The other day I had a conversation with a colleague who in a friendly,
but skeptical and pointed way asked whether all this digital stuff
made an important difference. It is still a good question. In the
domain of text-based scholarship, classical philology (broadly
construed) is an important test case. It is the only discipline of
substantial generic, linguistic, and diachronic scope of which it can
be said that all or most of the relevant documents exist in fairly
good and moderately interoperable form. There is no TLG or anything
like it for English, German, or any other language. There is All of
Old English and All of Old Norse, but those are boutique operations.
Thus Classical philology on the face of it is a discipline where you
could no longer blame the absence of a good enough cyber
infrastructure for the lack of scholarly 'progress' (always a
problematical word) or at least significant difference. If it has not
mattered much in Classics, it is unlikely to matter much elsewhere. If
there is good evidence about significant and worthwhile change in
Classics, it has deep implications for other disciplines where the
digital documentary infrastructure is still much more fragmentary.
Where is that difference and what do we know about it? I don't think
that significant change is necessarily measured in dramatic
breakthroughs. It is more likely to happen in slow, subtle, and
pervasive ways. But it ought to be measurable in some fashion. The
TLG has now been around almost 30 years and for close to 20 years
access to it has been within technical and financial reach of anybody
who care.
What difference has it made? What kinds of inquiry are possible now
that were not practicable then? How do books and articles benefit from
changed modes of access to the documentary base of classical
philology? (I am not talking here about changed modes of access to
secondary literature, because that is a phenomenon that applies with
more or less equal force to all disciplines).
I am inclined to believe that it has made a difference. But does
anybody have evidence good enough to persuade my hard-nosed colleague
that my belief is well grounded?
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