Greek and Latin in an Age of Open Data

We're pleased to announce that the Homer Multitext project will be presenting two papers at the "Greek and Latin in an Age of Open Data" conference hosted by the Open Philology Project at the University of Leipzig, December 1-4. You can read our papers "A Redefinition of Classical Scholarship" and "Open Access and the Practicality of Citizen Scholarship" from the conference program.

A Recent Mention of the Homer Multitext Project

Check out this recent paper by Greg Crane on computational humanities, the HMT, and citizen science!

How to Build a Community of Scholars Through Pancakes

One of the most integral components of the HMT is team collaboration, not just students working with each other in individual groups, but students sharing information across teams and working closely with faculty. Sometimes this collaboration takes place within one institution, but as HMT spreads through the summer seminar our collaborative teams find themselves miles and even oceans away. With one week left in the seminar, we are beginning to reflect on ways for the participants to bring their research home with them and continue this great scholarly work. Herein lie the pancake dinners. Collaborative research is a social endeavor and I would suggest that someone you are willing to share a pancake with makes an excellent research partner.

What does one eat with Dutch pancakes?

This past Wednesday evening, in the spirit of sharing culture and good food, some participants of the CHS Summer 2014 Seminar hosted a Dutch Pancake Potluck Dinner. Two of our students from Leiden University made authentic Dutch pancakes and the evening was generally agreed to be a massive success. Throughout the evening I snapped pictures, intending to post something nice about what our participants do when they aren’t furiously reading scholia. As I pondered what I was going to write, I reflected on the reasons why the dinner was such a success and why it was in many ways just as important as any seminar session on the oral poetics of Homer or how to code TEI markup in our xml editions.

Syrup is key!

Sharing food and recipes in this social environment is a great model for how to continue research after the summer seminar. The exchange of information doesn’t have to end and hopefully some really excellent pancakes will help solidify the relationships of the summer seminar to facilitate not just more great food but more great research.

Our community of scholars

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!

The Homer Multitext on the road this weekend

This weekend the Homer Multitext will be part of two conferences. Christopher Blackwell will lead a workshop entitled “Scholarship Outside the Codex: Citation-based digital workflows for integrating objects, images and texts without making a mess” at the Sixth Annual Lawrence J. Schoenberg Symposium on Manuscript Studies in the Digital Age: Thinking Outside the Codex. The symposium is being held at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

Meanwhile, Mary Ebbott will be speaking about “Rethinking the Role of Editors in the Homer Multitext” as part of the New Testament Textual Criticism panel (offered as a joint session with Digital Humanities in Biblical, Early Jewish, and Christian Studies) at the Society of Biblical Literature annual meeting, held in Baltimore this year.

The participation of the HMT at both events highlights our interest in cross-disciplinary conversations about the use of digital tools for scholarship on manuscripts. We have much to learn from our colleagues in other disciplines that also focus on manuscripts as primary sources, and we hope we have something to contribute in fruitful collaboration and sharing of ideas and methods.

The beauty of collaboration within our project also allows us to bring the HMT to two conferences on the same weekend!

How can digital tools help us understand and publish for others to study a complex document like the Venetus A manuscript? (Seen here is folio 15v of that manuscript.) Such questions will be considered at two conferences this weekend.

Collaboration and new tools are keys to success for Holy Cross research teams

Summer researchers and members of the Holy Cross MID Club in the St. Isidore of Seville Lab at Holy Cross
(back row, left to right: Stephanie Lindeborg, Rebecca Finnigan, Brian Clark, Nikolas Churik
front row: Neil Curran, Debbie Sokolowski, Andrew Boudon, Christine Bannan)

Two weeks ago I had the opportunity to visit to the College of the Holy Cross where I met members of the Manuscripts, Inscriptions, and Documents Club as well as their faculty mentors Mary Ebbott and Neel Smith. The club has four teams of dedicated undergraduate researchers pursuing three different projects within the summer research program at Holy Cross. Two teams are working as part of the Homer Multitext project to digitize portions of the Venetus A manuscript. A third team is working on a 16th century manuscript of Archimedes. Another club member is working to digitize the Athenian tribute lists. I will be sharing more about the work of these teams over the coming days. And more importantly, the teams will author posts later this summer sharing their original and substantive research. But before posting results, I'd like to share some details about how these teams go about their work and why they are so successful.  Two significant factors emerged during my visit: innovative tools and collaboration.

I want to highlight the idea of collaboration because this has become a fundamental concept for the Homer Multitext project as a whole. Collaboration in an academic setting often involves sharing results or reaching consensus in meetings, but in this case it goes much deeper; the work process of each 2-3 person team is entirely collaborative. Here's what I mean: a team of three students might work through a the text of a folio line-by-line as what Neel Smith calls a "three-headed monster": one person checking a print edition, a second checking the digital image of the folio, a third taking notes. At Holy Cross, they have multiple teams all working side-by-side in one lab, so teams support each other when questions arise. When there are issues that the students can't resolve, faculty members are available right down the hall for consultation.

