A Note on Electronic Research
At present, computer and internet resources are invaluable to the modern student of the humanities. For example, I gathered all the information for this essay through electronic means. By using e-mail, I was able to contact professors who were knowledgeable on matters relating to the history of classics and computing. I established a short correspondence with Professor George Sheets, who indicated some likely sources for my research. I joined an e-mail discussion group called "The Classics List" (<CLASSICS@washington.edu>), where I received even more suggestions for study from various scholars and professors around the world. Beyond that, I used the World Wide Web to gather much of my information.
History
According to Jon Solomon in his introduction to Accessing Antiquity, the history of computing and the classics continues the development of the scholarly tools first used in the tradition of classical criticism. In the fourth century B.C., Aristotle first began the "practice of formally organizing, cataloguing and analyzing data both scientific and humanistic" (Solomon 1), thereby hastening the development of new scholarly tools such as literary catalogues in order to sort through collected data. The process of utilizing data and the means in which works are archived and preserved has changed greatly over the centuries, but the essential concepts that support the discipline of classical criticism are still present. The utilization of computers in the study of classics demonstrates another change in the medium of data storage and exchange, however; this new medium incorporates entirely new dimensions.
Theodore Brunner, in his essay "Classics and the Computer," reports that the 1949 meeting between Jesuit Father Roberto Busa and J. Thomas Watson, then the president of IBM, "would probably constitute the first real contact between the computer and classical studies" (Brunner 10). Busa was doing research on the concept of "presence" in the works of Saint Thomas Aquinas. He encountered a problem in his research because the word indices available for Saint Thomas did not include certain common words considered to be "insignificant," and Busa required a complete index. His idea was to create a machine-readable text of the works. Eventually, Busa persuaded Watson to support his project. The ultimate outcome was a sixty-volume, 70,000-page concordance to the works of Saint Thomas Aquinas. It took until 1967 to complete. Busa's work represented the first effort to create a large data bank in the classics and many more, similar projects followed (11).
It took until the late sixties and early seventies for computers to make a large impact on the humanities. In that era, numerous machine-readable versions of classical works were created; these included the Bible and the complete works of Plato, along with other computer-aided projects that involved metrical, grammatical and literary analysis of texts (12). Though computer usage was on the rise, only a handful of scholars were embracing this new technology. It's purposes were still only dealing with basic data organizing for research purposes.
During the seventies, smaller mainframe systems allowed computers to be used as instruction tools. Gerald Culley's article "CAI in Classics" reports that the teaching programs of the seventies were primarily "drill-and-practice" programs, which helped the student to practice vocabulary and grammar. These types of programs later expanded their capacity and range with the advent of the Personal Computer (Culley 17). The only software available for Classical instruction well into the eighties was still primarily drill materials. By modern standards these seem extremely archaic. Take, for example, the program entitled "Basic Latin Verb Forms." It's a thirty-dollar program available from Miami University which drills the morphology of five regular Latin verbs excluding the subjunctive and imperative moods (19). Basically, this same amount of information could be placed on a single side of a sheet of paper. It is understandable that there was a good deal of skepticism about the value of these types of instructional programs (19).
According to Brunner's "Classics and the Computer," while computer-aided instruction continued to be viewed with mistrust in the eighties, computer-aided research projects were proving themselves to be increasingly effective. Enormous projects such as the "Thesaurus Linguae Graecae" were placed in the electronic medium with the aid of CD-ROM technology. International standards were established for encoding ancient text. Online newsgroups, such as HumaNet, were established in the late eighties to disseminate knowledge and discussion of current activities in the field of classical studies (Brunner 27). Now, with the advent of the World Wide Web and multimedia applications, the classics field moves to establish a serious relationship with the electronic medium which is destined to shape the progress of the discipline in years to come.
The Project: Electronic Publishing
The basic idea of a "classical project" as the term is used to define the various multimedia programs and World Wide Web projects devoted to classical topics has already existed for quite some time. These projects tackle topics independently of specific texts or serve as a supplement to original text. Take, for example, "The Thesaurus Linguae Latinae," a project founded in 1894 by Theodor Mommsen and Ulrich Wilamowitz which aims to create an encyclopedic lexicon of every Latin word which has passed down to us in surviving text between 300 B.C. and 600 A.D. The project is currently on the letter "P," and the end is not expected to be reached until well into the twenty-first century. While originally drafted on slips of paper, the work continues on in the electronic medium. The study is already available on CD-ROM and will gradually be posted on the Web as The Electronic Thesaurus Linguae Latinae. This translation from a print archive to a electronic archive is of some extraordinary significance to establishing the importance of computer work in the classics. It demonstrates another step of reproduction and refinement of ancient text, a process which has occurred in the field of classical studies since its beginnings.
