0.11 Response to roger bagnall paper: integrating digital papyrology

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A response might contain somewhere a list of areas in which the respondent disagrees, expresses reservations, or at least hints at dissent. I offer no such list. Bagnall’s paper sets out superbly the state of play at a key moment in the movement of papyrological resources, from materials gathered by diverse scholars in many forms and expressed in print, through the increasing presence of digital methods and publication across a range of distinct projects, to an awareness that having one successful project is not enough; and then, a series of steps towards—well, we do not know what yet, but the word Community is writ large across the gate these projects are trying to pass through.

The paper does more than describe what is happening among papyrologists. Change some names, and a few references, and shift the date and the geography: the trajectory Bagnall sketches for papyrologists is exactly the same for at least three other groups of scholarly materials with which I am familiar. The Canterbury Tales Project, with its eighty-four fifteenth-century witnesses of the Tales ; the Commedia Project, which has nearly finished work on seven manuscripts of Dante’s Commedia and is contemplating with mingled fear and joy the other seven hundred ninety-three or so manuscripts; and then, the Greek New Testament projects in Munster and Birmingham, with some five thousand witnesses in Greek, and many more in many other languages. All contemplate the same landscape, with huge ranges of material suddenly accessible in digital form; with new models of collaboration and publication now available; with the same tensions between widening involvement and scholarly standards; and with the same asymmetry, of beautiful visions and scarce resources to achieve them. And, I am certain, it is not just the three of us, and the papyrologists. Many projects find themselves now, early in 2010, some twenty years or so into the digital access revolution sparked by the web, at the same point.

I will sketch out some more the points which make Bagnall’s problems our problems. First, there is the volume of materials in many different media but now, increasingly, appearing in our browser: we all have manuscripts, papyri, catalogues, commentaries, dispersed across different media, times and places. Second, we have successful projects (at least, successful in that they did what they said they would do) going back a decade or more, which have created new masses of born-digital material. Third, we are not alone: a typical project both includes multiple partners within itself, and then partners with other projects. Fourth, we are aware that much as we might have done, we have barely started: in the Canterbury Tales Project we have published transcripts of only around 15 percent of the Tales , and all the rest of Chaucer, and then everything else in Middle English manuscripts lies before us. Fifth, we are all concerned about the future of what we have built so far. For many of us, it has been too personal a creation: who will put the same effort into continuing the work as we did into starting it? Sixth, we are discovering that traditional boundaries are dissolving in the digital world. Bagnall mentions the merging of text base and edition; the clear lines between transcription, editing, and reading are also blurring.