[This is hopefully the last essay, at least for a while, in a series that I have published on Digital Classics.]
Abstract: Who is the audience for the work that
we professional researchers conduct on Greco-Roman culture?
Frequently heard remarks, observed practices and published survey
results indicate most of us still assume that only specialists and
revenue-generating students really matter. If the public outside
of academia does not have access to up-to-date data about the
Greco-Roman world, whose problem is it? If we specialists do not
believe that we have a primary responsibility to open up the field
as is now possible in a digital age, then I am not sure why we
should expect support from anyone other than specialists or the
students who enroll in our classes. If we do believe that we have
an obligation to open up the field, then that has fundamental
implications for our daily activities, for our operational theory
justifying the existence of our positions, and for the
hermeneutics (following a term that is stil popular in Germany)
that we construct about who can know what.
The full text is at
http://tinyurl.com/nweeyfu.
Comments welcome:
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