0.11 Response to roger bagnall paper: integrating digital papyrology  (Page 2/10)

Seventh—and this is maybe the most crucial similarity, and where I found the Bagnall paper most pertinent—though our projects are led by scholars, and were originally conceived by scholars for scholars, we sense the presence of a wider context out there. We suspect that our work might reach thousands more, even millions. We suspect too that there are people in that audience who are more than interested, who more than wish us well: but who also have ability and knowledge to contribute to what we do—to transcribe, annotate, even edit. Every now and then something occurs to remind us of the potentials in this audience. On July 8 and 9 last year the British Library launched the Codex Sinaiticus website: in the first three days, over one million different people visited the site. Newspaper articles (mostly on the web, with CNN and Fox news leading the pack) about the project reached 200 million people worldwide. Very few of all those people could read a word of the manuscript: but there they all were.

This brings us to the one key word in Bagnall’s paper I have already flagged above: community. Up to the last pages of his paper, Bagnall uses the term more narrowly than I have used it in the previous paragraph. Primarily, he is there thinking of a community of fellow experts: scholars and students in the academy interested in, and working on, papyrological materials who are not directly involved in the nexus of projects he describes. Let us dwell on the concept of a scholarly community, as invoked by Bagnall in the first part of his paper. Of course, what defines a community is what the people in it have in common. In a neighborhood, a town, or a city, a community is just people living in the same geographical area. We are familiar too with geographical communities containing many other communities, defined by shared church, or school, or age group, or interests, or political affiliation, and we know that these may overlap and extend across other geographical communities. Most recently, we have online communities, some of them vast.

Successful communities need more than shared interest: they need agreed rules. Over the centuries, academic communities have evolved their own rules, covering issues such as plagiarism, credit, publication and control. It would be pleasant if these same rules just carried straight over into the digital world, and indeed some do. But some old rules do not apply, or need drastic modification, and we need some new rules.

Bagnall touches on several of the rules. In what follows, I will elaborate these further, building on his discussion. Consider, first, questions of credit, responsibility, and quality. It is axiomatic that in the academic world, authority is all: we need to know who was responsible for what, and we need assurance that it is good. This serves a dual purpose: we may trust work done by a scholar we have learnt to trust; in turn, we may learn to trust a scholar from the work he or she does. From the same roundabout, scholars receive credit for the work they do, and this is a currency they can trade for promotions, conference invitations, and credibility in grant applications. But vast areas of the Internet, like the world at large, are careless about these matters which weigh so heavily in the academy. Accordingly, as scholars, we have to make a special effort both to secure proper credit for digital work and to ensure that quality-control systems remain in place. The prescriptions Bagnall sets forward to meet these needs are well described. I found this part of his paper particularly useful: we (and many others) are struggling with these issues, and he and his group are further ahead than we are with thinking these issues through and seeking to implement solutions based on the Pleiades system. I have seen prototypes of the editing system (“Son of Suda online”) and it promises to do just what it says it will. That is: to provide a controlled editing environment, which does the necessary housekeeping to maintain a record of who did what and when to underpin accreditation, responsibility and quality statements. Here is our first rule, and a very uncontroversial one: scholarly communities in the digital world require rigorous and complete declarations of credit, responsibility and quality .