Christopher Blackwell is an Associate Professor of Classics at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina. He holds a B.A. from Marlboro College and a Ph.D. from Duke University. He has published on historical topics for scholarly audiences and general readers, and works on a variety of projects in digital humanities.
Tom Martin is the Jeremiah W. O'Connor Jr. Professor in Classics at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, USA. He was one of the original participants in the Perseus Project and a contributor to DEMOS, one of the projects under the aegis of STOA, both of which allowed him to collaborate with (and come to admire greatly) Ross Scaife. He is the author of
Authored for DHQ; migrated from original DHQauthor format
In this article, two professors of Classics present their experiences in incorporating into their professional activity a model of undergraduate research that reflects Ross Scaife’s ideals of collaborative, open scholarship, informed by traditional values, and taking advantage of advances in digital humanities
Classics as a discipline can employ information technology to encourage collaboration, engage undergraduates in research, and reinvent traditionally prized, but now under-used modes of scholarship.
We write this essay in memory of our friend and colleague Ross Scaife. Since Classics is what we, the authors, know best, and since Ross Scaife’s contribution to Classics is incalculable, we are focusing on Classics as a sub-discipline of the humanities. We hope that others may find our observations, limited as they necessarily are to our own experience, interesting, useful, or provocative.
To survive and prosper, colleges and universities have to sell themselves to
prospective students (or at least to prospective parents) as nurturing environments,
where students and faculty work hand-in-hand, ideally on important-seeming and
photogenic tasks. When undergraduate research
gets pitched on websites,
mass-mailed DVDs, and glossy brochures, it invariably takes that form of chemical
glassware or a string quartet. Students and teachers in the field of Classics,
however, when they appear in such promotional materials, are usually shown in the
context of advertising an institution’s dedication to teaching,
because in the
context of teaching
it is okay to show the middle-aged professor gesturing at
a blackboard covered with scrawled notes.
And as Gregory Crane has also described in the introdction to this issue, this
picture is not a misleading accident of the demands of superficial marketing but is
too often an accurate reflection of an unfortunate truth.
Faculty in Classics have not, in our experience as students and teachers, been very
interested in fostering the collection of activities that now go under the general
term undergraduate research
. Classics faculty have traditionally claimed to
inspire the life of the mind, to teach critical and subtle thinking, and to exercise
students’ intellects through close reading, rigorous philogy, and stimulating
discussion, and often these claims are entirely justified. But it would be
disingenuous to assert that the most insightful reading, the parsing of the most
complex syntax, or the most lively conversation is similar in kind or effect to a
public performance of Ravel’s
Undergraduate research in the Classics, as traditionally practiced, is a diluted
version of professional scholarship in the field as it developed during the second
half of the 20th century — and as it came to be seen by the turn of the 21st century
as an absolute touchstone for appropriate professional activity. We teachers send our
students forth to read scholarship and produce argumentative essays, carefully and
selectively annotated with citations to primary and secondary sources. Ideally, the
primary sources served our students as evidence, and the citations to secondary
sources provided armor against charges of plagiarism. We call this a diluted
version of professional scholarship for two reasons. A given undergraduate student —
let’s say that she is taking her first course in Roman History, a survey course in a
subject of tremendous complexity based on literally centuries of cumulative
scholarship in multiple disciplines from epigraphy and numismatics to textual
criticism and literary theory — is unlikely in the course of a semester or quarter to
be able to develop and advance an idea or interpretation that has never before been
produced by a professional scholar in the centuries long history of research in
ancient history. For this reason, no responsible teacher of Classics would insist on
originality (in this sense of a new and unique idea or interpretation, as opposed to
an idea or interpretation that is one’s own and expresses one’s personal intellectual
effort) in papers assigned in an introductory survey. (A professional scholar in the
field, by contrast, must demonstrate an original thesis, in the sense of an idea or
interpretation that is not only his or her own but is also new and unique, as the
first condition of publication.) Taking advantage of the kinds of papers that we can
responsibly expect our undergraduate students in Classics to write is the subject of
the first section of this paper,
The second way in which undergraduate research in Classics tends to deserve the
appellation diluted
is in its approach to citation of sources. Undergraduates
cite sources for two reasons: first, because their teacher insisted that they consult
a certain number of sources, as an exercise in learning to do research,
and
second, to prove that they did not plagiarize any of the sentences that they have
strung together to form an argument. But citation is not a pre-digital
anti-plagiarism technology, or at least it should not be in a wholesome intellectual
environment. Citation is a pre-digital equivalent to the hyperlink, a way of
continuing an ongoing conversation in print, a pathway back from the author’s current
words, to previous comments on the topic at hand. This idea, in our experience, is
often completely unfamiliar to undergraduates, even now that that they are subjected
to rigorous formal indoctrination against the evils of plagiarism. In the second
section of this paper, When All the Sources are Online,
we explore some
possibilities for educating our students in a more positive understanding of
citation, and we will suggest a mode of scholarship that can make plagiarism less of
a temptation for the student and therefore less of a concern for the teacher. When
done with insight and method, citation generates the only kind of research that
carries conviction: research based on a clearly defined data set whose parameters are
unambiguously described, thus opening the way to complementary and, in the best of
circumstances truly collaborative, extension of the results.
