“ Academic Collaboration On Line: The SOL as a Case
Study”
Ross
Scaife
University of Kentucky, USA
Raphael
Finkel
University of Kentucky, USA
William
Hutton
College of William and Mary, USA
Elizabeth
Vandiver
University of Maryland, USA
Patrick
Rourke
Nashoba Valley Technical Vocational High School,
USA
Despite the Herculean labors and remarkable achievements of the Perseus Project,
today many essential resources for the study of the ancient Mediterranean world
still remain accessible only to a few specially trained researchers because they
have never been translated into modern languages or provided with sufficiently
convenient interpretive materials. Our current work represents the first step in
an attempt to address that problem by engaging the efforts of scholars
world-wide in the production of substantial translated and annotated texts that
will be made available exclusively through the internet. The text with which we
have chosen to begin is the Byzantine encyclopedia known as the Suda, a 10th
century C.E. compilation of material on ancient literature, history, and
biography. A massive work of about 32,000 entries, and written in often dense
Byzantine Greek prose, the Suda is nevertheless an invaluable source for many
details that would otherwise be unknown to us about Greek and Roman antiquity,
as well as an important text for the study of Byzantine intellectual
history.
The sheer size of the Suda (the most up-to-date printed edition runs to four
hefty and tightly-printed volumes) and its lack of literary charm are sufficient
to explain why no individual scholar has committed his or her career to
translating it. Many scholars, each taking responsibility for selected entries
or series of entries, can get the job done more effectively. Moreover, the vast
breadth of subject matter covered by the Suda would challenge the expertise of
even the most widely competent modern scholar. By sharing the load, individual
translators can focus on those entries from the Suda that pertain to their area
of expertise, thus producing better translations and more informed
annotations.
Begun in January of 1998, the Suda On Line (SOL) already involves the
contributions (or promised contributions!) of nearly seventy scholars throughout
the world. The general plan of the project is to assemble an SGML-encoded
database, searchable and browsable on the web, with continuously improved
annotations, bibliographies and hypertextual links to other electronic resources
in addition to the core translation of entries in the Suda. Individual work
becomes available on the web as soon as possible, with only the minimum
necessary proofreading and editorial oversight. A diverse board of area
specialists will eventually edit every entry, altering and improving the content
as needed. The display of each entry will include an indication of the level of
editorial scrutiny it has received. We want to encourage the greatest possible
participation in the project and the smallest possible delay in presenting a
high quality resource to a wide public readership.
Collaborative efforts always generate questions about how to allot proper credit
to individual contributors. Given the searchable database format of the SOL it
is a simple matter for translators and editors to print out their own
peer-reviewed work for inclusion in, for example, promotion and tenure dossiers.
Moreover, we anticipate that translators will establish hypertextual links
directly from their on-line rèsumès to their contributions in the SOL.
Our choice of the web as the medium for publishing the SOL is crucial to the
project's conception. This format has many advantages, of which accessibility
and ease of use are perhaps the most obvious. Users can access the project's web
page and search the database in various ways: by strings in a full text search,
with Boolean combinations, by keyword, by translator, etc. The display for each
entry includes the headword in English and Greek (options for displaying Greek
suit the requirements of different systems), the translation, footnotes and
other annotations, and bibliographical references (where available and/or
appropriate). The SOL's interface automatically generates links to the complete
Greek text of the entry from the database of the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae and
to the relevant entries in Liddell and Scott's Greek Lexicon (via the Perseus
Project); further links to both external and internal resources can be created
in the text of the translations and the annotations.
The on line format also allows for continuous editing and updating, which is
crucial to our conception of the SOL as an evolving work forever subject to
improvement by many hands. We believe that the specific ways in which we have
enabled the process of editorial control and our plans for further enhancements
are among the most sophisticated now available in any on-line scholarly
resource: every aspect of communication among contributors is handled via
web-based forms and dynamically generated e-mail. Any work goes onto the web
immediately; individual authors do not have to wait for publication until the
entire project is finished (as in the case of a print format). Thus, the project
can be immediately useable even while the bulk of the work remains to be done.
Furthermore, entries can be updated immediately whenever new information
arises.
Perhaps the most exciting aspect of a web-based publication such as the SOL,
however, is the potential for interoperability with other projects. The SOL is
one of many projects involved in a consortial arrangement at the Stoa, which is
actively exploring ways to promote the interconnection of distributed projects.
Although our goal is to have as much annotation and documentation as possible
within the SOL database itself, our translation takes advantage of the natural
capacity of web-based documents to be linked with other sources of electronic
information. We want the SOL to be one important model for a new generation of
hypertext commentary on ancient texts; a SOL fully outfitted with links to other
electronic resources will provide not only the Greek text of the Suda and its
translation, but also a wide variety of links to other relevant Suda entries, to
the ancient vitae of any major authors or other figures mentioned in the text,
to all the testimonia, and to essays by various scholars (both public-domain and
new essays written specifically for this project). The same model may be used
for on-line commentaries for other ancient works, which may in turn be linked to
relevant entries in the SOL. The prospects for the on-line production of true
variorum editions are vast and exciting.
This copious annotation and hypertextuality will ensure that the on-line Suda is
useful not only to classical scholars and historians, but to a much wider
audience as well. Students at various levels will be able not merely to read the
translated Suda entries but to understand their wider context. A bare
translation would be of little use to most non-specialists, but a translation
provided with a rich supply of links to other ancient works and to modern
scholarship will open a whole world of information to the interested beginner
and can still be a valuable research tool for the trained specialist.
The goal of the SOL is not just to be a useful tool for researchers, but to
provide a sophisticated model for the kind of scholarship made possible by open
source technology and the internet, scholarship that is cooperative rather than
solitary, communal rather than proprietary, worldwide rather than localized and
evolving rather than static. Accordingly we aim at two principal results: in
addition to our development of the Suda On Line itself as a respected scholarly
resource, we plan to make a generalized, well-documented version of our software
freely available for other scholars to adapt for their own purposes.
References:
Suidae Lexicon. Ed. A. Adler. Stuttgart: , 1928. (5 volumes).
unknown. Perseus: An Evolving Digital Library of Ancient Greece. : ,
unknown. The Stoa: A Consortium for Electronic Publication in the Humanities. : ,
unknown. The Suda On Line. : ,
unknown. Thesaurus Linguae Graecae. : ,