0.10 Give us editors! re-inventing the edition and re-thinking the  (Page 16/18)

As a philologist with a particular responsibility for linguistic sources, I pose the following questions:

1. Can we manage the linguistic sources of the contemporary world? This includes thousands of languages, time-based media and overwhelming scale.
2. Can we manage the historical record of human language, extending more than four thousand years into the past and stretching, at minimum, from China and Japan to the Atlantic coast of Europe and Africa? Ultimately, the challenge here becomes scarcity, because, however rich our surviving sources may be, they are finite and imperfect. We cannot conduct experiments with native speakers of Classical Greek.
3. How do our linguistic sources relate to the material record? How well can we integrate the texts of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War or Tom Sawyer to the very different datasets available for the Greek world of the fifth century BCE and North America in the nineteenth century?

None of us can solve or fully understand any of these three questions. We all have our own research projects and must focus our efforts if we are to make tangible progress. Nevertheless, the digital world has no borders and every digital project can potentially interact with each other. My work on the Greek historian Thucydides should combine in unpredictable and interesting ways with work on the Chinese historian Sima Qian, the North African historian Ibn Chaldun, and the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant—the more recombinant my work, the better its chance not only of surviving but evolving long after my contribution has ceased. We all know the cliché that we should think globally and act locally. Whatever we do for the world in which we live, we should think about each of the global and the local every day in our scholarly work.

References

Alcock, Susan E. and Robin Osborne. (2007). Classical Archaeology . Malden, Ma: Blackwell Publishers.

Association of Research Libraries (ARL). (2009). The Research Library's Role in Digital Repository Services: Final Report of the ARL Digital Repository Issues Task Force . Technical Report. (External Link) .

Arms, William Y. and Ronald L. Larsen. (2007). The Future of Scholarly Communication: Building the Infrastructure for Cyberscholarship . Technical Report. (External Link) .

Babeu, Alison, David Bamman, Gregory Crane, Robert Kummer, and Gabriel Weaver. (2007). “Named Entity Identification and Cyberinfrastructure.” Proceedings of the 11th European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries (ECDL 2007), pp. 259-270. (External Link) .

Bamman, David and Gregory Crane. (2009). “Computational Linguistics and Classical Lexicography.” Digital Humanities Quarterly , 3 (1), (External Link) .

Bamman, David and Gregory Crane. (2008a). “Building a Dynamic Lexicon from a Digital Library.” Proceedings of the 8th ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL 2008) , pp. 11-20. (External Link) .

Bamman, David and Gregory Crane. (2008b). “The Logic and Discovery of Textual Allusion.” Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Language Technology for Cultural Heritage Data (LaTeCH 2008 ). (External Link) .