The traditional mode of Classical scholarship — deep and wide reading yielding new insights which are expressed through rigorous argument — is extremely difficult and has in the past not lent itself to collaboration, especially collaboration between young scholars and their teachers. But there are modes of humanist scholarship that do lend themselves to this collaboration, especially when the environment of scholarship is flexible enough to accommodate that collaboration and value it. In the third part of this paper,
In the final section of this paper,
A traditional writing assignment in an undergraduate Classics course is an essay in which the student-author argues a thesis with supporting evidence from primary and secondary sources. Such assignments are opportunities for teaching students to articulate their thoughts and use sources appropriately. Properly understood, an essay written for such an assignment constitutes a moment in a conversation, in which the student interprets primary sources, understood through the lens of previous scholarship, and makes a statement to the teacher and sometimes to fellow students as well.
Responsible teachers judge their students’ essays according to the criteria of
accuracy, clarity, appropriate scope, and significance. Originality in the sense of
something never before thought or expressed in the history of previous
scholarship in Classics
is generally not a criterion, because few
undergraduates (and not just they!), however bright, can come up with a new and
unique thesis concerning Sophocles’ tragedy
And secondary scholarship in Classics often presents inappropriate models for
students. For example, this very interesting article would be of interest to students
studying Greek or Roman religion:
highly abridgedprepublication of a chapter in a then-forthcoming book, which refers
to the ample evidence and argumentation
Secondary scholarship in Classics aimed at a general readership is notorious for
failing to give citations to the actual evidence behind its assertions. Olympic Register,
we suppose, on a century-old article: J. P. Mahaffy,
This is a problem, but it holds an opportunity. Undergraduate students, even those in
the earliest stages of their exposure to the ancient world, can undertake the
too-often ignored task of ascertaining and explaining the primary evidence underlying
particular questions. A paper entitled What are the ancient sources for the
Olympic Register?
would be within the ability of almost any student with
guidance from a teacher and some dedicated librarians, especially one who has had at
least one semester of Greek. Such an assignment would teach techniques of research,
would expose the student to various modes of scholarship, and would be relatively
straightforward to organize and write. The results would be useful and at least as
worthy of publication as any number of specific arguments about the Olympic Register
that may certainly stand on a similar list of sources, but which will not bother to
cite them explicitly for the benefit of curious readers. As a publication, even a
paper entitled Some ancient sources for the Olympic Register
that defined the
parameters of its data set would have recently been extremely helpful to one of the
authors of the present paper, since Mahaffy’s 1881 article does not cite sources not
immediately relevant to his argument (see note 3 above).
We have experience enlisting undergraduates as authors of scholarship intended for true publication, essays intended to be read not as demonstration-pieces limited in interest by the context of a particular class but as pieces to inform the public and provide a wide audience with accurate and useful insights. The online encyclopedia
As a further help to readers, Dēmos offers short essays about the evidence it cites.
