Historical Fragmentary Texts in the Digital Age (original) (raw)
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The digital edition of ancient sources as a further step in the textual transmission
Digital Classics III: Re-thinking Text Analysis. Proceedings of the workshop (Heidelberg, May 11-13, 2017), edited by Chronopoulos, Maier, Novokhatko
Critical editions of ancient sources are usually considered as the final outcome of a philological process of reconstruction aimed at reproducing the original text as most exactly as possible. Thus they are the fixed representation of a scholar's more or less trustable opinion on the text. Ancient studies today are characterised by a more and more widespread presence of the digital technologies, which allow us to redefine and reshape the concept itself of critical edition, more focused on the actual testimonies of the textual tradition and on their peculiar features. Multitextual editions, for example, tend to replace the traditional structure of text and apparatus criticus with a more dynamic network of multiple editions interconnected to each other; markup tagging and linguistic annotation, on the other hand, add deeper and deeper levels of in-text information. It can be argued, therefore, that a digital (critical) edition can develop into something completely different than the “old-fashioned” print critical edition: namely a further step in the fluid textual transmission of ancient sources.
Digital Canons and Catalogs of Fragmentary Literature
Fragmente einer fragmentierten Welt: Zur Problematik des Umgangs mit Fragmenten in der gegenwärtigen klassisch-philologischen Forschung, 2024
When the Ptolemies founded the Library at Alexandria in the third century BC, one of the first needs was to collect and arrange all the books in the inhabited world.1 In spite of contradictory figures mentioned by ancient authors about the storage of the Alexandrian collections, the result of this effort was the beginning of a monumental philological work that produced commentaries, lexica, excerpts and library catalogs. Still surviving sources preserve traces of this work and the fragments of the Pinakes of Callimachus are traditionally considered the remains of a pioneering catalog of ancient literature.2 Modern scholars have been looking for these traces in order to reconstruct methods and contributions of ancient philologists and obtain information about Classical authors and works. Collecting references to ancient works means first of all to explore and analyze the language used by ancient authors when citing and referring to other authors and works, and secondly to translate and convert the expressions of this language into canons, catalogs, and indices.3 This investigation has also allowed scholars to discover and extract traces of lost authors and works, beginning an editorial practice that is part of what we call fragmentary literature and that has been producing countless collections of printed critical editions of lost intellectuals.4 Catalogs and indices of authors and works are the result of this philological analysis, but their entries are mostly in Latin or in modern languages and only an analytical and separate reading of the passages collected in these resources provides an insight into the language used by ancient authors to express bibliographic citations, such as references to other authors and to titles and descriptions of other works. Even if linguistic annotations of ancient Greek and Latin are growing, we still miss collections and annotations of entities pertaining to authors and works extracted from ancient sources
The Linked Fragment: TEI and the Encoding of Text Reuses of Lost Authors
Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative, 2014
This paper presents a joint project of the Humboldt Chair of Digital Humanities at the University of Leipzig, the Perseus Digital Library at Tufts University, and the Harvard Center for Hellenic Studies to produce a new open series of Greek and Latin fragmentary authors. Such authors are lost and their works are preserved only thanks to quotations and text reuses in later texts. The project is undertaking two tasks: (1) the digitization of paper editions of fragmentary works with links to the source texts from which the fragments have been extracted; (2) the production of born-digital editions of fragmentary works. The ultimate goals are the creation of open, linked, machine-actionable texts for the study and advancement of the field of Classical textual fragmentary heritage and the development of a collaborative environment for crowdsourced annotations. These goals are being achieved by implementing the Perseids Platform and by encoding the Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum, one of the most important and comprehensive collections of fragmentary authors.
