Dear Helma,
Wow, only February, and I uttered the understatement of the year! :-)
But seriously, I take your point, and I want to mention that a major
mission of the DLL—vapor-ware though it may be at this stage—is to
enhance research, particularly in textual criticism, but also in
humanities computing. In addition to providing access to texts published
elsewhere on the Internet, we're working on a providing a viable way of
publishing new, born-digital critical editions of Latin texts that take
full advantage of existing and emerging online resources. The most
exciting part of the project for me is our plan for treating a text's
critical apparatus as rich metadata that can be visualized in a number
of ways. And we're committed to an open access and open source approach,
so the data will be available for reuse instead of sitting in one of
those walled gardens with forbidding walls that you mentioned.
And of course Greg Crane's Open Philology Project will have a major
impact on the availability of texts. And his vision for an open
community of annotators working to improve and enhance the texts will
lead to new directions for research.
Best,
Sam
--
Samuel J. Huskey
Chair, Department of Classics and Letters
Joseph Paxton Presidential Professor
University of Oklahoma
Date: Fri, 7 Feb 2014 13:05:05 -0600
From: Helma Dik<[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Fwd: INFO: Loeb Online
"Of course, there's also" being the understatement of the year.
None of us have seen the digital Loeb Library collection or the DLL; all we
know is what we have, sometimes for a fee, at Perseus, DigiLibLT,
musisquedeoque, and the Packard Institute disks, TLG, CLCLT etcetera. Some
of these are open to research questions other than those envisioned by the
director or editor-in-chief; most are not.
As Digital Classicists, I think we ought to collectively worry not only
about access for the common purposes of reading and teaching texts in a
linear fashion, but also about the kinds of research innovation that the
effort of double, triple, quadruple input of many of the same texts should
by now have made possible, but which have for the most part spectacularly
gotten stalled in walled gardens with various kinds of forbidding walls.
The seventies and eighties showed us (or maybe just David Packard and Ted
Brunner..) in a better light.
Helma
|