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

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While these requirements may seem onerous for the creation of pr<strong>in</strong>t editions, Bodard and Garcés
argued that digital editions could far more easily meet all these demands. In addition to provid<strong>in</strong>g all
the data and <strong>in</strong>terpretative decisions, however, these authors recommend formaliz<strong>in</strong>g critical editions
<strong>in</strong>to a mach<strong>in</strong>e-readable format. In sum, an OSCE provides access to an open text, to the data and
software used <strong>in</strong> mak<strong>in</strong>g an edition, and to the editorial <strong>in</strong>terventions made and scholarships beh<strong>in</strong>d the
decisions.
The authors also listed another major advantage of digital editions, namely, the ability to get back to
the materiality of actual manuscripts and move away from the “ideal” of reconstruct<strong>in</strong>g an Urtext, as
previously discussed by Ruhleder (1995) and Bolter (1991), to focus <strong>in</strong>stead on textual transmission.
Bodard and Garcés posited that papyrologists better understand the nature of the transcription process
and how creat<strong>in</strong>g a text is an editorial process, where there is typically not just one correct read<strong>in</strong>g.
Scholarship has <strong>in</strong>creas<strong>in</strong>gly challenged the idea that an editor can ever get back to the “orig<strong>in</strong>al text”
of an author, and Bodard and Garcés stressed that attention would be better focused on how to present
a text with multiple manuscript witnesses to a reader <strong>in</strong> a digital environment:
Digital editions may stimulate our critical engagement with such crucial textual debate. They
may push the classic def<strong>in</strong>ition of the ‘edition’ by not only offer<strong>in</strong>g a presentational publication
layer but also by allow<strong>in</strong>g access to the underly<strong>in</strong>g encod<strong>in</strong>g of the repository or database
beneath. Indeed, an editor need not make any authoritative decisions that supersede all
alternative read<strong>in</strong>gs if all possibilities can be unambiguously reconstructed from the base
manuscript data, although most would <strong>in</strong> practice probably want to privilege their favoured
read<strong>in</strong>gs <strong>in</strong> some way. The critical edition, with sources fully <strong>in</strong>corporated, would potentially
provide an <strong>in</strong>teractive resource that assists the user <strong>in</strong> creat<strong>in</strong>g virtual research environments
(Bodard and Garcés 2009, 96).
Thus, the authors hoped that digital or virtual research environments would support the creation of
“ideal” digital editions where the editor does not have to decide on a “best text” s<strong>in</strong>ce all editorial
decisions could be l<strong>in</strong>ked to their base data (e.g., manuscript images, diplomatic transcriptions). They
also argued that the creation of such ideal digital editions must be a collaborative enterprise, where all
modifications and changes are made explicit, are attributed to <strong>in</strong>dividuals, and are both citable and
permanent. Bodard and Garcés concluded that future research should exam<strong>in</strong>e what methodologies and
technology are necessary to make this vision a reality. A key part of this research will be to explore the
relationship between OSCEs and the materials found <strong>in</strong> massive digital collections and million-book
libraries with little or no markup. OSCEs and other small curated collections, Bodard and Garcés
<strong>in</strong>sisted, could be used as tra<strong>in</strong><strong>in</strong>g data to enrich larger collections, a theme which we return to <strong>in</strong> the
discussion of classics and cyber<strong>in</strong>frastructure.
One project that embodies some of the pr<strong>in</strong>ciples discussed here is the Homer Multitext Project
(HMT), 122 def<strong>in</strong>ed by Blackwell and Smith (2009) as an “effort to br<strong>in</strong>g together a comprehensive
record of the Homeric tradition <strong>in</strong> a digital library.” The website for the HMT is hosted by the Center
for Hellenic Studies and offers free access to a library of text transcriptions and images of Homeric
manuscripts, with its major component be<strong>in</strong>g digital images of the tenth-century manuscript of the
Iliad known as the Venetus A from the Marciana Library <strong>in</strong> Venice. Accord<strong>in</strong>g to the website:
this process, and for future editors of the same text, if it were possible to present this evaluation for each character and word <strong>in</strong> a structured format”
(Roued-Cunliffe 2010).
122 http://chs.harvard.edu/wa/pageRtn=ArticleWrapper&bdc=12&mn=1169. While the discussion here focuses largely on the technical architecture and
<strong>in</strong>novative approach to digital editions of the HMT, a long-term view of the scholarly potential and future of the project has recently been offered by Nagy
(2010).