Take for example this statement and its cited evidence: In times of crisis, the Assembly was responsible
for voting to mobilize, and the first step seems to have been a vote that the
trierarchs (
Dem. 50.4
Dem 50.4
will not convey much to most readers outside the discipline of
classics or ancient history. Even if the citation is a hyperlink to an online text of
that passage, as it is in Dēmos, and the reader follows the link, she will see this:
On the twenty-fourth day of the month Metageitnion
in the archonship of Molon, when an assembly had been held and tidings of many
serious events had been brought before you, you voted that the trierarchs (of whom
I was one) should launch their ships. It is not necessary for me to go into
details regarding the crisis which had at that time befallen the state; you of
yourselves know that Tenos had been seized by Alexander, and its people had been
reduced to slavery.
In order to be an informed critic and analyst of any
assertion with Dem. 50.4
as its evidence, a reader must have some
understanding of the context of that passage. So Dēmos includes, beside its
citations, links to short descriptive essays describing the nature of the sources.
The one that accompanies this citation describes Demosthenes’ speech against
Polyclēs; it begins: (Demosthenes, Against Polycles; see
also Oratory) Although this speech comes down to us under the name of
Demosthenes, it was almost certainly written by Apollodorus, who was suing
Polycles. Apollodorus is trying to recover some expenses that he, Apollodorus,
had incurred after his term of duty as trierarch (
Of course, the example above falls under the much-maligned category of
popularizing
scholarship, works aimed at bringing a topic to the
less-informed masses. The malignity with which this kind of writing is often regarded
in the professional community of Classicists seems to us to arise from the
(supposedly) lighter demands it places on its authors. But this kind of writing has
its own exacting demands — a perceptive synthesis, a broad knowledge of the general
context and primary sources, and clear, concise expression free of jargon — and these
demands align perfectly with those of most assignments given to undergraduate
students. Opportunities for having students contribute the fruits of their research
and writing to public forums abound these days — from Wikipedia, whose articles can
often profit from educated intervention, to local web-based publications, which can
be tightly controlled by their professional editors, and easily discoverable by the
world at large, to ongoing, illustrious, and highly regarded web-based projects in
collaborative scholarship such as the Suda Online, which has incorporated the work of
scores of undergraduate translators, in addition to the millions of words of
translation and commentary by professional scholars.
If teachers of Classics want to assign students research-based topics for their
written work of the kind mentioned above, as opposed to, say, opinion pieces or
creative writing, then by the terms of the assignment, the students’ analysis must be
based on a defined data set of sources (whether primary or secondary or both). To
complete the assignment, the student of course needs access to the relevant data, and
therefore the teacher must always pay attention to the availability of sources in
making such assignments. In today’s world of Classics, there are numerous and
frequent limitations on the availability of the necessary data, whether primary or
secondary. In our fields of Classics and ancient history, only a tiny number of
college and university libraries even approach (and none actually achieves) the ideal
of possessing and making available to their users the full collection in print form
of ancient texts and modern scholarship, which is strongly international and
multi-lingual in scope. The costs of acquiring, storing, and lending books and
articles are too high and the physical problems of deterioration of printed materials
too serious for any library to achieve such a goal.
Now, it is certainly not plausible for a college or university library to possess and make available anything near the totality of primary and secondary sources in our field to serve the needs of teachers in creating research-based assignments in Classics, given the limited time and scholarly expertise of undergraduate students. But the problem of the limitations on the accessibility of data remains pertinent nevertheless. No library, for example, can make available sufficient printed copies of even the most commonly available primary texts to allow a significant number of students to work on the same assignment individually. The recourse is, of course, to ask students to buy copies of books or articles themselves if they are not available freely online. This attempted and always partial solution to the problem of the limited accessibility of sources is itself becoming increasingly less feasible as the cost of books continues to rise and students continually experience severe financial pressures from the escalation of the expense of attending college or university in general.
The issue of the accessibility of secondary sources in our field is much more pervasive, even if we confine ourselves to modern scholarship in English. Classics and ancient history scholars writing in English produce a large number of increasingly expensive books (scholarly volumes priced at a hundred dollars or more are now common, even the norm). These books are published not just in the United States but also in the United Kingdom, Australia, and indeed other non-English speaking countries (e.g. Denmark, Holland, and India), and this international dispersion of publishing can makes acquiring them a challenge sometimes even for those willing to pay the price. The situation regarding scholarly articles is much more complicated and expensive still. Scholars in our fields publish in a wide array of English-language journals published here and abroad. The costs of journals has soared in recent years, and few libraries subscribe to more than a very limited subset of those published around the world. Very few journals in our fields are available electronically, whether by paid subscription or without charge. Reading articles in scholarly journals can require travel to major libraries, use of inter-library loan services, or subscription to expensive electronic databases such as JSTOR (http://www.jstor.org/). In short, access to secondary scholarship is often constrained for reasons that are difficult to overcome. For this reason, it is very challenging to make these sources consistently available to students, especially in a group setting, for assignments that are usually due within relatively short intervals of time.
