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Of course, we consult the variant readings all the time. Impossible to read, e.g., Lucretius or Propertius without doing so. Of course, we need to eliminate from consideration many witnesses to many authors, both for the limited value they bring and the practical reality that life is short and collating manuscripts of limited value is tedious and unrewarding work. (The reward can lie elsewhere: if Machiavelli's copy of Lucretius turned up, we'd study every line of it carefully, even though it is most unlikely that it would influence how we print Lucretius himself.) So a project like Musisque Deoque can be of high value if it merely reproduces existing editions well in a way that allows easy access to the encoded information. Doing that on a large scale would make available to digital users material that now must be consulted in print form. That would surely be good. How good? To be more precise, how many dollars or euros would you spend on doing that? Complicated question that would take real work to answer. But born-digital editions with many witnesses encoded, manuscripts imaged, earlier editions consulted, etc.? The Homer Multitext seeks such a goal; will take years to advance; and exists in a unique situation of a leading scholar, human and financial resources available, and a project of broad interest to many readers of classical texts. The question should be what other possible projects connect scholarly expertise, human and financial resources, and a scholarly need/value for that particular edition? That they are, so far, few is not a condemnation of digital editing or of scholars who refuse to participate: it's a reflection of an intrinsic difficulty that cannot be minimized. Jim O'Donnell Georgetown On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 4:38 PM, Paolo Monella <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > Hi Henry, > > thank you for replying! > >> - Do you have any stats for the number of witnesses for well known >> classical texts? This might put the digital scholarly editions question >> into perspective. > > Unfortunately I do not have such stats: can anyone in the list help? > All I know is that classicists who have published scholarly editions keep tellin me that they're too many and it's not worth to digitise them. > > At some point of my post, I start quoting the arguments I have heard over and over from traditional philologists. I hope that my implied polemic attitude towards those arguments came out: in my opinion, when they say that "it's not worth it", they're implying that they're not *that* interested in textual variance -- the worst of offenses for a classical philologist! In fact, seemingly they're not *so* interested as to embark in a transcription of all witnesses. Why? for the reason that you summarise very well: > > >> - If I understand your document correctly, you say that >> one of the reasons >> for the lack of interest in the textual tradition is because it is >> (relatively speaking) far from the source. So, the variant readings give >> more of an insight into the contemporary cultural context rather than the >> intentions of the original author. > >> - If we're in the arena of semi-controversial thoughts, here's one for >> you. >> Does anyone actually consult the critical apparatus in a standard text? >> Have you come across particularly striking >> examples of variant readings in >> classical texts? > > These are questions! I normally only consult the apparatus when I'm actually writing an article on that text (I think I'm not the only one). > As to the "striking" variants, this is my point in the article: classical texts are quite well preserved, after all. Apart from some sense-changing variants occurring from time to time. > > Being semi-controversial again: one would imagine that classicists kept complaining on the fact that our *digital* reference editions do not have variants yet. But we don't. If I'd perform a search on PHI 5.3 for "poena", I would miss Ov. Met. 6.538, where "poena" is a variant reading for "Procne" (real example, but the other way around). So I'd be missing a plausible variant (that Anderson's key edition has chosen in fact over "Procne"). However, if a first-year grad student fails to write the exact place, year, publisher of the print critical edition he uses, he gets scolded badly. > > Best, > Paolo > -- > Empfehlen Sie GMX DSL Ihren Freunden und Bekannten und wir > belohnen Sie mit bis zu 50,- Euro! https://freundschaftswerbung.gmx.de