Eric Raymond popularized the phrase "release early, release often" as a philosophy for software development. It works for digital scholarship, too.
We're happy to announce today an early release of a facsimile browser incorporating new material from our photography in the Escorial last summer. (The adjacent image of folio 18 recto is linked to the new browser, or see the facsimile reader home page at http://pinakes.hpcc.uh.edu/codex.)
The digital facsimile edition requires data about the manuscripts (including what folios appear in what sequence), an index aligning each folio with a canonical citation of lines of the Iliad, and an index identifying which side of which folio each image illustrates. A group of dedicated and talented volunteers (some shown in the photo below) has been meeting regularly on Friday afternoons to put this material together for the E3 manuscript, prior to beginning work on a full diplomatic edition of the text (as others are already doing for the Venetus A and Venetus B codices).
Perhaps even more remarkable than the volunteers' rapid mastery of E3's Byzantine script is the fact that all of the students are in their first year of Greek at Holy Cross. If you're not accustomed to learning about the transmission of Homer from first-year Greek students, a Friday afternoon with this group is enlightening.
You will undoubtedly see postings on this blog in the future announcing further releases of material from "Team E3." In addition to the puzzles they've had to solve to make today's release available, they are compiling careful observations that will lead to a helpful guide to the paleography of E3, and have already noted a number of unpublished or unappreciated discrepancies bewteen E3 and other manuscripts that are forcing all of us working on the Homer Multitext project to reassess the traditional scholarly views on the (b) family of manuscripts of the Iliad.
The E3 group has currently indexed more than half of the manuscript: we're including folios 1 recto - 109 recto (covering Iliad books 1-8) in today's release.
Our profound thanks to all members of the group (alphabetically):
- Matthew Angiolillo (HC '13)
- Neil Curran (HC '14)
- Maria Jaroszewicz (HC '12)
- Alex Krasowski (HC '13)
- Becky Musgrave (HC '14)
- Kathleen O'Connor (HC '13)
- Anne Salloom (HC '14)
- Megan Whitacre (HC '14)
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