The effect of these constraints on the accessibility of source data in our field is
to limit the number and type of assignments that can be given to our students with
any reasonable expectation that they will be able to complete the work in the time
allowed. This fact in turn limits the intellectual goals that we as teachers can set
for our students. When all the sources are online
— the ideal that we envision
through the use of electronic technology — is an idea that would change all this.
Whether it will actually turn out to be possible to have absolutely all source data
online in the future is not the point; rather, the issue is how research-based
learning for undergraduates in Classics could change if the presently existing
constraints on source data were eliminated as far as possible by making primary and
secondary sources accessible to any student who has access to the Internet.
The first change would be that teachers would be able to make assignments based
purely on the intellectual value of the work rather than limit their options to those
assignments feasible with the limited print resources at hand. Secondly, it would be
possible to teach students how to treat primary sources truly as primary
,
meaning to ground arguments and statements in the most foundational evidence extant,
while always defining the parameters of the data set being used. Thirdly, students
could be taught to examine the evidentiary basis of secondary sources. They would
learn the crucial difference between secondary sources that fully and clearly ground
their arguments and statements in primary source material and secondary sources that
fail to do so. For the former, they could easily access the cited primary sources, so
as to control the validity of the interpretation of the primary sources in the
secondary source. Exercising this sort of control effectively would naturally require
training by experienced teachers who are themselves committed to research-based
learning, and it would no doubt take time to learn this skill. But at least the
possibility would exist for students to take this major step toward gaining the
intellectual power and independence that this approach would support.
Admittedly, these sorts of assignments would be onerous work for students and teachers alike, and it is obviously not practical for everyone to track down every primary source for every argument and statement in every case, at least not in reasonable amounts of time. But the very possibility of examining primary sources because they are all available online would change the intellectual climate of undergraduate work. The very effort of examining primary sources and thinking about their possible meanings would bring home the reality that scholarship is always research, in the sense of finding, identifying, interpreting, and presenting evidence. Students could operate as scholars, whether through the process of verifying the plausibility of the presentation of evidence by others, or by presenting arguments and interpretations that are in one way or another original, in all the various senses of that word. In this context, secondary sources that concentrated on making clear presentations of primary evidence would become especially valuable to students because they would model the behavior for this approach.
When all the sources are online, then we as teachers of Classics can more effectively engage our undergraduate students as collaborators in research, whether in the collection of, for example, themed primary source collections, or in the interpretation of the countless issues in Classics and ancient history that still await effective investigation based on careful analysis of well-chosen and clearly defined data sets rather than impressionistic assertions. When all the sources are online, the way students and teachers do their work together will change dramatically, and for the better.
Another but related point for the near-term future: a concerted and visible effort to
put all sources online might have a salutary effect on curbing one of the most
frustrating and careless habits of secondary scholarship in our field, one whose
unthinking arrogance places onerous and completely unnecessary hurdles in front of
students and faculty at the great majority of colleges and universities in their
attempts to pursue research-based learning that emphasizes identifying primary
sources at the most basic level possible, a research method that requires being able
to see the full source of a cited excerpt of text so that its context can be
evaluated. That habit is the practice of listing excerpts from lost
(i.e., no
longer directly preserved) ancient works (so-called fragments) and evidence about
them or their authors (so-called testimonia) by the arbitrary numbers assigned the
fragments and testimonia in modern works collecting the preserved remains of such
lost texts. Giving arbitrary numbers to fragments, such as Fragment 1 of author
such-and-such,
is tantamount to asserting that the fragments are somehow
free-standing textual entities, when in fact they are for the great majority of cases
simply quotations or paraphrases from other, still extant texts. (We leave aside
fragments that are indeed fragmentary pieces, found in a partially preserved papyrus
or in an inscription.)
