0.10 Give us editors! re-inventing the edition and re-thinking the  (Page 10/18)

Scholarship was so successful that classicists in the closing decades of the twentieth century shifted their focus away from editing and commentaries and more fully embraced the monograph-oriented publication culture of English and History. While we do find faculty at leading institutions who create editions and commentaries, most of these either work on less developed areas (e.g., Byzantine studies or less commonly read classical authors), or in areas such as papyrology, where new material needs to be edited and published, or came of age in the 1960s and 1970s. Thus a 2008 panel of the American Philological Association (APA) on “Critical Editions in the 21 ^st century,” organized by Cynthia Damon, included scholars who worked on papyri, Medieval Latin, Greek science, and Byzantine literature. James McKeown, an editor of Ovid, and Donald Mastronarde, an editor of Euripides, received their BAs in 1974 and 1971 respectively.

Classicists do not appreciate the amount of scholarly labor at their disposal. The Bryn Mawr Classical Review (BMCR) (External Link) . included 3,008 reviews in the five years beginning with 2005 and running through 2010—approximately 600 reviews each year. This figure was calculated by downloading the web pages for each year and counting all the entries except for the twelve monthly “books received” entries. Clearly, there will be some hastily produced works while others will reflect years of study. We might assume, conservatively, that the average item reflects one year of direct labor. For every dollar that we pay a faculty member, we need to assume a dollar for benefits (e.g., health care) and the complex overhead of running an institution of higher learning. If we assume $50,000 as a typical salary, then the cost of a year of academic labor is around $100,000. In other words, even if we ignore all the articles that classicists write and only consider those books that warrant reviews in BMCR, the 600 or so reviews each year represent, by a conservative estimate, more than $50 million dollars of labor.

Of 704 entries counted in the 2009 BMCR volume, a quick survey turned up only 28 for editions and commentaries—or around four percent of the total.

Another preliminary survey reinforced this figure. An analysis of 100 CVs (from a total of about 180) for a position in Philology advertised in the fall of 2009 revealed only three with an interest in producing editions and commentaries.

In effect, classicists as a group have made a cost/benefit decision to allocate less than approximately five percent of their labor to the production of editions and commentaries. Improving the print infrastructure for the fifty million words of Greek and Latin that survive in manuscript transmission through about 500 CE was not a high priority—the benefits were no longer great enough to justify much scholarly labor. Rather, we invested our energy in interpretive articles and monographs.

A number of factors have altered the cost and benefits of editing within the humanities. Each project participating in this workshop reflects, in varying ways, the subsequent recalculations of how to invest scholarly labor.