The Humboldt Chair of Digital Humanities at the University of Leipzig sees in the rise of Digital Technologies an opportunity to re-assess and re-establish how the humanities can advance the understanding of the past and to support a dialogue among civilizations. Philology, which uses surviving linguistic sources to understand the past as deeply and broadly as possible, is central to these tasks, because languages, present and historical, are central to human culture. To advance this larger effort, the Humboldt Chair focuses upon enabling Greco-Roman culture to realize the fullest possible role in intellectual life. Greco-Roman culture is particularly significant because it contributed to both Europe and the Islamic world and the study of Greco-Roman culture and its influence thus entails Classical Arabic as well as Ancient Greek and Latin. The Humboldt Chair inaugurates an Open Philology Project with three complementary efforts that produce open philological data, educate a wide audience about historical languages, and integrate open philological data from many sources: the Open Greek and Latin Project organizes content (including translations into Classical Arabic and modern languages); the Historical Language e-Learning Project explores ways to support learning across barriers of language and culture as well as space and time; the Scaife Digital Library focuses on integrating cultural heritage sources available under open licenses.

For more information about the Humboldt Chair of Digital Humanities, here are some announcements and press releases:

• Professor Gregory Crane is awarded the 2013 Humboldt Professorship, receiving €5million to create The Open Philology Project
• Info TV Leipzig interview with Humboldt Professor Gregory Crane
• “Reinventing Humanities Publication Project” receives €1.1million grant from the Saxon Ministry of Science and European Social Fund

Needless to say, I’m ecstatic!!

When I say I’ve reached 125 editions, it doesn’t mean I have complete records for each and every one (the catalogue is quite labour intensive and only makes up a small part of my research) but I’m making good progress. As I’ve almost completed the geocoding, it only really makes sense for me to show you location-based visualisations of the data.

The first image is a network graph showing the link between the time-period to which the edition belongs (in blue) and the country it was produced in (in orange), weighed by the total number of editions. As you can see, the majority of the projects (out of my 125) have anglocentric provenance and are based on modern texts (= 15th century onwards). How will the graph change as more editions are added?

The second is an update of a map I previously posted and simply shows the spatial distribution of the editions (many overlap as single institutions, such as King’s College London, have produced more than one project).

As well as adding more editions to the catalogue, I’m presently attaching philological and technological details to each project, so I hope to share more interesting visualisations with you very soon.

DigiLab, whose website is currently in Italian only, brings together many departments within the university, including the long established Centro Interdipartimentale di Servizi per l’Automazione nelle Discipline Umanistiche (CISADU) and its library, now known as the Biblioteca di Informatica Umanistica. Its principal activities are research and teaching, whereby the team fosters collaborative projects and offers an interesting set of specialisation courses and programmes in different subjects, from Library and Information Science to Digital Editing and 3D Animation.

DigiLab also produces publications, the latest being a book entitled Dall’Informatica Umanistica alle Culture Digitali, organises conferences and events, maintains a newsletter and a YouTube channel, and promotes e-training English courses.

My only criticism is accessibility. Though many scholars in the field of Digital Humanities have some knowledge of Italian, an English translation of the website would allow a wider audience to appreciate the breadth and richness of DigiLab’s work, as well as augment its online presence. I think many of us would kill to do digital humanities in Rome!

• Krista Stinne Greve Rasmussen, PhD student, University of Copenhagen (DK) – Reading or using a digital edition? Reader roles in scholarly editions
• Cynthia Damon, Professor of Classical Studies, University of Pennsylvania (US) – A digital workspace for Latin textual criticism
• Patrick Sahle, Uni Köln (DE) – What is a scholarly digital edition?
• Joris van Zundert, Huygens Institute (NL) – The practice of theory and tools: A theoretical framework for quality assessment of tools for digital scholarly editing
• Camille Desenclos, Ecole nationale des chartes (FR) – Rethinking digital editions for early modern correspondences: A new approach to edition at the École nationale des Chartes
• Jennifer Lo, PhD student, King’s College London (UK) – Dimensionality in print and digital editions of Henslowe’s Diary
• Ray Siemens, University of Victoria (CA) – Foundations of the social edition
• Dirk Van Hulle, Universiteit Antwerpen (BE) – Digital genetic editing and manuscript literacy
• Roberto Rosselli Del Turco, Torino (IT) – The battle we forgot to fight: Should we make a case for Digital Editions?
• Marina Buzzoni, Venice (IT) – A ‘protocol’ for digital scholarly editions? The Italian point of view
• Et moi - Greta Franzini, PhD student, UCL (UK) - A catalogue of digital editions