In truth, of course, the work to which a fragment originally belonged simply no
longer exists. It is well and truly lost, unless by some near-miracle a previously
unknown copy turns up in a manuscript buried in a library or recovered from a papyrus
found in an archaeological excavation. A fragment of an ancient historian or
comedian, for example, that is embedded in, say, the text of
In scholarship on Greek ancient history, to describe the situation in our particular
specialty, it remains standard practice to cite fragments from the works of lost
ancient Greek historians by the numbers assigned to the fragments by Felix Jacoby in
his monumental collection of the remains of fragmentary ancient Greek
historians,
Suppose, for instance, that a student in a course on freedom and tyranny in ancient
Greece becomes interested in the colorful and controversial career of Dionysius I,
the (in ancient Greek terminology) tyrant
of Syracuse in Sicily in the
classical era. There is controversy over his career concerning just how (in modern
terms) tyrannical
Dionysius I really was. To learn more in order to address
the question of the nature of the rule of Dionysius I and having been in this case
warned away from Wikipedia by her solicitous instructor, our enterprising student
begins her inquiry by looking up his name in the standard one-volume print
encyclopedia on ancient Greece and Rome commonly recommended by teachers and found in
nearly every library in the land, the third edition of the
*Timaeus (2)as a source for the career of the alleged tyrant. Being admirably industrious, the student is aware that the asterisk indicates a cross-reference to another article in the encyclopedia. Turning to the article on Timaeus (pp. 1526-1527), our researcher discovers that Timaeus was
the most important western Greek historianand that being
a conservative aristocrat, [Timaeus in his work Sicilian History] distorted not only the historical picture of Agathocles [another tyrant], who had exiled him (fr. 124), but also of other tyrants, e.g. *Hieron (1) I and Dionysius I (frs. 29, 105).The article has nowhere explicitly said that Timaeus’
is known through 164 fragments, the extensive use of it made by *Diodorus (3) (4-21 for the Sicilian passages), and *Polybius (1)’s criticism in book 12.
Where, then, the inquiring mind of our researcher wants to know, are the fragments to
be found? Because her teacher has told her about the situation concerning the
publication of fragmentary ancient Greek historians, she realizes that the notation
at the beginning of the bibliography is the key to the mystery of the locations
of the fragments. The fragment numbers cited in the article, she realizes, refer to
Jacoby’s massive collection. If to verify the accuracy of the encyclopedia article
she wants to know what Timaeus actually said in allegedly distorting the picture of
Dionysius I, all she has to do is to read fragments nos. 29 and 105 under historian
no. 566 in
If she did by chance have access to
FGrH 566 frs. 29 and 105.
At the very least, scholars who subscribe to the value of the ideal of When all
the source are online
would, we hope, never fail to cite the underlying
primary source when they need to refer to a fragmentary text. To choose as an example
a citation from a book written by one of our organizers, this is the way citation of
fragmentary ancient Greek authors should be done: According to Ion of Chios (
inspired the
Athenians most of all by calling upon them neither to leave Hellas lame nor to
stand by and watch their own city lose its yoke-fellow
When authors fail to cite the primary sources for fragmentary works and a researcher has no access to the referenced modern collection of fragments, the only alternative for finding the underlying primary source is to try to identify the fragments by choosing likely words to search for in the
When all sources are online,then students and faculty, regardless of the state of their library, would have a much better chance of pursuing research-based study of fragments in which they were interested. Why? Because it is much more likely that their libraries would own copies of the basic texts from which many of the fragments come than that they would own extremely costly modern collections of fragments such as
To conclude this section: a well-publicized effort to reach the time when all
sources are online
might, to be blunt, help shame scholars into doing their
utmost to include primary source citation to the greatest degree possible in all
their works, whether in the publication itself or in some complementary medium, as,
for example, on a web site meant to accompany the main publication (in the spirit of
the supplementary special features
frequently added to films on DVDs these
days). With the ideal of when all sources are online
as an inspiration, we
might then hope to avoid situations such as the one in which a recently published
book in our field was slammed in a review for its almost total failure to cite
primary sources, thereby preventing the reviewer — and future readers, if there are
any — from investigating its evidentiary validity (BMCR 2007.09.52). When all
sources are online
can and should be a rallying cry of the kind that the
founders of Perseus used twenty years ago when trying to garner external support for
work that our discipline at that time condemned and ridiculed: Democratize access
to information!
