0.10 Give us editors! re-inventing the edition and re-thinking the  (Page 4/18)

2) In a digital age, philologists need to treat our editions as components of larger, well-defined corpora rather than as the raw material for printed page layouts. Some of the challenges to philology in the age of digital corpora have been examined by Boschetti 2009. Many may take this as obvious but few have pursued the implications of this general idea. The addition of punctuation, the use of upper case to mark proper names, specialized glossaries, the addition of name and place indices, and even translations prefigure major classes of machine-actionable annotation—interpretations of morphological and syntax analyses, lexical entries, word senses, co-reference, named entities are only a subset of the features we may choose to include as new practices of editing emerge. Even when we turn to the most heavily studied classical Greek and Latin texts, a radically new world is taking shape. We have returned to an age of the editio princeps —not literally the first edition, but the first edition in a medium so distinct from that which preceded it that it constitutes a new beginning. We see before us a great age—indeed, a heroic age, one filled with triumphs and false starts, messy, destabilized and destabilizing, and, above all, dynamic.

The remainder of this paper will focus primarily upon the new forms of editing and their consequences. But before exploring those consequences, we will first outline some basic goals based upon the changing possibilities within the digital culture.

Humanities, classics, philology: assumptions and implications

Strategic goals are slippery things. The following have proven useful to me and I offer them if only to explain the decisions implicit in what I will describe later. I offer implications that I have drawn from three largely hierarchical perspectives: the humanities as a whole, the study of the Greco-Roman world, and the responsibilities of a Classical Philologist.

Humanities

As a humanist, I seek to advance the intellectual life of humanity. I am not pursuing the cures to dread diseases or developing new sources of energy. To some extent, my work resembles that of the scientist or mathematician developing knowledge without immediate practical applications. But the funders of such basic research point to the long- term utility of such initially abstract activity—the basic research of today needs to be unfettered so that it can stumble upon the practical methods of tomorrow.

If our goal is to support the intellectual life of humanity by making intellectual actions transparent for inspection, then the editorial process, construed as the sustained process of making primary sources intellectually accessible, rises to the fore. The most brilliant hypotheses and argumentation only assume their full value insofar as any human being can drill down behind the exposition and into the evidence.

For me this goal has a very clear consequence. Publishing in conventional journal articles that assume specialized knowledge and that are legally restricted behind subscription gateways has much less appeal than it did when I began my life as a professional scholar a generation ago. A series of arguments against academic scholarship being locked behind commercial paywalls have recently been articulated by Rausing 2010. In the field of classics, Pritchard 2008 has explored recent efforts to make more secondary scholarship available as open access. More generally, I act on the assumption that all human beings should have access to the evidence behind any proposition about their shared cultural heritage. For me, this view is as arbitrary and natural as the idea of universal education. Access has a physical dimension—we cannot make every site and every artifact physically accessible but we can do far more with their digital counterparts. But access also has an intellectual dimension—we need to provide people with the tools that they need to think productively about what they see. To realize physical and intellectual access, we need rights regimes that allow the digital surrogates for human cultural heritage to flow freely and instantaneously back and forth between humans and machines. The need for open content that is accessible both to humans and to computational processes has also been stressed by Lynch 2006, and Arms and Larsen 2007.