As David Bolter stated in "Hypertext and the Classical Commentary," "the implicit goal of textual criticism is to establish the Urtext, the original and perfect version of the play, poem or treatise" (Bolter 161). Of course, this is an unattainable goal since the original, ancient texts are often irretrievable or perhaps never existed in a complete form. Modern editions of ancient works include interpretations of various readings offered by different manuscripts and editors. Ancient texts were recopied so many times that with each new edition, more questions arose about the nature of the original text. In the Middle Ages, the quality of text tended to degenerate with each recopying. Later, the printing press made it possible for the text to improve with each new edition (160). At least with the advent of electronic publishing, the quality of the original text should no longer deteriorate because of printing or copying errors. Of course, the question remains about how to deal with the various extant editions of ancient texts. How should all these texts be dealt with in the electronic medium to give the scholar the most complete view of the original work?
The first step to making a modern scholarly research tool in the computer medium was to translate the canon of original text into electronic text. "The Thesaurus Linguae Graecae" was a project originally started by Marianne McDonald in 1972 with the objective to make an electronic data bank of ancient Greek Literature. The finished project was publicly released in 1982, and a few years later it was given a CD-ROM format. The Thesaurus includes an electronic version of virtually every surviving ancient Greek text from 800 B.C. to 600 A.D.; for details see The Home Page of the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae. Though it is a monumental achievement it only begins to fulfill the potential of computer-aided research. Other, companion projects better suggest the full potential of electronic publishing.
The Perseus Project has been described by its maker, Gregeory Crane, as a "complementary piece" to "The Thesaurus Linguae Graecae" (Crane 134). Though this project takes on a much smaller cross section of the Greek canon, it adds secondary references. It includes "texts in both the original and translation plus color photos of archaeological objects and sites, and such secondary materials as a Greek-English lexicon, a classical encyclopedia and an overview of Greek history" (134). The whole of the project is linked together to provide easy movement from one source to another. The interactivity of a project such as Perseus demonstrates some of the innovations that the electronic medium can produce (154). A student or scholar can synthesize information faster than they might have through traditional library research. The original Perseus Project was formatted for CD-ROM, but it is now available on the Web. The innovations of the Perseus Project have subsequently encouraged a multitude of other, similar scholarly projects based on other classical writings. As more and more new projects enter the Web, the significance of electronic publishing becomes more apparent.
William Harris, in his introduction to The Romulus Project, touches upon some of the important effects that electronic publishing has had and will have on the future of classical commentary. With the rising costs of publication, the only really cost-effective way to maintain the availability of ancient text is to do so electronically. Classical texts have such a limited audience to begin with, that printing copies is too costly a way to disseminate the information. Electronic text is more cost-effective, more easily editable and more interactive than printed text. Another beneficial loophole for reducing publishing cost of ancient text is the fact that many of the source texts were published long ago and are no longer subject to copyright limitations.
Even original "for print" articles and publications would be far cheaper to produce themselves when published electronically. The general concept of cost-effectiveness in electronic text was taken up by James O'Donnel's "A Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing." His estimate was that the cost of electronic publishing would be approximately 25% of that of paper publishing. Of course, he also made the observation that calculating these kinds of figures was like "challenging the advantages of automobiles by calculating how much they would save on horse-feed" (O'Donnel 26). The institutions and technologies which drive both print and electronic publishing are not truly comparable on a cost basis. Of far greater intellectual importance than its basic cost-effectiveness is a subject that has already been touched upon: the fundamental, new nature of electronic text--its essential interactivity.
