Rome Wasn't Digitized in a Day - Council on Library and Information ...

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and <strong>in</strong>tellectual cultures of the peoples liv<strong>in</strong>g <strong>in</strong> and around the Aegean and Mediterranean
from the age of Mycenae (c. 1400–1200 BCE) until roughly the seventh century CE (Hardwick
2000).
Melissa Terras recently offered a helpful def<strong>in</strong>ition of a classicist:
Often understood as ‘one who advocates the school study of the Lat<strong>in</strong> and Greek classics’, this
def<strong>in</strong>ition belies the complex range of sources and associated research techniques often used by
academic Classicists. Varied archaeological, epigraphic, documentary, l<strong>in</strong>guistic, forensic and
art historical evidence can be consulted <strong>in</strong> the course of everyday research <strong>in</strong>to history,
l<strong>in</strong>guistics, philology, literature, ethnography, anthropology, art, architecture, science,
mythology, religion and beyond. Classicists, have by nature and necessity, always been
work<strong>in</strong>g across discipl<strong>in</strong>ary boundaries <strong>in</strong> a data-<strong>in</strong>tensive research area, be<strong>in</strong>g
‘<strong>in</strong>terdiscipl<strong>in</strong>ary, rather than simply un-discipl<strong>in</strong>ed’. The addition of advanced digital and
computational tools to many a Classicist’s arsenal of skills should therefore not really come as a
surprise, given the efficiencies they afford <strong>in</strong> the search<strong>in</strong>g, retrieval, classification, label<strong>in</strong>g,
order<strong>in</strong>g, display and visualization of data (Terras 2010, 172).
Classical studies is thus an <strong>in</strong>herently <strong>in</strong>terdiscipl<strong>in</strong>ary field and one that has long made use of
advanced technology. Various studies 2 have considered the impact of comput<strong>in</strong>g on classical studies.
This section provides an overview of several articles <strong>in</strong> order to set the context for an exam<strong>in</strong>ation of
more recent developments <strong>in</strong> the field of digital classics.
The evidence on which classicists draw can range from build<strong>in</strong>gs, <strong>in</strong>scriptions, artifacts, and art objects
to written evidence such as poetry, drama, narrative histories, and philosophical works. One particular
challenge is that many of the classicist’s textual sources are fragmentary. Hardwick notes:
Even where we possess a more or less complete form, texts have generally survived via
manuscripts copied and recopied <strong>in</strong> late antiquity or medieval times. Almost all of the material
evidence has to be excavated and/or reconstructed. Even objects that have survived relatively
<strong>in</strong>tact often lack their orig<strong>in</strong>al contexts. Thus, far from consist<strong>in</strong>g of a fixed, closed body of
knowledge, as used to be imag<strong>in</strong>ed when Classical Studies had the reputation of be<strong>in</strong>g the
ultimate ‘canonical’ field of study, the discipl<strong>in</strong>e often <strong>in</strong>volves considerable experimentation,
conjecture and hypothesis (Hardwick 2000).
Although classics is often considered to be a field of fixed knowledge, the research discussed <strong>in</strong> this
paper illustrates the <strong>in</strong>accuracy of that belief.
In an effort to trace the long history of classics and comput<strong>in</strong>g, Stewart et al. (2007) have def<strong>in</strong>ed
several generations of digital corpora <strong>in</strong> classics. The first generation simply sought to make texts
available onl<strong>in</strong>e (such as the Lat<strong>in</strong> Library 3 ) and relied on community contributions. A second
generation of corpora, such as the Thesaurus L<strong>in</strong>guae Graecae (TLG) and the Packard Humanities
Institute (PHI) 4 Lat<strong>in</strong> Library on CD-ROM, <strong>in</strong>vested <strong>in</strong> professional data entry and <strong>in</strong>volved scholars
2 A full review of all the important studies of classics and comput<strong>in</strong>g. or <strong>in</strong>deed even a comprehensive bibliography of this topic, is beyond the scope of
this paper. For several of the larger studies see Bagnall (1980); Brunner (1993), found <strong>in</strong> Solomon (1993); and Edmunds (1995). For a brief but slightly
more recent overview, see Latousek (2001.
3 http://thelat<strong>in</strong>library.com/
4 The Packard Humanities Institute is a nonprofit <strong>in</strong>stitution that was established <strong>in</strong> 1987 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packard_Humanities_Institute) and
has funded a range of projects <strong>in</strong> archaeology and historic conservation, <strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g the above-mentioned database of Lat<strong>in</strong> literature, an extensive onl<strong>in</strong>e
Greek epigraphy project, the Duke Databank of Documentary Papyri, and a database of “Persian Literature <strong>in</strong> Translation”
(http://persian.packhum.org/persian/ma<strong>in</strong>).