Seminar 2014 Presentations

We have reached the time for CHS Summer Seminar 2014 presentations! We are looking forward to our participants presenting on a variety of topics seen in the scholia of Iliad 12. We will be live streaming the presentations. If you would like to watch the presentations live see the following instructions and caveats:

The best place to see the stream is on the CHS network.

If you are not able to come to the CHS, you can try the following link: rtsp://stream.chs.harvard.edu/HouseA.

Note that Mac users will have to use QuickTime 7 Player  (a very old version) because Apple has deleted RTSP format from QuickTime 10: http://support.apple.com/kb/dl923.

The VLC player works too, sometimes: http://www.videolan.org/.

If you have any trouble accessing the stream, but would like to watch the presentations, they will be recorded and posted at a later date.

Stay tuned for more blog posts based on the Summer 2014 presentations and on other work by our participants.

Iliad 12 as Oral Traditional Poetry

Each year at the Homer Multitext Summer Seminar we introduce a new group of students to the scholarly principles that underlie the Homer Multitext project, which are grounded in the research and fieldwork of Milman Parry and Albert Lord on oral poetry. In addition to talking in a broad way about how the Iliad was composed and transmitted over time, we also think out loud about how our understanding of Homeric poetry as an oral traditional system affects how we interpret the poetry. And each year we ground that discussion by focusing on a particular book of the Iliad. The students create an XML edition of the text and scholia for that book in the Venetus A manuscript, and in a series of sessions we talk as a group about the poetics of that book. This year's book is Iliad 12 and it has led us to discuss such topics as the building of and battle before the Achaean wall (which caused such consternation among Analyst scholars in the 19th and early 20th centuries), the poetics of battle and the way that they overlap with the poetics of Catalogue poetry such as we find in Iliad 2, and the way that repetition functions in oral poetry, as well as text critical questions such as how to treat verses that are omitted from one or more of our medieval manuscripts (such as 12.219). These discussions have fostered a great deal of creative exchange among the participating students and faculty (who this year include Michiel Cock, Casey Dué, Eric Dugdale, Mary Ebbott, Olga Levaniouk, Gregory Nagy, Corinne Pache, Ineke Sluiter, and Neel Smith). This exchange has in turn influenced the latest post on our Oral Poetry blog, "Walk On Characters in the Iliad." 

CHS Seminar 2014

For the fourth summer in a row, the Homer Multitext project is running a two week seminar on digitally editing the Venetus A manuscript. Twenty-two undergraduates, graduates, and professors have been hard at work, creating a digital edition of Iliad 12 in the Venetus A. Many have likened work on this project to building a ship while sailing it and these researchers have shown great flexibility learning both the 10th century Byzantine hand and at the same time learning how to conduct their editing using virtual machines, a new technology added to the project this summer.

Front row (left to right): Olga Levaniouk, Mary Ebbott, Melody Wauke, Malia Piper, Sam Hill, Stephanie Lindeborg
Middle row (left to right): Corinne Pache, Ineke Sluiter, Shannon Young, Suzanne Verkade, Solomon Umana, Amie Goblirsch
Back row (left to right): Ian James, Casey Dué, Neel Smith, Kirsten Haijes, Charlie Schufreider, Eric Dugdale, Michiel Cock, Jacob Luber, James Skoog, Ian Tewksbury

We look forward to great things from this team of researchers as they tackle questions that have puzzled scholars on Iliad 12 and have plagued readers of the scholia, and look to update Allen’s landmark article, "On the Composition of Some Greek Manuscripts," with live references to the digital material now available through HMT.

Left to right: Suzanne Verkade, Corinne Pache, Malia Piper, Shannon Young, Sam Hill, Jacob Luber, and Michiel Cock

Left to right: Shannon Young, Melody Wauke, and Michiel Cock

Look forward to more updates soon as they tackle the scholia of Iliad 12!