Designing Cyberinfrastructure in 2007 for Classical Studies in 2017: Working for the future, building on the past, acting in the present:

Forty years have passed since David Packard developed a computer-generated index to Livy in the basement of the Harvard Science Center and there are tenured professors in the field who have never used a typewriter and for whom the printed reference materials have always been supplements to wide-ranging searches of the primary sources themselves.

But while much has happened, the first generation of development has been retrospective, applying new media to existing needs. The center of gravity has remained firmly in the print world, with publications in HTML and PDF mimicking their print predecessors, with digital texts, available only in single editions and without the textual notes, as elaborate indices to their print originals, and with data about material culture fragmented into hundreds of incommensurate databases and linked only by expository prose, written by and for human readers.

A commission funded by the ACLS and the Mellon Foundation has called for a cyberinfrastructure to support the humanities and social sciences. Their published report follows a similar report, published in 2004, by a National Science Foundation commission. Other neologisms and phrases have emerged to capture aspects of changes that many can sense but no one has yet fully articulated: the Grid, e-Science, and virtual research environments. We may not be able to predict, but we must nevertheless prepare for, the future. We must imagine what we want to be able to do in ten years and we must begin today to work towards that goal.

This collection of essays looks forward to the world that we wish to build, to the past, both print and digital, on which we can build, and then to the work that must do now if we are to realize our visions for the future. That vision will change dramatically over time, but with open debate today and bold action tomorrow that vision is much more likely to grow richer and more powerful over time. These essays thus establish the groundwork for debate but describe work done, the future, and the path forward.

Submission dates: July 1

Guest Editors: Christopher Blackwell, Gregory Crane, Brent Seales, Neel Smith

Nature of the publications: This collection features articles that publish original work that has been accomplished and describe how that work points to the long term development of classical studies. Each paper will address three questions: where are we now? Where do we want to go? How will we know when we have gotten there?

The following is a tentative TOC. People with asterisks in front of their names have not yet been approached.

1. Christopher Blackwell, Gregory Crane, Brent Seales, Neel Smith, The Stoa: the first ten years

2. Gregory Crane et al., The Perseus Digital Library and the Infrastructure for Classics

3. Brent Seales, Christopher Blackwell, Neel Smith, Imaging Text

4. Anne Mahoney, The Suda On-Line and the future of decentralized publication in classics

5. Neel Smith and Christopher Blackwell, Canonical Text Services

6. Bruce Robertson, Historical Event Markup Language

7. Tom Elliott, Pleiades and Geographic Information

8. Thomas Martin and Chris Blackwell, Ancient History “when its all on-line”

9. Gabby Bodard, Tom Elliott, Charlotte Roueche, Epigraphy

10. Josh Sosin, Papyrology

11. David Smith, What can you do with parallel texts?

12. Jeff Rydberg Cox, Early Modern Classical Texts online

13. Kenneth Morrell, Classics and the Liberal Arts Education of the 21st century

14. Maria Daniels, The Ancient World in New Media

15. Sebastian Heath, Robert Kummer, Art, Archaeology and the linguistic services needed to support them

16. David Bamman, Computational Linguistics and Classical Philology

17. Terry Tunberg, Post-classical Latin

18. Raphael Finkel

19. Casey Du�? �, Mary Ebbot, Homer Multitext

Our goal is to have these pieces ready for release by early Fall 2007. Our goal will be to fund a workshop at the University of Kentucky to review these publications and to inaugurate the on-going discussion that we are hoping to provoke.

-- JuliaFlanders - 09 Apr 2007