0.10 Give us editors! re-inventing the edition and re-thinking the  (Page 12/18)

4) We need to shift from lone editorials and monumental editions to editors as … editors, who coordinate contributions from many sources and oversee living editions . Robinson 2010 makes a similar argument for needing to harness the contributions of hundreds or thousands in the process of making digital editions. We have vast amounts of work to be done as we create new generations of editions. Automated methods can detect patterns across the billions of words and hundreds of languages, but even automated methods often depend upon carefully curated data. We need diplomatic XML transcriptions of manuscripts and papyri. We need translations into modern languages, not only for human readers but also to support such automated methods as parallel text analysis. We need curated syntactic analysis for our treebanks. We have an endless supply of projects that are challenging but accessible to our students and that will increase in complexity as they move through their careers. They may start by analyzing sentences or distinguishing one Alexander from another but they can also begin to analyze linguistic, stylistic, intellectual, historical and other questions. We will—and must—depend upon a generation of fundamental scholarly work produced by our students, published online, linked to the passages on which they bear, and preserved indefinitely.

5) Digital editing lowers barriers to entry and requires a more democratized and participatory intellectual culture . The decentralization of editing is a necessity that has further consequences. A fall 2009 listing for a tenure track job welcomed “candidates who can support contributions and original research by undergraduates as well as MA students within the field of Classics.” This seemingly innocuous term flummoxed almost all of the 180 or so applicants to this position—most simply ignored it. Some had creative ideas but these were ideas they had developed themselves. The intellectual culture of Classical studies assumes a long apprenticeship model, with advanced graduate students working their way toward a point where they can publish articles in specialist journals and books in academic presses. Ruhleder 1995 offered a brief exploration of how digital publication and scholarship might challenge this tradition of apprenticeship in her larger consideration of the impact of the Thesaurae Linguae Graecae on classics as a discipline.

In a culture of digital editing, our students can begin contributing in tangible ways as soon as they can read Greek—first-year Greek students are already able to distinguish text from commentary in the digitized Venetus A manuscript of Homer. More information on this project can be found in Blackwell and Martin 2009. Intermediate students of Greek and Latin offer their own analyses of individual sentences for the Greek and Latin treebanks—contributions that are then compared against each other and then added to a public database, with the names of each contributing student attached to each sentence. This annotation model is explained further in Bamman, Mambrini and Crane 2009. These contributions can develop seamlessly into undergraduate and MA theses of real value and immediate use. When our students publish previously unpublished material or contribute to knowledge bases, we find ourselves in a participatory culture of active learning. Pale clichés about citizenship and democratization suddenly become tangible.