0.10 Give us editors! re-inventing the edition and re-thinking the  (Page 6/18)

In Classical Studies, at least, the benefits of open access and content have, in the view of those most actively working with digital corpora as corpora (as opposed to giant virtual indices), outweighed the benefits of more recent but restricted editions. The benefits of open access and content for classical studies is pursued at greater length in Crane and Blackwell 2009. We have chosen to base our corpora upon the best public domain editions. Where later editions contain information that affects debate, members of the community can identify these passages and add their own annotations. If rights holders assume a more pragmatic posture, we can align new editions, even when we depend upon Greek and Latin text generated by OCR, with earlier curated, public domain editions. We have previously reported on our initial results with OCR in Ancient Greek in Boschetti et al. 2009.

Once we shift from publications that are static in form and unchanging by legal restrictions and into a world of versioned, dynamic linguistic data, then our textual sources become living entities that can evolve. Their current state is only a single datapoint. An edition that provides demonstrably superior information today is strategically inferior to an edition that can improve over time. If members of the community feel that the editions need to be improved, they can create their own versions and/or annotate those that exist.

Classics

As a Classicist, I seek to advance the role that Greco-Roman antiquity can play in the intellectual life of humanity. Several practical consequences emerge if we make this assumption.

First, we need to provide access to the full material and textual record so that we can understand the ancient world properly. This is hardly a new idea: such giants in the foundation of modern Classical Studies as Friederich Wolf (1759-1824) and August Boeckh (1785-1867) asserted that even the student of Greek and Latin language must pursue the totius antiquitatis cognitio , a knowledge of antiquity in its full range and without compromise. August Boeckh, Enzyklopädie und Methodenlehre der philologischen Wissenschaft , edited by Ernst Bratuscheck (Darmstadt 1966, ed. 3) 25: “die Erkentniss des Alterthums in seinem ganzen Umfange” = August Boeckh, On Interpretation and Criticism , translated by John Paul Pritchard (Oklahoma, 1968) 22; William M. Calder III, “How Did Ulrich Von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff Read a Text?” The Classical Journal , Vol. 86, No. 4 (Apr. - May, 1991), pp. 344-352. Nor is this insistence on a comprehensive view limited only to philologists: Robin Osborne and Susan Alcock assert in the introduction to a collection of essays entitled Classical Archaeology that they seek to create classical archaeologists who “first and foremost…will use the texts along with material archaeology, offering both a context for archaeology and an indication of areas of material culture ideologically understated or repressed.” Alcock and Osborne 2007, p. 8.

It is one thing to assert the totalitätsideal that many great scholars have espoused. Creating an environment that would support this overwhelming task and that would enable researchers to draw upon more than a minute subset of the data from the material and textual record is a daunting task—but it is possible to achieve quite a bit over time. The major challenges are not logistical or financial—though these are both daunting—but social. We simply have to adapt our priorities and, even if we ourselves continue our traditional research, support those efforts needed, at the least, to support a new generation of research and, if we have a broader view, to enable Greco-Roman culture—not just literature or archaeology—to play the broadest possible role in intellectual life.