That is the goal of always thinking, When all the sources
are online.
Between 1889 and 1907, the Homeric scholar and editor T. W. Allen published a series
of articles, each of which amounted to a list of Homeric manuscripts that he had
found and identified in the various libraries of Italy:
This impressive list of publications from a most eminent scholar should alone be
enough to justify the compiled index as a legitimate genre of publication, but there
is no shortage of other examples, such as the invaluable (and ongoing) publication
of: John F. Oates, Roger S. Bagnall, Sarah J.
Clackson, Alexandra A. O'Brien, Joshua D. Sosin, Terry G. Wilfong, and Klaas A.
Worp,
This is a genre to which undergraduate researchers can easily contribute. All they need is guidance and access. Guidance should take the form of a professional scholar and teacher describing a need, since this is something an undergraduate will not be likely to identify alone. Access can come in many forms, from the more romantic and exotic, such as Allen’s decade-long sojourn among Italian libraries at the end of the 19th century, to the more mundane, such as Oates,
In the summer of 2007, as the team from the Biblioteca Nationale Marciana in Venice,
the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, DC, and the British Library brought
home new, high-resolution digital images of three Homeric manuscripts from the
Library of St. Mark, a student in his third year of Greek at Furman University
volunteered to produce indices based on this new access to these manuscripts. One of
them, the Venetus A [Marcianus Graecus Z. 454 (= 822)] was already well documented;
the other two, the Venetus B, much less so.
Canonical Text Services Universal Resource Name, a concise method of identifying with precision a particular passage of a particular text; see chs75.harvard.edu/diginc
The other index associated folio-sides of each manuscript with an image of that folio; so for Venetus A, folio 12 recto, there are four images, the full page in natural light and ultraviolet light, and two details:
- urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0012.tlg001:1.17 msA-12r
- urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0012.tlg001:1.18 msA-12r
These indices not only contribute to the online publication of these images (http://chs.harvard.edu/chs/manuscript_images), but serve a variety of other scholarly purposes as well; for instance, from them, we can determine at which points the scribe skipped lines when moving from one folio to another [for example, on the Venetus B, Marcianus Graecus Z. 453 (=821), folio 140 recto ends with
- VA012RN-0013 msA-12r
- VA012RND-0892 msA-12r
- VA012RUV-0893 msA-12r
- VA012RUVD-0894 msA-12r
Projects like this can promote a healthy collaboration between students and their teachers, and can be rewarding and exciting to students in direct proportion to the extent to which the value of such work is celebrated. If all scholarship is expected to take the form of an argument, then an accomplishment like Lanier’s becomes menial (but terribly difficult and time-consuming) drudgery. Seen in the context of traditionally honored work such as Allen’s catalogues of Homeric manuscripts in Italian libraries, and acknowledged as a vital contribution to the future of the discipline, projects like this can be thrilling.
The introductory page of the Homer Multitext Library site (http://chs.harvard.edu) describes the
project thus: The Homer
Multitext project, the first of its kind in Homeric studies, seeks to present the
textual transmission of the
The Homer Multitext
Library (hereafer, HMT), in its fundamental set of data, stands one hundred and fifty
years of philological scholarship on its head: While enormous effort on the part of
classical philologists has been spent comparing manuscript variants
in an
effort to describe an original text,
the HMT seeks out different texts of the
Homeric poems and seeks to preserve, highlight, and understand their very points of
difference.
The scholarly background and philosophical foundation of the HMT is treated
elsewhere.
These undergraduates, the HMT Fellows, were assigned the task of preparing transcripts of the specific texts of five Byzantine and medieval manuscripts of the
Greater Edition) of T.W. Allen’s
The HMT Fellows divided the books of the
Where they found references in the apparatus the noted places where the text of a
certain manuscript differs from Allen’s edited text, they noted the difference on the
page of notes. The matter was not always straightforward. Allen’s apparatus will
sometimes report a variant reading as being vulg.
, for vulgate
, or as
appearing in codd.
, for the (Byzantine and medieval) codices.
