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

4
associations to work together, and the need for scholars to give up obsess<strong>in</strong>g over “slavish” tasks and
return to the more important work of humanistic <strong>in</strong>terpretation of sources, still r<strong>in</strong>g true.
More than 30 years later, J. D. Bolter offered a detailed analysis of how one feature of the Internet—
hypertext—offered great new potential for record<strong>in</strong>g and present<strong>in</strong>g scholarship (Bolter 1991). Bolter
contended that studies for the past two centuries had been def<strong>in</strong>ed by the qualities of the pr<strong>in</strong>ted book
where the ma<strong>in</strong> goal of scholarship had been to “to fix each text of each ancient author: to determ<strong>in</strong>e
the authenticity of works ascribed to an author and for each work to establish the Urtext—what the
author actually wrote, letter for letter.” This is the essential work of a classical philologist or creator of
a critical edition: to study all the extant manuscripts of an author, to “reconstruct” a text, and then to
list all the text variants (or at least the most important) found <strong>in</strong> the orig<strong>in</strong>al sources with explanations
<strong>in</strong> an apparatus criticus. While postmodern literary theory had challenged the ideal of the Urtext <strong>in</strong>
many discipl<strong>in</strong>es, Bolter submitted, classical studies had rema<strong>in</strong>ed largely unaffected. Nonetheless,
Bolter believed that the nature of hypertext was affect<strong>in</strong>g how classicists perceived the nature of their
texts. “Hypertext now challenges the Urtext not <strong>in</strong> the jargon of postmodern theory,” he expla<strong>in</strong>ed,
“but practically and visibly <strong>in</strong> the way that it handles text.” Hypertext, he posited, might lead scholars
to focus less on establish<strong>in</strong>g an exact Urtext and more on explor<strong>in</strong>g the connections between texts to
“emphasize the cont<strong>in</strong>uity between the ancient text and its ancient, medieval, and modern
<strong>in</strong>terpretations.” The need for digital editions to reflect a more sophisticated tradition of textual
transmission and textual variation is a theme that is echoed throughout the literature of digital classics.
An even more extensive exploration of how new technologies might affect the discipl<strong>in</strong>e of classics
was provided by Karen Ruhleder (Ruhleder 1995), albeit with an exclusive focus on the TLG. One
challenge Ruhleder underscored was that “humanists themselves have been more <strong>in</strong>terested <strong>in</strong> apply<strong>in</strong>g
comput<strong>in</strong>g technologies to their work <strong>in</strong> detailed studies of the impact of comput<strong>in</strong>g technologies on
their discipl<strong>in</strong>es.” Christ<strong>in</strong>e Borgman echoes this criticism <strong>in</strong> her recent exam<strong>in</strong>ation of the digital
humanities (Borgman 2009). Ruhleder surveyed how us<strong>in</strong>g the TLG had affected the daily work of
classicists, how it had changed their relationship to the textual materials they used, and how it affected
both social relations among classicists and their discipl<strong>in</strong>ary <strong>in</strong>frastructures. She conducted 60
unstructured <strong>in</strong>terviews with classicists and concentrated on work <strong>in</strong> literary scholarship and textual
criticism. Ruhleder observed that the work of classical scholarship was often like detective work, and
that scholars’ questions typically <strong>in</strong>cluded “manuscript authorship and authenticity, social relationships
between different groups or classes <strong>in</strong> ancient Greek society, and the different mean<strong>in</strong>gs of a word or
phrase over time.” Classical scholars used analytical techniques to weigh and <strong>in</strong>terpret evidence and
used tools “to locate particular pieces of evidence with<strong>in</strong> texts,” Ruhleder noted. As Bolter expla<strong>in</strong>ed
previously, the nature of textual evidence for classicists is complicated because materials are often
fragmentary or questionable, their transmission is disputable, and the “reconstruction of the orig<strong>in</strong>al, or
urtext, is an important primary activity with<strong>in</strong> classical scholarship.”
While the TLG did offer amaz<strong>in</strong>g new search<strong>in</strong>g opportunities as well as both breadth and depth of
material, Ruhleder criticized its unexam<strong>in</strong>ed use by classicists. The TLG uses one “best edition”
chosen by a special committee of the American Philological Association (APA) 10 for each Greek
author and <strong>in</strong>cludes no commentaries or apparatus criticus, a practice challenged by Ruhleder:
The TLG has altered not only the form (book to electronic medium) but also the content and the
organization of materials presented <strong>in</strong> the package. It <strong>in</strong>cludes neither critical notes nor other
10 http://www.apaclassics.org/