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

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across virtual collections of data. The importance of an <strong>in</strong>tegrated <strong>in</strong>frastructure for research by
classicists has also been recognized by the VRE-SDM project:
The aim of the VRE-SDM project has been to construct a pilot of an <strong>in</strong>tegrated environment <strong>in</strong>
which data (documents), tools and scholarly <strong>in</strong>strumenta could be available to the scholar as a
complete and coherent resource. Scholars who edit ancient documents are always deal<strong>in</strong>g with
damaged or degraded texts and ideally require access to the orig<strong>in</strong>als, or the best possible
facsimiles of the orig<strong>in</strong>als, <strong>in</strong> order to decipher and verify read<strong>in</strong>gs, and also to a wide range of
scholarly aids and reference works (dictionaries, name-lists, editions of comparable texts, and
so on) which are essential for <strong>in</strong>terpretation of their texts (Bowman et al. 2010, 90).
As Bowman et al. expla<strong>in</strong>ed, an <strong>in</strong>tegrated research environment or cyber<strong>in</strong>frastructure will require
access not only to primary sources but also to digital tools and to a wide range of preexist<strong>in</strong>g reference
tools/works that will need to be adapted for the digital environment. They also noted that many of the
necessary collections have already been created or digitized but are unfortunately scattered across the
websites of various museums and libraries.
To create a more <strong>in</strong>tegrated classical cyber<strong>in</strong>frastructure, Crane, Seales, and Terras propose a
m<strong>in</strong>imum list of necessities, <strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g libraries or repositories that can provide susta<strong>in</strong>able
preservation, “sophisticated citation and reference l<strong>in</strong>k<strong>in</strong>g services,” new forms of electronic
publication, new models of collaboration, and a digital <strong>in</strong>frastructure that is portable across languages
(Greek, Lat<strong>in</strong>, Ch<strong>in</strong>ese, Arabic, etc.). They conclude with three strategies to beg<strong>in</strong> build<strong>in</strong>g this
<strong>in</strong>frastructure: (1) optimiz<strong>in</strong>g mach<strong>in</strong>e translation for the field of classics; (2) convert<strong>in</strong>g as much
<strong>in</strong>formation as possible <strong>in</strong>to mach<strong>in</strong>e-actionable data; and (3) us<strong>in</strong>g canonical literary texts that have
already been marked up to serve as databases of l<strong>in</strong>guistic annotations.
Crane et al. (2009a) provide an overview of the opportunities and challenges faced <strong>in</strong> mov<strong>in</strong>g from
“small, carefully edited and curated digital collections to very large, <strong>in</strong>dustrially produced collections”
with a focus on the role of classical collections and knowledge sources. The authors stress the need to
create a classical apographeme onl<strong>in</strong>e as an analogy to the genome, or the need to represent onl<strong>in</strong>e:
… the complete record of all Greek and Lat<strong>in</strong> textual knowledge preserved from antiquity,
ultimately <strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g every <strong>in</strong>scription, papyrus, graffito, manuscript, pr<strong>in</strong>ted edition and any
writ<strong>in</strong>g bear<strong>in</strong>g medium. This apographeme constitutes a superset of the capabilities and data
that we <strong>in</strong>herit from pr<strong>in</strong>t culture but it is a qualitatively different <strong>in</strong>tellectual space (Crane et al.
2009a).
This argument focuses on the need to represent all Greek and Lat<strong>in</strong> sources onl<strong>in</strong>e <strong>in</strong> an <strong>in</strong>tegrated
environment, whether <strong>in</strong>scribed on stone or pr<strong>in</strong>ted <strong>in</strong> a book. Match<strong>in</strong>g these new onl<strong>in</strong>e collections
with advanced OCR and other applications, Crane et al. (2009a) expla<strong>in</strong>, is currently support<strong>in</strong>g a
number of important new services, <strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g the creation of multitexts, chronologically deeper
corpora, and new “textual forms of bibliographic research.” In this new world, the authors argue, all
classicists are also act<strong>in</strong>g as corpus l<strong>in</strong>guists.
A large part of this paper is dedicated to outl<strong>in</strong><strong>in</strong>g the services required for humanities users <strong>in</strong> massive
digital collections, <strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g access to physical images of sources, transcriptional data, basic page
layout <strong>in</strong>formation, semantic markup with<strong>in</strong> a text, dynamically generated knowledge, and, f<strong>in</strong>ally,
“l<strong>in</strong>guistically labeled, mach<strong>in</strong>e actionable knowledge.” The importance of access to “mach<strong>in</strong>eactionable
knowledge” and the need for creators of digital classics resources to create data and sources