Willard, I think you're absolutely right. There is very little 
interesting to say (from a Digital Classicist point of view, at least) 
about mere resource provision (although 'Digitising the Classics' is a 
big topic in itself and one that deserves attention, it's not the 
research topic of this kind that I have in mind).

I agree that digital research technologies need to do more than address 
old research questions, but I also think it is important to stress that 
the sort of research questions we want to be seen to be asking are ones 
that would be recognised as legitimate, important, and interesting 
questions by the traditional research establishment. At least that we 
can show, even to a skeptical luddite, that we are learning something 
new about the ancient world by approaching the evidence in this way. 
(Rather than simply creating a flashy new hypertext edition of some 
texts--a worthy endeavour in itself, but a different kind of research, 
perhaps akin to writing a big edition rather than a focussed research 
paper.)

Of course new digital resources change the very way we look at classical 
texts and enable new questions to be asked: even the TLG, which is 
fairly crude in Humanities Computing terms (and rightly so, by the way), 
has changed the way we all do research on Greek texts irreversibly. Not 
everything is a question of scale, of course: 3D visualisation enables 
lots of new work in archaeology, as well as just new publication 
strategies; hypertext editions of a text like Homer can do very exciting 
things for our understanding of oral poetry; network analysis can 
suggest whole new questions as well as suggest answers on topics as 
diverse as trade routes in Spain and the prosopography of Imperial 
Aphrodisias.

What I want to see for this CA proposal, at least for the part I 
visualise (and it seems others are visualising other things in addition, 
which is great!) is a couple of papers that could pass for traditional 
Classics research papers, and that don't have to apologise for the 
Humanities Computing component. So papers that start with a problem, a 
research question (and yes, a new one, one that couldn't have been asked 
  a hundred years ago), and go on to address both the evidence and the 
research techniques before offering a solution to that question. (That 
may not be the order in which the research was performed, of course, but 
the rhetoric of the academic paper is important nonetheless.)

It certainly looks like we might end up proposing something like two or 
three panels at the end of the day. I keenly await more suggestions from 
the list population. Thanks to all those who have already responded, 
on-list and privately.

Yours,

Gabriel

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Dr Gabriel BODARD
Centre for Computing in the Humanities
King's College London
Kay House
7, Arundel Street
London WC2R 3DX

Email: [log in to unmask]
Tel: +44 (0)20 78 48 13 88
Fax: +44 (0)20 78 48 29 80
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