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

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Digital critical editions, however, offer a number of advantages over their pr<strong>in</strong>t counterparts, accord<strong>in</strong>g
to Monella, the most important of which is the ability to better present textual variance <strong>in</strong> detail (such
as by l<strong>in</strong>k<strong>in</strong>g critical editions to the sources of variants such as transcriptions and images of
manuscripts). Two other benefits of digital critical editions are that they enable the reader to verify and
question the work of an editor and allow scholars to build an “open” model of the text where the
version presented by any one editor is not considered to be “the” text.
At the same time, Monella noted that most orig<strong>in</strong>al sources (whether manuscript or pr<strong>in</strong>ted), <strong>in</strong>
addition to <strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g a “ma<strong>in</strong> text” of an ancient author, also <strong>in</strong>cluded a variety of “paratexts” that
commented on it, such as <strong>in</strong>terl<strong>in</strong>ear annotations, glosses, scholia, 119 footnotes, commentaries, and
<strong>in</strong>troductions. Scholia, <strong>in</strong> particular, were often considered so important and were also so vast that the
scholia on a number of major authors have appeared <strong>in</strong> their own editions. 120 To represent the
complicated nature of such sources, Monella proposed a model for a “document-based digital critical
editions” that <strong>in</strong>cludes both ma<strong>in</strong> texts and paratexts as they appear <strong>in</strong> different <strong>in</strong>dividual sources:
Such a model should <strong>in</strong>clude both the ma<strong>in</strong>texts and the paratexts of each source, express<strong>in</strong>g
explicitly the relation between s<strong>in</strong>gle portions of each paratext and the precise portions of ma<strong>in</strong>
text to which they refer. This implies that, rather than a traditional edition of scholia, it would
be both an edition of the text and of its ancient (and modern) commentaries—and the
relationships between the text and its commentaries (Monella 2008).
This model for digital critical editions then <strong>in</strong>cludes the need to publish each “ma<strong>in</strong> text” (e.g., each
“reconstructed” text of an ancient author <strong>in</strong> an <strong>in</strong>dividual witness/source) with all of its paratexts such
as scholia. Nonetheless, Monella admitted that develop<strong>in</strong>g a markup strategy that supports l<strong>in</strong>k<strong>in</strong>g each
paratext to the exact portion of the ma<strong>in</strong> text it refers to is very difficult, and this has led to the
development of a number of project-specific markup strategies as well as to debates over what level of
“paratextuality” should be marked up <strong>in</strong> the transcriptions. Develop<strong>in</strong>g project-specific markup is to be
avoided whenever possible, Monella <strong>in</strong>sisted, and the raw <strong>in</strong>put data (typically manuscript
transcriptions <strong>in</strong> this case) should be based on exist<strong>in</strong>g standards so that the data can be reused by other
projects.
Monella ultimately recommended a fairly complicated model of transcription and markup that clearly
separates the roles of transcriber and editor. Transcribers who create primary-source transcriptions
must conf<strong>in</strong>e themselves to encod<strong>in</strong>g “<strong>in</strong>formation neutral with regards to the paratextuality levels” or
else only append such <strong>in</strong>formation to any necessary elements with an “<strong>in</strong>terpretative” attribute. An
editor, who is assumed to be work<strong>in</strong>g <strong>in</strong>teractively with a specific software tool, takes this transcription
and assigns paratextuality levels to pert<strong>in</strong>ent places <strong>in</strong> the transcriptions, generates an Alignment-Text
of all the ma<strong>in</strong> texts <strong>in</strong> the transcriptions, and stores the l<strong>in</strong>k<strong>in</strong>g <strong>in</strong>formation necessary to align the ma<strong>in</strong>
text Alignment-Text with all of the different paratexts. The next phase is to create custom software that
119 As def<strong>in</strong>ed by the Oxford Dictionary of the Classical World, “Scholia are notes on a text, normally substantial sets of explanatory and critical notes
written <strong>in</strong> the marg<strong>in</strong> or between the l<strong>in</strong>es of manuscripts. Many of them go back to ancient commentaries (which might fill volumes of their own). Scholia
result from excerption, abbreviation, and conflation, brought about partly by readers' needs and partly by lack of space.” Oxford Dictionary of the
Classical World. Ed. John Roberts. Oxford University Press, 2007. Oxford Reference Onl<strong>in</strong>e. Oxford University Press. Tufts University. 19 May 2010
http://www.oxfordreference.com/views/ENTRY.htmlsubview=Ma<strong>in</strong>&entry=t180.e1984
120 For example, one recently released project created by Donald Mastronarde, professor of classics at the University of California, Berkeley, the
“Euripides Scholia Demonstration” presents a new open-access digital edition of all the scholia on the plays of Euripides that were found on more than 29
manuscripts and pr<strong>in</strong>ted <strong>in</strong> 10 different editions. For a distributed-edit<strong>in</strong>g approach to scholia, a new project, Scholiastae
(http://www.scholiastae.org/scholia/Ma<strong>in</strong>_Page), has extended MediaWiki with easier word and phrase annotation <strong>in</strong> order to support <strong>in</strong>dividuals who
wish to create their own scholia onl<strong>in</strong>e for public doma<strong>in</strong> classical texts.