While slowly picking up these skills on my own through online tutorials and university courses, I will need some form of supervision and assistance, particularly for the photographic stage of the project, the most delicate part. I’m really lucky to have Melissa Terras by my side as not only is she a great supervisor and friend but she also happens to be incredibly knowledgeable on manuscript imaging – an expert, in fact. Another recent acquaintance of mine is Professor Filippo Briguglio of the University of Bologna. Briguglio is working on a fantastic imaging project which aims to read and restore the Gaius palimpsest (also housed in the Biblioteca Capitolare di Verona, hence my connection with him). I actually went to Bologna last week to meet him: he showed me wonderful pictures and three-dimensional renditions of the Latin script he’s working on, making me want to attack ‘my’ manuscript as soon as possible. Professor Briguglio has very kindly agreed to help photograph my manuscript and we hope to make a start in December 2012 or January 2013.

From a computer/web point of view, I do have friends and colleagues who could help. But I took the brave and mad decision to do most of the work myself. After all, the point of my research is to demonstrate that humanists with little technical skills *can* create digital editions. I am one of them. Let’s see how it goes!

http://www.decivitatedei.eu

The first step of the ‘computer ladder’ is to register a domain name. Done! My website will appear at the address http://www.decivitatedei.eu. There’s nothing much there at the moment but I’ve been silently preparing content so keep an eye out. I’m still in the process of identifying and assessing the best CMS or web platform for the project so if you see random text or error messages, don’t worry, it’s not your computer, but me trying stuff out. For updates, watch this space.

In the meantime, if you have any suggestions, comments or criticisms, do email me!

Dante online is a database of manuscript copies of the Divina Commedia recording dates, repositories and occasionally scribes. Some of these manuscripts can also be viewed online thanks to high definition images. The website contains information about Dante’s life, a timeline, as well as searchable texts and a bibliography. In short, this is a comprehensive gateway to the famous philosopher, writer and thinker. With regards to his writings, while presently focusing on the Divina Commedia, the aim of the Società Dantesca Italiana, in charge of the project, is to digitise all existing manuscripts of Dante’s works.

This is an interesting and very ambitious project and, as such, I expect it will require considerable time and effort to complete. Nevertheless, it already boasts useful features, both in terms of manuscript analysis and navigation. For starters, the website is available in both English and Italian, an option we might take for granted but that is often missing. The Latin texts are also translated into English, thus opening up the resource to a non-specialist audience. The search engine offers a good variety of parameters, particularly the CITY filter one can use to physically locate the manuscripts. The INTERVIEWS section has good potential if further developed.

However, there are also a few drawbacks: the images are spoilt by large watermarks and there is only one zoom view; the font size is unreasonably small considering the amount of empty space available; the project describes itself as a library of Dante’s works, yet it doesn’t provide dates for the documents listed; the absence of a critical apparatus, even basic, doesn’t do much for the reader in terms of contextualising the story; the NEWS section is, in my opinion, counterintuitive in that it doesn’t display a list of entries but, instead, leaves it up to the user to search the news archive.

Wouldn’t it be beneficial to open this -ultimately huge- resource up to the public so as to crowdsource links, dates and annotations? Or does user input work against the project’s (scholarly) objectives? As a heavy user of online resources myself, I like to actively engage with them rather than be passively given information. After all, isn’t the digital about user engagement and breaking barriers?

