0.10 Give us editors! re-inventing the edition and re-thinking the  (Page 5/18)

From this perspective, the most important among thousands of books published in Classics in the first decade of the twenty-first century was Christopher Blackwell’s Demos , an e-book that earned its author tenure. (External Link) . This book not only provides a survey of Athenian Democracy and its underlying institutions but also systematically provides machine-actionable links between its exposition and open-access versions of relevant primary sources in Greek and English. These links include not only simple citations but also services such as dynamic maps and searches for keywords. In the history of intellectual life this act was as profound as it was simple. Demo s was not the first such publication. In the 1980s, Thomas Martin, one of the founders of the Perseus Project, created an Overview of Greek Culture (External Link) . that appeared both as a print book published by a university press and as a electronic publication that contained machine-actionable links to primary sources and to dynamic services. Christopher Blackwell was the first to create such a publication as an independent project and to hazard his career upon the experiment.

In my own work, I can point to at least one major practical consequence of this larger goal. There are clear benefits to working with the most up-to-date editions of Greek and Latin source materials, but if we work with primary sources that are legally entailed, whether by contract or copyright law, we bear the cost of losing open access and open content. Open access in this case designates the ability to make a source freely available and to allow anyone without restriction to examine the primary sources on which our work is based. The fact that many of these sources may not have accompanying translations in a language familiar to a particular audience is a subject to which I will return.

I use open content to designate the right for third parties to modify, repurpose and redistribute derivative works from original digital editions freely. Even if we only interest ourselves to our professional colleagues with privileged access to commercial databases, we cannot conduct emerging scholarship without the ability to create derivative works. This includes not only the production of new editions but also of scholarship that augments digital corpora. The Hestia Project (External Link) . in the UK, for example, took the geo-coding within the Perseus digital edition of Herodotus as a starting point, augmenting and correcting the automatically generated information from Perseus and creating a new database with which to study the geographic relations within Herodotus. For more on this see also Barker 2010. They were able to begin this project without formal permissions because the content was available under a Creative Commons license The various kinds of creative commons licenses available are described at (External Link) . Almost all of the TEI-XML files available from the Perseus Digital Library can be downloaded, and they are all licensed under the Creative Commons NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 License. and they can now redistribute the results of their work freely. Among the most important fields for much emerging humanities research—certainly for those of us who work with language—are corpus and computational linguistics. And yet unfortunately, the reuse of many linguistics resources (historical or otherwise) also involves complicated copyright and other legal issues, see Lehmberg et al. 2008 for an overview. The operative model is not the entrepreneurial Dickens seeking copyright protection to make money. Historical linguistic sources must be defended as data sets that must circulate as freely as their counterparts in environmental science or astrophysics if our research is to realize its full potential.