Cogent and insightful, Rome Wasn’t Digitized in a Day: Building a Cyberinfrastructure for Digital Classicists rewards the reader with a many-faceted exploration of classical studies: the history of this complex and multidimensional field, its development of computer-based resources and tools over the last several decades, its current opportunities and needs in a digital era, and prospects for its future evolution as envisioned by digital classicists. Alison Babeu reminds us early in her report of the astonishing reach of classical studies, a field that includes the disciplines of history, literature, linguistics, art, anthropology, science, and mythology, among others, bounded by the Mycenean culture at its most distant past and continuing to the seventh century C.E. Not surprisingly, within this historical compass the sources for classicists are equally complex: stone fragments, papyri, pottery shards, the plastic arts, coins, and some of the most breathtaking physical structures the world has known.
In the course of this report, the substantial gains in the use of digital technologies in service to classical studies become obvious. Over the past 40 years, remarkable resources have been built, including largescale text databases in a variety of languages; digital repositories for archeological data, as well as for coins and cuneiform tablets; and datasets of texts for paleography and epigraphical studies. Applications that assist the scholar in morphological analysis, citation linking, text mining, and treebank construction, among others, are impressive. The challenges are also significant: there persist problems with the integrity of OCR scans; the interoperability of multimedia data that contain texts, images, and other forms of cultural expression; and the daunting magnitude of so many languages in so many different scripts.
The intellectual return on this investment in technology as a service to classical studies is equally startling and complex. One of the more salient developments has been the reconceptualization of the text. As recently as a generation ago, the “text” in classics was most often defined as a definitive edition, a printed artifact that was by nature static, usually edited by a single scholar, and representing a compilation and collation of several extant variations. Today, through the power and fluidity of digital tools, a text can mean something very different: there may be no canonical artifact, but instead a dataset of its many variations, with none accorded primacy. A work of ancient literature is now more often deeply contextualized, its transmission over time more nuanced, and its continuity among the various instantiations more accurately articulated. The performative nature of some of the great works—the epics of Homer are a prime example—can be captured more rigorously by digital technology, which can layer the centuries of manuscript fragments to produce a sharper understanding of what was emphasized in the epics over time and what passages or stories appear less important from one era to another, affording new insight into the cultural appropriation of these fundamental expressions of the human condition.
Achieving these new perspectives has required a cultural change in the classics. Scholarship in the digital environment is more collaborative, and can include students as integral contributors to the research effort. The connections, continuities, and cultural dialogue to which classical works were subject are reflected by new teams of scholars, working across traditional disciplines (which can often include computer science) to develop new methodological approaches and intellectual strategies in pursuit of knowledge about the ancient world. In this regard, the digital classics encompass new alignments of traditional hierarchies, academic boundaries, and technologies.
The Council on Library and Information Resources is pleased to publish this far-reaching study. The issues and perspectives to which it gives voice pertain significantly to the humanities at large. Its appearance is especially relevant as plans to build very large digital libraries in Europe and the United States flourish. Indeed, a transdisciplinary approach will be essential in constructing a digital environment with the scale and sophistication necessary to support advanced research, teaching, and lifelong learning. As this study suggests, we must continue to engage humanists, engineers, scientists, and all manner of pedagogical expertise in pursuit of a new, transformative educational ecology.
URL : http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub150/pub150.pdf