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

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works by <strong>in</strong>dividual authors (Electronic Boethius, 116 Ovid’s Metamorphoses, 117 and the Vergil
Project). 118
In their discussion of multitexts and digital editions, Blackwell and Crane (2009) offered an overview
of digital editions and what an ideal digital library <strong>in</strong>frastructure might provide for them:
… digital editions are designed from the start to <strong>in</strong>clude images of the manuscripts,
<strong>in</strong>scriptions, papyri and other source materials, not only those available when the editor is at
work but those which become available even after active work on the edition has ceased. …
This is possible because a true digital edition will <strong>in</strong>clude a mach<strong>in</strong>e actionable set of sigla.
Even if we do not yet have an <strong>in</strong>ternationally recognized set of electronic identifiers for
manuscripts, the pr<strong>in</strong>t world has often produced unique names (e.g., LIBRARY + NUMBER)
that can later be converted <strong>in</strong>to whatever standard identifiers appear. A mature digital library
system manag<strong>in</strong>g the digital edition will understand the list of witnesses and automatically
search for digital exemplars of these witnesses, associat<strong>in</strong>g them with the digital edition if and
when they come on-l<strong>in</strong>e (Blackwell and Crane 2009).
They stated that digital editions need to <strong>in</strong>clude images of all their primary sources of data, and that
“true” digital editions will be dynamic and will automatically search for digital facsimiles of
manuscript witnesses as they become available, provided standard sets of mach<strong>in</strong>e-actionable
identifiers are used.
Whether <strong>in</strong> a pr<strong>in</strong>t or digital <strong>in</strong>frastructure, Borgman has also noted the cont<strong>in</strong>u<strong>in</strong>g importance of
access to various editions of a text, comment<strong>in</strong>g that humanities scholars and students “also makes the
f<strong>in</strong>est dist<strong>in</strong>ctions among editions, pr<strong>in</strong>t<strong>in</strong>gs, and other variants – dist<strong>in</strong>ctions that are sometimes
overlooked <strong>in</strong> the transition from pr<strong>in</strong>t to digital form” (Borgman 2009). This section provides an
overview of some of the theoretical and technical issues <strong>in</strong>volved <strong>in</strong> creat<strong>in</strong>g a cyber<strong>in</strong>frastructure for
digital editions <strong>in</strong> classics and beyond.
Theoretical Issues of Model<strong>in</strong>g and Markup for Digital Editions
Creat<strong>in</strong>g a critical edition <strong>in</strong> classics typically <strong>in</strong>volves the consultation of a variety of sources
(manuscripts, pr<strong>in</strong>ted editions, etc.) where editors seek to reconstruct the Urtext (orig<strong>in</strong>al text, best
text, etc.) of a work as “orig<strong>in</strong>ally” created by an ancient author, while at the same time creat<strong>in</strong>g an
apparatus criticus that records all major variants found <strong>in</strong> the sources and the reasons they chose to
reconstruct the text as they did. The complicated reality of textual variants among manuscript and other
witnesses of a text is one of the major reasons beh<strong>in</strong>d the development of modern pr<strong>in</strong>ted critical
editions, as stated by Paolo Monella:
Critical editions, i.e., editions of texts with a text-critical apparatus, respond to the necessity of
represent<strong>in</strong>g one aspect of the complex reality of textual tradition: the textual variance. Their
function is double: on the one hand, they present the different versions of a text with<strong>in</strong> the
context of the textual tradition; on the other hand, they try to ‘extract’, out of the different texts
born by many carriers (manuscripts, <strong>in</strong>cunabula, modern and contemporary pr<strong>in</strong>t editions), a
reconstructed Text, the closest possible to the ‘orig<strong>in</strong>al’ one prior to its ‘corruption’ due to the
very process of textual tradition, thus ideally recover<strong>in</strong>g the <strong>in</strong>tentio auctoris (Monella 2008).
116 http://beowulf.engl.uky.edu/~kiernan/eBoethius/<strong>in</strong>lad.htm
117 http://etext.lib.virg<strong>in</strong>ia.edu/lat<strong>in</strong>/ovid/
118 http://vergil.classics.upenn.edu/