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

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display.” “These guides to practice derive from the research experience of the practitioners <strong>in</strong>volved,”
Mahony (2011) expla<strong>in</strong>ed, “and so should be considered research outputs <strong>in</strong> themselves.”
The website also <strong>in</strong>cludes a list of 33 tools, from “advanced imag<strong>in</strong>g techniques” to “TimeMap,” and a
brief list of selected electronic resources. This wiki provides an excellent means of entry for scholars
first explor<strong>in</strong>g potential the application of digital technology <strong>in</strong> their area of <strong>in</strong>terest and provides many
collaborative work<strong>in</strong>g opportunities. Although Mahony (2011) granted that collaborative work such as
through jo<strong>in</strong>t publication and analysis was not <strong>in</strong>herently new, he argued that tools such as the Digital
Classicist Wiki enabled a new type of collaboration <strong>in</strong> that onl<strong>in</strong>e material can be “searched, analysed
and edited all <strong>in</strong> a very short time by a number of editors regardless of their physical location” and thus
supported dramatic <strong>in</strong>creases <strong>in</strong> scholarly productivity. He also emphasized that this new collaborative
process is help<strong>in</strong>g shift “academic culture” away from isolated scholars to a new model where no
<strong>in</strong>dividual has total control or ownership of the research process. “This paper does not argue for the
ext<strong>in</strong>ction of the lone scholar,” Mahony concluded, “but <strong>in</strong>stead for a scholarly environment where
both scenarios are recognized and valued” (Mahony 2011). 608
Although collaboration is a frequently lauded virtue of many digital projects such as Stoa and the
Digital Classicist, one scholar quoted by Harley et al. (2010) stated rather bluntly that the level of
collaboration could vary <strong>in</strong> classics depend<strong>in</strong>g on the discipl<strong>in</strong>e:
I would say collaboration is still relatively rare <strong>in</strong> the literary side of the classics. Not that many
people will coauthor articles on Socrates. … This may be different for projects with more
technical components, like archaeology, papyrology, or epigraphy…In those areas, there are a
lot of projects that require collaboration…I would say that those particular fields—epigraphy,
which is read<strong>in</strong>g rock <strong>in</strong>scriptions, and papyrology, work<strong>in</strong>g with bits of papyri—are
enormously collaborative…I also th<strong>in</strong>k classics, on the whole, has not done too badly <strong>in</strong>
embrac<strong>in</strong>g other fields. … or at least certa<strong>in</strong> practitioners of classics have gone out there and
hooked up with colleagues <strong>in</strong> various discipl<strong>in</strong>es and brought th<strong>in</strong>gs back that have cont<strong>in</strong>ued
to expand the field or expand the range of th<strong>in</strong>gs we can do (Harley et al. 2010, 102).
Indeed, this spirit of collaboration among papyrologists was called upon by Joshua Sos<strong>in</strong> <strong>in</strong> his recent
talk at the Congress of the International Association of Papyrologists: “We must collaborate. We must
share the workload. We must use common technical standards. We must do our work <strong>in</strong> the full
sunlight of the web, and not <strong>in</strong> the black box of anonymity. We must leverage the strength of our
community’s dist<strong>in</strong>guish<strong>in</strong>g spirit of collegiality” (Sos<strong>in</strong> 2010).
While Harley et al. noted that many scholars often worked <strong>in</strong>dependently <strong>in</strong> terms of the close study of
documentary rema<strong>in</strong>s, they frequently worked together <strong>in</strong> the creation of scholarly editions,
exhibitions, and digital projects. On the other hand, the desire for collaborative work, even with
documentary rema<strong>in</strong>s has been illustrated by the VRE-SDM.
One of the largest and oldest truly collaborative digital classics project is the Suda On L<strong>in</strong>e (SOL), a
“massive 10 th century Byzant<strong>in</strong>e Greek historical encyclopedia of the ancient Mediterranean world,
derived from the scholia to critical editions of canonical works and from compilations by yet earlier
authors.” 609 The purpose of SOL is to create a keyword searchable and freely available XML encoded
608 This argument echoes earlier conclusions by Toms and O’Brien (2008) that humanists need to work <strong>in</strong> greater collaboration.
609 Reference works seem to lend themselves to collaboration; for examples, consider “DIR: De Imperatoribus Romanis: An Onl<strong>in</strong>e Encyclopedia of
Roman Rulers and Their Families” (http://www.roman-emperors.org/), a collaborative encyclopedia that <strong>in</strong>cludes Roman and Byzant<strong>in</strong>e biographies
prepared by scholars and actively updated and l<strong>in</strong>ked to other classics sites, and Vicipaedia, a Lat<strong>in</strong> Wikipedia (http://la.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pag<strong>in</strong>a_prima).