Variants
may appear as corrected text on a manuscript, and be recorded by Allen as B
corr.
. The HMT Fellows had to master this cryptic discourse.
The apparatus is compressed, and the compression is lossy
at times. For
example, for Book 1, line 93, Allen’s apparatus reads, in part, as follows: 93 ...
In other words,
Manuscript A has medieval
vulgate
has either
So the HMT Fellows have been careful to characterize their work as producing facsimiles of A, B, T, E3, and E4 according to the apparatus of Allen’s editio maior. Their transcriptions will necessarily fall short of capturing perfectly the texts of the manuscripts, but should nevertheless serve well as the basis for initial comparisons, and as drafts for further revision, as future scholars gain access to the manuscripts or good images of them.
Having marked the variants in the apparatus and written them down on the facing pages of notes, the HMT fellows entered those changes into their working-copies of the
We will present one example of their work, which should serve both to illustrate the importance of this approach to the Homeric texts and to highlight the depth and rigor of the scholarly contribution that these undergraduate research fellows are making. The example begins with Allen’s apparatus at the entry for
[Apollo] will not drive off the loathsome pestilence from the Danaans
until…
In the apparatus, however, we see this long, difficult note:
97
Freed from any constraints of space, we may translate and expand the
text and note thus:
[Apollo] will not drive off the loathsome
pestilence from the Danaans until…
— a marginal note, or scholion, on
Manuscript A
and another on Manuscript T
both have this to say about
the line just quoted: The 2nd century BCE scholar Aristarchus has the line this
way, as just quoted, and so do both the version of the
Liand is echoed on the manuscript
T). And so it seems that the edition of Zenodotus is the different one, because it has this line:
[Apollo] will not lift his heavy hand of plague until…: and this last version is what all the medieval manuscripts have (with a certain number spelling the word for
plaguedifferently, and a couple having a slightly different version of the verb).
In yet other words, there are two utterly different versions of this line floating around the ancient and medieval world. Both are Greek; both are poetry; both make sense. Marginal notes on various medieval manuscripts are our evidence for these two lines – notes that preserve the contents of editions and commentaries on Homer that date back to the library at Alexandria.
One version appeared, evidently, in the edition of Zenodotus, the earliest
Alexandrian scholar of Homer, in the 3rd century BCE This same line appears in every
medieval bound manuscript (that is what the abbreviation codd.
means,
codices
).
Another version appeared in the editions of Aristarchus of Samothrace, the 2nd
century BCE librarian of Alexandria who was the greatest ancient scholar of
Δαναοῖσιν ἀεικέα λοιγὸν ἀπώσει.
editions(
So, the 3rd century BCE editor of Homer and all the medieval manuscript witnesses say
X, while two 2nd century BCE editors and a city edition
say Y.
Allen picks Y, relegating X to the rhetorical basement
of his apparatus. The
Homer Multitext Fellows were faced with no such choice. They restored
the
proper text into its place on each of the manuscripts they are transcribing; the
scholiastic texts, which preserve the other valuable reading, will be transcribed
independently, with comparison of this horizontal variant
made accessible by
means of end-user applications that draw on all of this data.
The editors of the HMT are, of course, deeply interested in the precise contents of
the drift
of the language of the poem over a millennium supports the notion
of an ongoing tradition of multiformity. T.W. Allen’s choice — a choice determined by
the conventions of the traditional critical edition — obscures that difference. So,
in their XML transcriptions of medieval manuscripts, the work of the HMT Fellows will
highlight a problem in the history of the Homeric text, thus contributing a point of
conversation and analysis to the ongoing study of the
The work of assembling transcriptions from Allen’s apparatus is a valuable start to reproducing specific manuscripts as XML files. The next step would be to remove the need to have Allen mediate between our research and its objects. After May of 2007, the HMT Fellows had access to preliminary versions of digital images of the A and B manuscripts, taken at the Biblioteca Nationale Mariciana. These they found helpful in decyphering some of Allen’s more cryptic notations regarding those manuscripts. And they found some places where Allen’s apparatus was not entirely precise. For example, at 11.525, Allen’s text reads:
The Trojans were driven in confusion, both their horses and themselves.
