0.10 Give us editors! re-inventing the edition and re-thinking the  (Page 15/18)

Digital editing lowers barriers to access not only for our students but also for students of Greek and Latin beyond the traditional English-speaking and Western European centers of Classical studies. The University of Cairo maintains a well-established and flourishing Classics department—few North American or European institutions can, for example, boast an intermediate Classical Greek class with more than one hundred students. Instruction takes place in Arabic and the departmental website has no translation in English or any other European language. The Classicists at Cairo and elsewhere in the Arabic speaking world are familiar with scholarship in a range of modern languages, but few indeed of us in Europe or North America are able to read their Arabic publications.

If we are developing a digital edition with morpho-syntactic analyses, disambiguated people and places, and other categories of machine-actionable annotation, our knowledge of Greek and Latin and our understanding of Greco-Roman culture are the most important factors. A diagram of a sentence from Aeschylus looks the same whether the scholar who produced that analysis thinks in English, Arabic or Chinese. The problem of language emerges as we articulate our reasons for choosing that interpretation of the sentence—we may find ourselves constructing hypertextual arguments that emerge, as much as possible, from the way we select and structure evidence. We also need to address the challenge of writing for machine translation. This would benefit from an authoring environment that would prompt us to clarify salient ambiguities as we write (e.g., does “case” refer to a grammatical category or a criminal investigation?).

We have an opportunity to transform the community of scholarship and our ability to stimulate, from within the academy, the broad intellectual life of humanity. For Classics, we have an opportunity to create a global discipline that disseminates knowledge and stimulates debate about Greco-Roman antiquity across the linguistic and cultural barriers that we inherited from print culture.

What is to be done?

A great deal has been done over the past twenty-five years. We have established collections that have evolved over a number of years and long outlived initial grants and enthusiasm. Roger Bagnall, Allison Muri, Greg Nagy, and Kenneth Price have described disciplinary projects with overlapping needs. Alan Burdette, Charles Henry, Paolo D’Iorio, Penelope Kaiserlian, and Todd Presner have reported substantive progress towards an infrastructure that can support scholarly activities today and foster innovation over time. But we have a long way to go. We need to think on a far broader scale and move much further beyond our original disciplines if we are to realize the potential of this new medium. We are still far too fragmented and constrained by our disciplinary perspective or the traditions of publication that we have inherited. Much of what we say echoes what we could have heard a generation ago. All of us need to move beyond first-generation efforts and do a better job of transcending our own disciplinary boundaries.