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

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and that “is ma<strong>in</strong>ly based on the content of texts and concerns handwrit<strong>in</strong>g texts as well as pr<strong>in</strong>ted
documents.” Crane, Seales, and Terras (2009) similarly def<strong>in</strong>ed philology as the “production of shared
primary and secondary sources about l<strong>in</strong>guistic sources” and dist<strong>in</strong>guished classical philology as a
discipl<strong>in</strong>e that “focuses upon Greek and Lat<strong>in</strong>, as these languages have been produced from antiquity
through the present.”
As these def<strong>in</strong>itions illustrate, the study of philology concerns all texts whether they are ancient
manuscripts or pr<strong>in</strong>ted editions from the n<strong>in</strong>eteenth century. The needs of philologists are closely tied
to the development of digital editions and digital corpora, and various research surveyed throughout
this review has explored different facets of philological research. For example, the LDAB helps
philologists f<strong>in</strong>d the oldest preserved copies of <strong>in</strong>dividual texts, and portals such as KIRKE and
Propylaeum have created selected lists of digital philological resources. TextGrid is dedicated to
creat<strong>in</strong>g a specialist text-edit<strong>in</strong>g environment, and philologists are one of their <strong>in</strong>tended user groups
(Dimitriadis et al. 2006, Gietz et al. 2006). Various computational tools, such as morphological
analyzers, lexicons, and treebanks, have been developed to assist philologists of Sanskrit (Huet 2004,
Hellwig 2010), Lat<strong>in</strong> (Bamman and Crane 2006, Bamman and Crane 2009), and Greek (Bamman,
Mambr<strong>in</strong>i, and Crane 2009, Dik and Whal<strong>in</strong>g 2009). Other tools have been created to help philologists
create digital critical editions such as DUGA (Roued-Cunliffe 2010), Hypereidoc (Bauer et al. 2008),
and OCHRE. Other work has explored cyber<strong>in</strong>frastructure for digital philology and digital classics
(Crane, Seales and Terras 2009). This section looks at several research projects that hope to support a
new type of “digital philology.”
One of the greatest obstacles to “digital philology,” accord<strong>in</strong>g to some researchers, is that digital
corpora such as the TLG and the PHI databank of Lat<strong>in</strong> texts simply choose a s<strong>in</strong>gle edition as their
canonical version of a text and provide no access to the apparatus criticus (Boschetti 2009, Ruhleder
1995):
Such approach to the ancient text, just about acceptable for literary and l<strong>in</strong>guistic purposes, is
unfeasible for philological studies. In fact, the philologist needs to identify manuscript variants
and scholars’ conjectures, <strong>in</strong> order to evaluate which is the most probable textual read<strong>in</strong>g,
accept<strong>in</strong>g or reject<strong>in</strong>g the hypotheses of the previous editors. Furthermore, he or she needs to
exam<strong>in</strong>e the commentaries, articles and monographs concern<strong>in</strong>g specific parts of the text. Thus,
the extension <strong>in</strong> breadth of the aforementioned collections needs to be <strong>in</strong>tegrated by the
extension <strong>in</strong> depth, accord<strong>in</strong>g to the paradigms of a new generation of digital libraries
(Boschetti 2009).
In the Digital Aeschylus project described by Boschetti (2009), the author reports that they are seek<strong>in</strong>g
to remedy these problems by creat<strong>in</strong>g a digital library that <strong>in</strong>cludes images of multiple manuscripts of
Aeschylus, manually created transcriptions of the most relevant manuscripts and pr<strong>in</strong>ted editions, OCR
of recent editions, an extensive bibliography of secondary sources, and <strong>in</strong>formation extraction tools to
be used on the digitized documents. They seek to create a comprehensive digital library for Aeschylus
that will support philologists <strong>in</strong> the development of critical editions.
Tools for Electronic Philology: BAMBI and Aristarchus
One of the earliest projects that explored the computational needs of philologists was the BAMBI
(“Better Access to Manuscripts and Brows<strong>in</strong>g of Images”) project, which developed a “hypermedia
workstation” to assist scholars <strong>in</strong> read<strong>in</strong>g manuscripts, writ<strong>in</strong>g annotations, and navigat<strong>in</strong>g between
words <strong>in</strong> a transcription and images <strong>in</strong> digitized manuscripts (Bozzi and Calabretto 1997). The project