Allen’s apparatus notes that Manuscript A has both the horses and men
(both the
horses and others
(in ras.
moved the HMT fellows to look at the image of folio 147-verso
of the Venetus A. Here they saw that the words and themselves
were indeed written over the erasure, but
that the erasure was in fact almost three times as long as that phrase, far longer
than necessary if the erased text were either of the alternative texts given in
Allen’s apparatus. Allen, too, had noted only the last word, imperfectly renders erasures and corrections.
The task of reading and transcribing the texts of specific manuscripts is skilled
work, but easily within the abilities of good, advanced students of Greek, once they
have some familiarity with the language of Homeric poetry, and have access to some
reference materials on Byzantine palaeography. That this work is valuable scholarship
needs little argument, and certainly is not limited to advocates for any particular
school of interpretation, or to devotees of technological innovation in humanities.
T.W. Allen, in the closing paragraph of his
nadded to the end of a word for the sake of euphony), accented versus unaccented
Various reasons made these omissions necessary: to lighten the apparatus, which would have swelled to almost unprintable proportions; the fact that the collations, though considerable, were not exhaustive and therefore did not admit of statistical conclusions; and that the phenomena belong to the history of medieval Greek accentuation and the usage of Byzantine scribes rather than to the Homeric texts. On these subjects further I have paid little attention to the evidence of quotations, whether in scholia, which being divorced from their context are peculiarly at the mercy of copyists, or of authors, especially in the older editions where the editors may be suspected of adding conventional prosody.
unprintable.His scholarship was further limited by the fact that he was its sole author; he could not do exhaustive collation (by himself), and had to rely on secondary scholarship (earlier editions) for manuscripts that he did not collate himself. Allen’s apparatus is, therefore, represents a least-common-denominator, limited by the most careless of the earlier editors on whose work he relied. He admits that the omitted information would be the subject for statistical analysis, were it collected in a systematic way. But his most regrettable criterion for omission is that of
interest— he excluded material that he deemed of interest only for Byzantine palaeography and bibliography, and of interest only to scholars of medieval Greek accentuation.
A humanist scholarship that is unwilling to divide itself along strict (but strictly
arbitrary) lines — where the Homeric text
of a manuscript is somehow divorced
from questions of the usage of Byzantine scribes
and the history of
medieval Greek accentuation
— should take note of Allen’s list of obstacles
and work to overcome them. The answer, we think, is clear: model of collaborative
research, the products of which are electronic texts (not required to be
printable
) in transcription (rather than collation), involving scholars who
may be senior professors or juniors at a liberal arts college, working with
high-quality images of the primary texts, the papyri, the Byzantine and medieval
manuscripts.
The rewards of such work are manifold. The results would be subject to statistical analysis, and any other kind of analysis that interested readers might envision, even if they are asking questions that have never occurred to the editors of these electronic texts. The undergraduate members of such a team have the experience of engaging without mediation the very stuff of philology, the most ancient witnesses to a literary tradition; the task is within their abilities while being extremely challenging, and they know that they are doing real work of real value, not merely exercising an arbitrary set of skills before the judging eyes of a single teacher. The faculty of Furman University and the College of the Holy Cross who have worked with the Homer Multitext Fellows as they meticulously transcribe these texts and explore the problems that those texts reveal have witnessed a degree of dedication and excitement that turns the glowing rhetoric of undergraduate research from a marketing pitch to an honest appraisal.
Because technology has lowered the economic barriers to academic publishing — a
reality that too few publishing Classicists have fully understood — it is easy to
guide student - writers into becoming student-authors. We who teach Classics can add
to our pedagogy the technological tools of the information economy, thus arming
ourselves against charges of impracticality and at the same time possibly attracting
students whose interests lie outside the Classics. And as digital libraries begin to
inter-operate, they breathe new life into largely disregarded scholarly genres and
invent entirely new ones — geographic information systems, computational linguistics,
and so forth. We have presented some very specific examples of the kind of work, and
the kind of thinking, that we have found to be fruitful in encouraging undergraduates
in their research. We believe in scholarship; we believe that scholarship should be
rigorous; we believe that scholarship demands precision and dedication; but we also
believe that scholarship can assume many useful forms, and we are convinced that
scholarship, if done properly, should not seem like the kind of burdensome task the
ancient Greeks called a