Another two digital projects on Dante advertise similar goals: the Princeton Dante Project ❝combines a traditional approach to the study of Dante’s Commedia with new techniques of compiling and consulting data, images, and sound❞ and the Dartmouth Dante Project contains commentaries on Dante’s magnum opus.

Dante Online, Princeton, Dartmouth… I’m thinking Linked Open Data.

• I have 85 digital editions – but many more in the pipeline.
• I’m visualising the data to see if there are any interesting patterns (example below).
• I’m progressively contacting each and every project for back-end information, such as user statistics and enquiries.

 As soon as I receive enough information from the project creators and reach my target of 100 editions, I’ll share it with you. Until then, why not let me know what you would like to see in the catalogue?

Paolo and I met on Twitter over a brief tweet conversation about digital editions. It was then that I discovered that he, too, had been compiling a list of electronic editions, so we decided to join forces and create a collaborative Google spreadsheet where we merge our classification schemes, his philological, mine more technical: we’re recording everything from project duration to technological statements and zoomable images. I’ve also been playing around with Google Fusion Tables which greatly simplifies things like extracting coordinates from a spreadsheet and displaying them in Google Maps and helps to easily create scatter or bar charts. The intention is not only to share and speed up our research but also to create a freely-accessible, comprehensive database for the Digital Humanities and Digital Classicist communities.

We’ve already expanded our two-man team to include one of DH’s VIPs, Monica Berti! We’ve also received valuable advice from Patrick Sahle, author of the Catalog of Digital Scholarly Editions (see below), on the philological dimension of the project. We’re looking to include more people so if you’re interested, please give us a shout!

We aren’t ready to make these documents available quite yet but if you would like to have a look at our ongoing lists of digital editions, check out Paolo’s Review of DH (section 2.2) and my Zotero folder.

Other catalogues/lists include:

• Aurélien Berra’s Corpus;
• Cinzia Pusceddu’s ePhilology;
• Digital Classicist wiki: Classical digital editions;
• Digital Classicist wiki: Classical scholarly digital editions;
• Patrick Sahle’s Catalog of Digital Scholarly Editions.

Will let you know how we get on!

While my interests lie more in the computational, user, front-end aspects of digital editions, Chiara has a more theoretical, editorial and classical approach. I’ve never been really good at conceptual frameworks so I’m lucky to have someone like Chiara to learn from.

Ok, so in yesterday’s seminar Chiara discussed her work on the creation of an open-source digital edition of book 1 of the Odyssey, with particular emphasis on the scholia. This is a cyclopean (check out my Odyssean terminology ) project not only because of its scale and intricacy but, most importantly, because the oral register of Homer poses some difficult theoretical and encoding questions. After spending a year on reviewing state of the art printed and digital editions of Homer (including the Homer Multitext and The Chicago Homer), Chiara has now begun XML-ing the text in accordance with TEI standards. An analytical discussion on encoding choices and methodology was followed by the thorny issue of digitally reproducing the critical apparatus. The textual density of critical apparati in printed volumes of Homer as well as other major authors is visually tiring and, frankly, off-putting. Chiara’s research is trying to address this issue by assessing and proposing the digital edition as an advantageous means of unpacking textual compactness into a more readable format. Some people argued that the tool would only benefit those with large computer screens, that the digital edition should offer something the print cannot, etc. – all fair points but, hey, we can’t make everybody happy. Homer is huge and Chiara’s tool would enable users to filter Homer so to avoid squinting over large amounts of tedious text. Think also about the teaching and learning possibilities a digital edition would offer… Finally, in line with her initial discussion on open-source editions, Chiara intends to make her raw data available through a clean, simple online interface, similar to that of the Vincent Van Gogh: The Letters project.

Like Chiara, I’m spending the first year of my research reviewing existing literature in the form of a Google Spreadsheet, where I record extant digital editions, their features, strengths and shortcomings. My data collection is already revealing some interesting patterns so hopefully it won’t be long before I move to the next stage.

As ever, the whole series will be recorded and the podcasts + slides uploaded to the Digital Classicist website. If you can’t attend, you can always follow or join the conversation via the Twitter #digiclass hashtag.

Hope to see you next time!