In addition to this collaborative approach, the teams are benefiting from the use of new tools that speed up the work flow while ensuring the quality of data. These tool also facilitate the creation of new resources and allow researchers to ask new kinds of questions about these manuscripts and the traditions they preserve.

For instance, the first team I met on my visit included Neil Curran (class of 2014) and Stephanie Lindeborg (class of 2013), who are both veterans on the HMT. This is Stephanie's third summer of research and Neil's second. [For more on Stephanie's research, see "Scholia On Odysseus in Iliad 8, Part One.]" Right now they are working together to verify transcriptions done by earlier teams on books 1-8 of the Venetus A. Part of the verification process involves a new tool: Mandatory On-going Maintenance or MOM, which Professor Neel Smith had just updated that morning. Among other things, MOM allows the team to generate an index of Greek words used on a folio along with the lines where the word occurs.

This list can then be automatically parsed and checked against all the entries in the LSJ to find words without a match. There are typically between 5 and 30 unmatched terms, or "failures," for each folio. These failures are then tracked and checked carefully, since some of them potentially represent "new" terms that can be added to the ancient Greek lexicon.

Partial list of possible "new" terms in Book 4 of the Venetus A.

This discovery of new words alone would be exciting, but these tools will also allow the creation of new and valuable resources, such as a "core vocabulary" for reading scholia in individual manuscripts—a challenging task even for many professors working from a print edition such as that of Erbse. In this case, however, undergraduates are reading a 10th century Byzantine script marked by the frequent use of abbreviations, technical language, and letter formations that are totally unfamiliar to most students, who are accustomed to reading from a print edition such as an Oxford Classical Text. And the HMT team has already estimated that about 20% of the scholia in the Venetus A have never been published, so there is often no authority to double check. These researchers become experts on many fronts.

As these students augment the ancient Greek lexicon and redefine undergraduate research, they are also building skills they never thought they would have. When I asked the team about this, Stephanie told me about the technical skills she has gained. It happens that her father is an engineer. Since working on the Homer Multitext, she has found that she is becoming fluent in the kind of technical language her father uses on a daily basis. And Neil noted the confidence that comes from being part of the HMT: "We are prepared to learn to do anything!"

This brings me to another point about collaboration on the project. The close, work-process collaboration I saw in action is not accidental. It has been intentionally and carefully fostered by the HMT team including Neel Smith, Mary Ebbott, Casey Dué, and Christopher Blackwell. Such collaboration is part of the genuine deep learning that is taking place, and it is hard to replicate in a traditional classroom. In fact, experience has shown that these teams are typically more successful when grades and course credit are left far behind. Perhaps this is because in a typical reading class, it's very easy to hide what we don't know. But when you are working through a text as "three-headed monster" there's no place to hide. You contribute all you can, then you simply admit what you don't know, you ask for help, and your team works it out together. Even the professors are in a position that requires complete intellectual honesty and at times modesty, since many of these scholia have never been translated before. The result is that good questions are valued as much as good answers.

And here's perhaps the most important outcome of this collaborative approach: teams develop their ideas in the context of meaningful intellectual relationships that extend beyond graduation day. Here again, the faculty have lead the way. Ebbott and Dué have been collaborating since their time as graduate students at Harvard, co-teaching courses, writing books, and now co-editing the Homer Multitext. Likewise, the project's information architects, Smith and Blackwell, have collaborated on the technical infrastructure of the project for over a decade now, and regularly collaborate on numerous other projects as well.

Over the next few years, the HMT team hopes to strengthen communication across its multiple teams at various universities. They are also thinking about ways to collaborate with participants after graduation, whether they are moving on to graduate programs in Classics or to careers in law, secondary education, or other fields.

Stay tuned for more from the Holy Cross teams and HMT graduates in the coming days.

HMT Collaborator Interviewed for Ars Technica's Coolest Jobs in IT

Ryan Bauman, a researcher at the University of Kentucky's Center for Visualization and Virtual Environments, has been interviewed by Ars Technica for their series on the Coolest Jobs in IT. In the article Bauman discusses his work on the Homer Multitext Project, including multispectral and 3-D imaging of ancient manuscripts. He talks about how gratifying it is to do research that benefits both humanists and computer scientists at the same time: "The most interesting part is finding research questions that touch on both sides," he said. "Finding something that a humanities scholar is interested in that we can help them answer using some kind of digital approach that is also challenging enough on the digital side that it pushes computer science forward as well." 

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."