The Project: Hypertext and Multimedia
Classical scholarship was the first multimedia discipline, according to Jay David Bolter. "The contemporary classical scholar feels the constraint of the received text much more than does a student of modern literature, who may do important work on Dickens or Virginia Woolf with hardly a glance at a variorum edition" (160). The classical scholar must take into account the whole manuscript tradition when reading ancient text. Texts have come to us in a variety of mediums including clay tablet, scrolls, codices, scraps of papyrus and various others. Text in each of these media must be studied in order to "gain a comprehensive picture of antiquity" (161). In the work being done by the various Web projects, more and more of the relevant secondary materials are placed interactively alongside the text in order to give the reader a more complete understanding of the original text. The Ovid Project: Metamorphosing The Metamorphoses, is one currently in-process work which plans to digitize various versions of the primary text for perusal. Though digitizing the original work brings up issues about what is lost in the translational process, the digitized product gives at least some form of access to an otherwise inaccessible artifact.
Multimedia, hypertext commentary, and links are all important aspects of the newest classical projects in-process. In the last few years, the trend of these projects has been to move away from the mass archiving of sources, to the focused study of individual materials. As the projects become more focused and interactive, their audience becomes larger and includes more than just scholars and researchers. The new projects are far more useful to the student of classical studies because of their increasingly concise textual focus and expanded interactivity and secondary textual resources. Take for example, Who's Who in the Metamorphoses of Ovid: The Analytical Onomasticon Project, by Willard McCarty, Burton Wright and Aara Suksi. This is a project which focuses exclusively on Ovid's "Metamorphoses." It will eventually consist of a comprehensive, multimedia index of persons and places within the work. An interesting aspect to note here is that almost half a century has passed since Father Busa's project, and the classicists have come full circle back to creating indices of works. Of course, there are fundamental differences in the form and presentation of each project, but the essential concepts remain the same.
As electronic text becomes the new medium for dissemination of knowledge in the field of classical studies, it is important to notice how the medium changes the nature of a commentary. "Browsing" pages is no longer the method in which commentary and text is read. "The notes need not function as mere interruptions in a relentless march to the end of the primary text" (Bolter 163). Instead, hypertext commentaries and links are available upon request. As Bolter sees it the electronic medium is not conducive to linear reading. We, as readers, are much more sensitive to the text as a "network of verbal references" (164). This is important in classical studies for particular tropes especially characteristic of ancient literature such as litotes and negations. For example, Bolter examined the instances of negation in "Oedipus Rex" to discover an underlying theme of "avoiding of truth" (164). Hypertext links can be made to easily discover any number of suggestive grammatical links within the text. Though such research has been done manually before, making such connections in the electronic medium can be an ordinary part of the reading or rereading process.
A project which promises to support such hypertext links as Bolter suggested is The Vergil Project. This is a project designed to give numerous forms of hypertext commentary to the active reader including: variant readings, language, style, meter, structure, parsing, scansion, translation, mythology, bibliography and concordance. This project, once it is finished, is also another example of tightening focus and expanded commentary becoming prevalent in new electronic projects. However, the problem with this particular project is one that plagues several of the in-process projects on the Web today. They may have bitten off more than they can chew by attempting to assimilate all these sources of commentary when provided with limited time and resources.
While it touches upon some of the more esoteric aspects of hypertext and the nature of the electronic medium, this essay was primarily a discussion of the changes in the relationship between computing and classical studies. The electronic medium continues to grow in its importance to the field as the entire cannon of classical literature is gradually translated into electronic text. Hopefully, as more projects are developed on the Web, the broader the range of readers will become, and ancient texts will experience a new life through this medium.
Bolter, Jay David. "Hypertext and the Classical Commentary." Solomon, Accessing Antiquity 157-73.
Brunner, Theodore F. "Classics and the Computer." Solomon, Accessing Antiquity 10-34.
Crane, Gregory, Kenneth Morrel, and Eli Mylonas. "The Perseus Project: Data in the Electronic Age." Solomon, Accessing Antiquity 133-57.
Culley, Gerald R. "CAI in Classics." Classical Bulletin 65 (1989): 17-31.
Miall, David S. "Introduction." Humanities and the Computer. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. 1-10.
O'Donnell, James. Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads: A Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing. Washington, DC: Office of Scientific and Academic Publishing, 1995.
Solomon, Jon, ed. Accessing Antiquity. Tuscon: University of Arizona Press, 1993.
---. "Introduction." Accessing Antiquity. 1-10.
Michael Hancher Department of English, University of Minnesota URL: http://umn.edu/home/mh/houdek.html Comments to the author, Shane Houdek Web page created 24 October 1996 (from author's electronic file, 7 October 1996) Last revised 29 June 1997