De Gruyter eBooks, 2019
Cataloging and Citing Greek and Latin Authors and Works illustrates not only how Classicists have built upon larger standards and data models such as the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR, allowing us to represent different versions of a text) and the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines for XML encoding of source texts (representing the logical structure of sources) but also highlights some major contributions from Classics. Alison Babeu, Digital Librarian at Perseus, describes a new form of catalog for Greek and Latin works that exploits the FRBR data model to represent the many versions of our sourcesincluding translations. Christopher Blackwell and Neel Smith built on FRBR to develop the Canonical Text Services (CTS) data model as part of the CITE Architecture. CTS provides an explicit framework within which we can address any substring in any version of a text, allowing us to create annotations that can be maintained for years and even for generations. This addressesat least within the limited space of textual dataa problem that has plagued hypertext systems since the 1970s and that still afflicts the World Wide Web. Those who read these papers years from now will surely find that many of the URLs in the citations no longer function but all of the CTS citations should be usablewhether we remain with this data model or replace it with something more expressive. Computer Scientists Jochen Tiepmar and Gerhard Heyer show how they were able to develop a CTS server that could scale to more than a billion words, thus establishing the practical nature of the CTS protocol. If there were a Nobel Prize for Classics, my nominations would go to Blackwell and Smith for CITE/CTS and to Bruce Robertson, whose paper on Optical Character Recognition opens the section on Data Entry, Collection, and Analysis for Classical Philology. Robertson has worked a decade, with funding and without, on the absolutely essential problem of converting images of print Greek into machine readable text. In this effort, he has mastered a wide range of techniques drawn from areas such as computer human interaction, statistical analysis, and machine learning. We can now acquire billions of words of Ancient Greek from printed sources and not just from multiple editions of individual works (allowing us not only to trace the development of our texts over time but also to identify quotations of Greek texts in articles and books, thus allowing us to see which passages are studied by different scholarly communities at different times). He has enabled fundamental new work on Greek. Meanwhile the papers by Tauber, Burns, and Coffee are on representing characters, on a pipeline for textual analysis of Classical languages and on a system that detects where one text alludes towithout extensively quotinganother text. At its base, philology depends upon the editions which provide information about our source texts, including variant readings, a proposed reconstruction of the original, and reasoning behind decisions made in analyzing the text.
Analysis of Ancient and Medieval Texts and Manuscripts: Digital Approaches discusses the possibilities offered by collaboration between classical studies and digital resources, in order to explore what could be the future of digital humanities. The digital revolution has changed the approach to research, especially for humanities. In the last decades the process of image scanning, transcription and creation of digital archives of text has materialized, but many scholars aren't conscious of the results it can achieve for their studies. For that reason, Analysis of Ancient and Medieval Texts and Manuscripts: Digital Approaches aims to show the possibilities given by computer-assisted methods in the analysis of ancient and medieval codices. In particular, there is a focus on the combination and comparison of data, which can lead
Contrary perhaps to expectation, Classical studies is at the vanguard of the latest technological developments for using digital tools and computational techniques in research. This article outlines its pioneering adoption of digital tools and methods, and investigates how the digital medium is helping to transform the study of Greek and Latin literature. It discusses the processes and consequences of digitization, explaining how technologies like multispectral imaging are increasing the textual corpus, while examining how annotation, engagement, and reuse are changing the way we think about " the text ". It also considers how the digital turn is reinvigorating textual analysis, by exploring the broader ecosystem, within which the digital text can now be studied, and which provides enriched contexts for understanding that are constantly shifting and expanding. Classical literature in the digital age has the potential to both challenge dominant modes of thinking about antiquity and disrupt traditional ways of doing research.
Greek Literature, the Digital Humanities, and the Shifting Technologies of Reading
Oxford Handbooks Online, 2016
Contrary perhaps to expectation, Classical studies is at the vanguard of the latest technological developments for using digital tools and computational techniques in research. This article outlines its pioneering adoption of digital tools and methods, and investigates how the digital medium is helping to transform the study of Greek and Latin literature. It discusses the processes and consequences of digitization, explaining how technologies like multispectral imaging are increasing the textual corpus, while examining how annotation, engagement, and reuse are changing the way we think about “the text”. It also considers how the digital turn is reinvigorating textual analysis, by exploring the broader ecosystem, within which the digital text can now be studied, and which provides enriched contexts for understanding that are constantly shifting and expanding. Classical literature in the digital age has the potential to both challenge dominant modes of thinking about antiquity and dis...
This paper presents work on documenting text reuse of fragmentary authors and of extant works in the Deipnosophists of Athenaeus of Naucratis. By fragmentary we mean authors whose texts are lost and known through quotations and references by other authors. Our data model defines taxonomies of text reuse for representing references to authors and works as contextualized annotations, expressing their nature of reuse of textual evidence. Our data model documents uniquely instances of text reuse and it is developed on the Canonical Text Services (CTS), which is a protocol for identifying and retrieving passages of text based on concise, machine-actionable canonical citation. CTS is one component of a larger digital library architecture, developed for the Homer Multitext project and called CITE (Collections, Indices, Texts, and Extensions).