Images of the Geneva Iliad have been Posted!

Images of the Geneva Iliad, which has undergone extensive restoration and digitization in a partnership between the E-Codices project of Switzerland and the Homer Multitext, have now been published. Here is an excerpt from the E-Codices press release:

The “Geneva Iliad” was most likely produced in Constantinople in the 13th century. The manuscript was purchased in the 16th century, probably in Venice, by Henri Estienne, who used this manuscript as a basis for his 1566 edition of the Iliad, which remained the standard edition into the 18th century. This manuscript is unique for numerous scholia, which are not found in any other similar manuscript.
The digital publication of this manuscript was requested in 2010 by the “Homer Multitext”, a project of the Center for Hellenic Studies at Harvard University, which uses digital techniques to facilitate research regarding the multiformity of the textual tradition in Homeric epics.

We are extremely excited to be able to start making use of these images within the Homer Mutlitext. The E-Codices Creative Commons non-commercial licensing on the images will allow to use these images for education and research. As with the other manuscripts we have brought together digitally within the project, we will now be able to compare the Geneva Iliad side by side along with other manuscripts, and will no doubt learn a great deal about how the manuscript was conceived and constructed, the information contained in the scholia, and the sources for its scholia.

This collaboration between the Mellon Foundation, the E-Codices Virtual Manuscript Library of Switzerland, and the Homer Multiext has been four years in the making. We are so grateful to the Bibliothèque de Genève for overseeing the restoration, digitization, and scholarship on the manuscript that allowed for publication of these images to happen. Stay tuned as we learn more about this remarkable manuscript with its unusual lay out and unique set of scholia.

Geneva Iliad to provide exciting challenges for HMT

I had the opportunity to visit the Genavensis 44 manuscript of the Iliad last week during my trip to Switzerland for the E-codices workshop. The manuscript is undergoing an extensive restoration and has been completely unbound. I was able to see that the manuscript is indeed in need of extensive restoration, and I learned a great deal about the manuscript by seeing it in person. For example, although I knew that there is an interlinear paraphrase that runs through approximately the first half of the poem, I was not aware that this paraphrase is of the same size and same hand as the main text. It raises the question, for me at least, as to how to characterize this text from the point of view of transcription and identification of text groups. Line numbers are of course modern editorial additions, but when we transcribe this document we will have to make some choices about what to put where. I assume we will separate out the paraphrase from the text of the poem, but having access to the images of the manuscript itself will allow users of this transcription to appreciate that the paraphrase was originally written to be an organic part of the reading of this manuscript. When we separate it out, we lose something of that experience.

Homer Multitext to collaborate with E-codices of Switzerland

As part of a Mellon funded project, the Homer Multitext will collaborate with E-codices of Switzerland to publish the thirteenth century manuscript of the Iliad known as the Genavensis. For several years Neel Smith has been working on creating electronic editions of ten sets of scholia in which individual scholarly notes are coordinated so that we can, for the first time, systematically analyze their distribution across the manuscripts where they are attested.  Cluster analysis identifies clearly distinct groups of comments that appear together in particular sets of scholia, and suggests that, far from slavishly reproducing a single archetype, scribes could combine material from multiple, distinct sources. An initial methodologically independent measurement of vocabulary similarity isolates precisely the same clusters of scholia: the obvious historical conclusion is that scribes drew on different sources for their differing scholarly content.[1] This completely overturns traditional attempts to construct a single stemma, or “family tree,” of manuscript scholia, and means that we urgently need to reassess the relation of the important scholia in the  Codex Genavensis 44 to the other scholia we have already studied. 

The goal of the e-codices project is to provide access to all medieval and selected early modern manuscripts held in Switzerland via a virtual library At the moment, the virtual library contains 605 manuscripts from 25 different libraries. We are grateful for the opportunity to collaborate with E-codices to bring this manuscript on-line with high resolution images. The manuscript is being carefully restored in preparation for imaging. We anticipate that the imaging will take place in Spring 2011.

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[1] Preliminary results have been presented at the conference "Text Mining Services" (Leipzig, 2009) and are forthcoming  forthcoming in the conference proceedings (Springer Verlag, 2009) as Gabriel Weaver and Neel Smith, "Applying Domain Knowledge from Structured Citation Formats to Text and Data Mining: Examples Using the CITE Architecture."