Patrick,
in trying to make a point, I have oversimplified a situation I really know
about only from texts (books and journals). The point still stands,
though: for some reason, there are few scholarly editions of classical
texts.
A simple thing that could be done (and it goes well, I think, with
enthusiasm of Eleonora) in the digital medium is *distributed* edition of
a text. That is, a group of people --- for exemple, a group of us
interested in the discussion --- could share the task of preparing the
fontes lectionum, each taking one manuscript or edition, even though far
apart geographically, even though they belong to different philological
traditions, etc. This is something similar to what the philologists in
the 19th century were doing, when they had to rely on other's collations
--- but we could (could, that is, once the copyright issues of libraries
were settled) document and support our collations with much more precision
and certainty.
Another interesting question would be: which classical author (apart from
Homer, obviously) would have the most "impact" edited digitally? Which
one would be the most interesting? Or even, which one would be easiest to
do (considering cost/benefit ratio)?
Neven Jovanovic
> Even *Arion* did not really intend to renounce philology, but rather the
idea that all there was to the study of the classics was
> philology. They knew that close reading could only be done in the
original languages, but did make the rather radical concession of
allowing that interesting insights might come from a critic reading only
in translation; they also argued that teaching exclusively the canonical
texts and exclusively in the original languages would, in an educational
system where difficulty and "irrelevance" were rapidly marginalizing
many fields, and in which classics no longer held pride of place in the
intellectual culture, eventually leave classics as no more than an "area
study," like Egyptology or Southeast Asian Studies.
>
> That, at least, is how I have read them.
>
> Patrick Rourke
>
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