0.10 Give us editors! re-inventing the edition and re-thinking the  (Page 13/18)

There is nothing innovative in having undergraduates contribute to and then conduct research within a field—promising students in the sciences, for example, regularly begin working in laboratories, taking measurements or conducting technical procedures, and then develop experiments of their own. Classics is—or should be—a demanding field, but no more so than the sciences.

In the second half of the twentieth century, we developed courses and degrees in classical studies that removed or minimized the burden of mastering Greek and Latin. We are now in a position to create another path through the field, one that can be as challenging as any curriculum we have offered in the past but that also engages our students as collaborators.

6) The emerging digital environment can potentially allow editors to accomplish more with the same degree of effort . Word processing, high-resolution digital images, and email alone have changed the way in which editors can carry out their traditional tasks. The millions of dollars and euros invested in digital editing should have made traditional editorial practices faster and less expensive. The problem is, of course, that digital tools change what is possible and challenge us to redefine our tasks, making older models inappropriate—feature creep from one perspective, renaissance from another. Adding syntactic analyses for every word in a text, for example, should not significantly increase the overall editorial task—the real effort lies, or should lie, in thinking about each and every word in the text. If anything, editors should spend more time thinking about different interpretations for each sentence, knowing that they can publish these alternate interpretations in a form that can be visualized or analyzed.

Beyond simple calculations of time and money and the new questions we can ask, there is a chance that new scholarly instruments such as treebanks may allow us to make progress with thorny questions of reconstructing even our best-studied texts. We will certainly be able to frame arguments about various readings and conjectures when we have new and extended linguistic comparanda. Even if we avoid the idea of progress in reconstructing classical texts (and in this case, progress is a plausible category because in many cases we are trying to reconstruct a single source), we can at least provide new evidence with which to advance our discussions.

Three dimensions of change

The previous section described changes in the cost-benefit calculations that we as scholars make that bear upon the role of editing. This section shifts the focus and examines three dimensions by which to evaluate the current and emerging impact of digital scholarship. While I have selected several projects as exemplary for particular advances, I do not mean to imply that any one project only represents a single category.

1) Advancing established scholarship . Digital environments only exert long-term change if they first address the well-understood problems and aspirations of scholarship. The importance of this fact, or of the need to build digital infrastructures or virtual research environments that help scholars with both their “traditional tasks” as well as “cutting edge” scholarship has also been echoed in various discussions of humanities cyberinfrastructure; see for example Blanke 2010, Pybus and Kirkham 2009. Roger Bagnall’s piece on the rise of digital papyrology documents what is arguably the biggest success story within the digital humanities. Papyrologists from different institutions and nations have collaborated over a period of years to transform their core materials into shared digital collections and to create a functional digital environment for the shared editing of new texts. For more on this work, see the website for the “Integrating Digital Papyrology” project, (External Link) . Several factors are at play. Papyrologists have new material that they need to publish. The traditional audience is not huge and thus there are fewer problems with rights holders restricting open-access publication. Most of all, there is what Ulrich Wilcken (1862-1944) long ago phrased the amicitia papyrologorum , E. G. Turner, T. C. Skeat, and J. David Thomas, “Sir Harold Idris Bell,” The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology , 53 (1967) 138. a distinctively and consciously collegial relationship among papyrologists and a determination to support each other and their field. The amicitia papyrologorum , imperfect and intermittent as it may be, is nevertheless an extraordinary achievement and has conferred upon papyrology a competitive advantage in the fierce Darwinian struggle of academic disciplines. The rise of Digital Papyrology both reflects and increases this advantage. Technology progress begins with our attitudes towards our colleagues and depends upon our ability to place some shared good above our quarrels and personal advantages.