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

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many discrete texts, <strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g a copy of Proclus’s Chrestomathy, the Iliad, summaries of books of the
Iliad, four different scholiastic texts, and later notes. In these authors’ system of text l<strong>in</strong>k<strong>in</strong>g and
retrieval through abstract citation, all of these contents are described as separate texts and the CTS
protocol is used to refer to the structure of each text. Indexes are then created that associate these texts
with digital images of the folio sides that make up the manuscript. 126 Ultimately, Blackwell and Smith
conv<strong>in</strong>c<strong>in</strong>gly argued that this approach to primary sources, which favors diplomatic or facsimile
editions and simple <strong>in</strong>dex<strong>in</strong>g over complicated markup, would support the greatest possible amount of
reuse for the data, posit<strong>in</strong>g that it “requires less knowledge to <strong>in</strong>tegrate texts with simple markup and
simple, documented <strong>in</strong>dices, than to disaggregate an elaborately marked up texts that embeds l<strong>in</strong>ks to
other digital objects.”
While all primary sources might benefit from such an <strong>in</strong>frastructure, the Homeric poems <strong>in</strong> particular
require one, accord<strong>in</strong>g to Dué and Ebbott (2009), largely because of the complicated oral-performance
tradition that created the poems. Traditional pr<strong>in</strong>ted editions of the poems with a ma<strong>in</strong> text and an
apparatus that records all alternative <strong>in</strong>terpretations, they argue, creates the mislead<strong>in</strong>g impression that
there is “one” correct text and then there is everyth<strong>in</strong>g else. Dué and Ebbott also criticized the fact that
a critical apparatus could be deciphered only by a specialist audience with years of tra<strong>in</strong><strong>in</strong>g. The digital
medium can be used to better represent the nature of the Homeric texts, however, for as they
contended:
The Homeric epics were composed aga<strong>in</strong> and aga<strong>in</strong> <strong>in</strong> performance: the digital medium, which
can more readily handle multiple texts, is therefore em<strong>in</strong>ently suitable for a critical edition of
Homeric poetry—<strong>in</strong>deed, the fullest realization of a critical edition of Homer may require a
digital medium (Dué and Ebbott 2009).
Accord<strong>in</strong>g to their argument that the Homeric poems were composed anew <strong>in</strong> every performance, there
is no s<strong>in</strong>gle orig<strong>in</strong>al author’s composition or text to attempt to reconstruct. They put forward that the
variations found <strong>in</strong> different manuscript witnesses are not necessarily copy<strong>in</strong>g “errors,” and that <strong>in</strong> fact
the traditional term “variants” as used by textual critics is not appropriate for the compositional process
used to create the poems. Dué and Ebbott asserted that the digital medium could support a superior
form of textual criticism for these epics:
Textual criticism as practiced is predicated on selection and “correction” as it creates the fiction of a
s<strong>in</strong>gular text. The digital criticism we are propos<strong>in</strong>g for the Homer Multitext ma<strong>in</strong>ta<strong>in</strong>s the <strong>in</strong>tegrity of
each witness to allow for cont<strong>in</strong>ual and dynamic comparison, better reflect<strong>in</strong>g the multiplicity of the
textual record and of the oral tradition <strong>in</strong> which these epics were created (Dué and Ebbott, 2009).
Instead of the term “variants,” they co<strong>in</strong> the term “performance multiforms” to describe the variations
found <strong>in</strong> the manuscript witnesses. Standard pr<strong>in</strong>ted critical editions could never reflect the complexity
of such multiforms, Dué and Ebbott submitted, but they <strong>in</strong>sisted that a digital “edition” such as the
HMT supports the representation of various manuscript witnesses and could more clearly <strong>in</strong>dicate
where variations occur, s<strong>in</strong>ce no “ma<strong>in</strong> text” must be selected for presentation as with the pr<strong>in</strong>ted page.
Yet another advantage of the multitextual approach, Dué and Ebbott contended, is that it can be far
more explicit about the many channels of textual transmission. For example, many quotations of
Homer <strong>in</strong> Plato and the Attic orators, as well as fragmentary papyri, are quite different from the
medieval texts that served as the basis for all modern pr<strong>in</strong>ted editions of Homer. A multitext approach
126 For detail on these text structures, data models, and technical implementation, see Smith (2010).