0.6 Homer multitext project

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Introduction

The Homer Multitext project is published by the Center for Hellenic Studies ( (External Link) , and see especially the link project components ). I am currently Director of the Center. The leaders of our multigenerational team of participants in the Homer Multitext project are its two Editors, Casey Dué of the University of Houston and Mary Ebbott of the College of the Holy Cross, who are also Executive Editors on the Editorial Board of the Editorial Team of the Center for Hellenic Studies. I currently serve as Editor-in-Chief of the Board. I am also one of three Co-Editors of the Homer Multitext project team, together with Douglas Frame and Leonard Muellner, who are respectively the Associate Director and the Director of Publications and Information Technology at the Center for Hellenic Studies, and who are also members of the Editorial Board.

Other leaders of our multigenerational team of participants in the Homer Multitext project are its Information Architects, Christopher Blackwell of Furman College and Neel Smith of the College of the Holy Cross. Both are also members of the Editorial Board of the Editorial Team of the Center for Hellenic Studies, along with Douglas Frame and Leonard Muellner, mentioned earlier.

All the participants in our multigenerational team working on the Homer Multitext project are listed on our webpage ( (External Link) ). I describe our team of participants as multigenerational not only because we are a blend of junior as well as senior professors: we are also a blend of students as well as professors, and the students, whose level of study ranges from undergraduate to postbaccalaureate to doctoral to postdoctoral, are directly engaged in the ongoing research on the Homer Multitext project in collaboration with their professors and with each other. That is because one of the most important aspects of our mission in the overall project is to shape dynamic models of collaboration in research and teaching at all levels of education. I will have more to say about this aspect of our mission at the end of my presentation.

Still to be fully integrated into the overall Homer Multitext project is the online Homer and the Papyri , the current editors of which are Professors Dué and Ebbott as well as Professor Dimitrios Yatromanolakis of the Johns Hopkins University. My current title in the context of that project is Editor-in-Chief.

A brief history of the concept of a homer multitext

This concept of a Homer Multitext is based on the more fundamental concept of a multitext edition . The term originates from the work of Rupert Pickens, a specialist in medieval literature. In a study concerning the textual traditions of medieval French and Provençal songs composed by troubadour s, Pickens (1994:61) refers to the “multitext format” of his 1978 edition of the songs of the Provençal troubadour Jaufré Rudel, describing it as “the first widely recognized edition attempting to incorporate a procedure to account for re-creative textual change.” In a study of my own concerning the textual traditions of ancient Greek poetry, Poetry as Performance: Homer and Beyond (Nagy 1996; online second edition 2009, at chs.harvard.edu ), I noted the need for such a “multitext format” in editing the surviving ancient Greek poetic texts of epic and drama. I went on to say: “If indeed a multitext format is needed for editing medieval texts like the songs of Jaufré Rudel, then perhaps the need is even greater in the case of ancient Greek drama and epic” (Nagy 1996:31). The Homer Multitext project, which is an ongoing online multitext edition of the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey , fills such a need.