None of this is a counsel of despair; but it is a counsel for realism to temper the enthusiasm for those who promote the digital environment as a cheaper and more flexible alternative to the analogue (Flichy 2008).
So called Web 2.0 services are believed to support novel forms of epistemic communities in online social networks that somehow encourage a diachronic exchange. While it is undeniable that such online communities are much more tractable than in the past, this does not mean that their composition or interactions are different than before. Scholarly discourse has always taken place within epistemic communities that transcend individual institutions. I do some of my research with a colleague in Oxford, and while the Internet has made the exchange of data easier, we could have collaborated as effectively by the analogue postal services (see, for example, Ackroyd et al. 2006). The whole nature of the academic enterprise is predicated on interactions both between established scholars and with and between their students: witness the long lists of acknowledgements in most monographs, which are often accompanied by generous recognition of students at all levels. It is through such interactions that ideas are formed and honed. It is true that Web 2.0 services within a website such as that at the Center for Hellenic Studies can make such interactions much more transparent; but it is unwise to claim too much for the potential of such facilities for new forms of collaborative working, particularly if high standards of editorial control set by the Glasgow Homer 250 years ago are to be maintained. The Glasgow Homer, once it had been set and corrected by the Foulis brothers, was “thrice examin’d&revis’d by two Professors” (quoted in Hillyard 2010). The content of the Harvard Homer, if its multi-textuality is to be fully realized, will require an equivalent attention to detail. Although it is possible to automate the process of formatting, layout, design and upload, the actual editing process remains essentially a handicraft industry that requires considerable skill and has not changed for centuries and may never change.
Where the Harvard Homer differs radically from the Glasgow Homer is in what I might describe as the user’s kinaesthetic encounter. Edward Gibbon reflected, “as the eye is the organ of fancy, I read Homer with more pleasure in the Glasgow folio” (quoted in Hillyard 2010). Would he take the same pleasure in the Harvard Homer? This is a much more difficult question than it first appears, as we simply do not know much about the experience of users whose contact with sources is only through online renditions. Most people who are busy constructing their family epics do so largely, if not entirely, from online resources, where undeniably information can be discovered much more easily than in the analogue. They may never experience the physical textuality of a will—the colors of the paper and the ink, the feel of the paper in their hands, the bundles tied with ribbon in which they were held, and the dust that Carolyn Steedman describes in her book with that title (Steedman 2002). Does it matter? Those of us who enjoy the exciting smell of old paper even if it makes us sneeze will respond emphatically “of course it does.” This is the very stuff of our craft; but those brought up in the sanitized digital paradigm may reply that we are simply being nostalgic for a lost world and are failing to respond to the very diachronic that we advocate. We need to know much more about this. Interestingly, the digital environment is in some senses replicating the manuscripts on which the multitext project is based. The various versions of the Homeric text exist as single instantiations and in order to see the originals it is necessary to visit all the various libraries that hold them. The Harvard Homer will exist as a single instantiation on a server at the university that we can view many times by taking advantage of the power of the Internet as a distribution channel. We may not be going physically to Harvard, but we are going there virtually. This is quite different from the Glasgow Homer that has existed in libraries and collections around the world since its publication. Online publication in this context raises serious issues of ownership and control that are unresolved and which, when translated into the commercial sphere, may have unanticipated consequences for both the academy and higher education institutions (Moss 2008). In these straitened times, it may even occur to university administrators that money could be made out of them.
Acknowledgements: The author is grateful to James Campbell, Brian Hillyard, and Kathryn Lowe for permission to cite their unpublished papers.
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