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The consequences for us are significant. Collaboration with the DAI is particularly promising because it supports institutes and research projects around the world and must address archaeology on a global scale. We cannot, however, simply work with colleagues in Western Europe but need to develop on-going scholarly and personal relationships with scholars beyond the dominant networks of scholarly exchange from the twentieth century.

In our own work, we collaborate with colleagues in Cairo, Zagreb, and China. We need not only to deepen these existing collaborations, but to also reach out to regions such as South America and India. This involves a great deal of travel and a constant need to expand our own linguistic skills.

Philology

As a philologist, I have a particular responsibility to classical Greek and Latin. From a pragmatic perspective, my goal is to help Greek and Latin sources play the fullest possible role in the intellectual life of humanity—to help as many people as possible to think as creatively as possible about as many Greek and Latin sources as possible. For more on the issue of philology in the digital world, see Crane, Seales and Terras 2009 and Crane et al. 2009b. For a specific look at creating an infrastructure that will support the new tasks of digital philology, see Deckers et al. 2009. This implies access, physical and intellectual, to the widest possible audience today and preservation for audiences of the future.

The surviving corpus of Greek and Latin sources includes, of course, the traditional corpora of texts that survive through literary transmission or on objects such as stone, papyrus, metal, and bone that have survived directly from antiquity. In a digital age, we have access already to more Greek and far more Latin sources produced after the classical period (e.g., 500 CE in the West, 600 CE in the East). The Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (TLL) (External Link) . focuses upon an archive of ten million words from ancient Latin authors recorded on paper slips. For more on the TLL, see Hillen 2007. Johannes Ramminger, a TLL researcher, had in January 2008 already collected more than 200 million words of early modern Latin in digital form. (External Link) . David A. Smith, a computer scientist from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, identified approximately 13,000 books whose cataloguing data listed them as being in Latin from among the approximately 1.5 million books available from the Internet Archive. (External Link) . While some of these books are multiple editions of classical authors and some are editions of Greek authors with Latin introductions, most of the 1.7 billion words in these books are probably unique Latin texts and thus represent a corpus almost one hundred times larger than the classical corpus. Google has, at present, digitized twelve million books, so the amount of Greek and Latin available in digital form is only going to increase. The challenges presented by such massive collections to the discipline of classics has been investigated in Crane et al. 2009a.