Spring Academic Conference at Holy Cross

Every spring, the College of the Holy Cross hosts an Academic Conference during which students showcase research and share their conclusions on long term projects or senior theses. Once again, the HMT was well represented by several teams who shared their ongoing research from the 2014-2015 academic year. 

The whole Classics panel at the Academic Conference,
including teams working on other manuscript projects

Michael and Corey highlighting examples in the Lexicon

Michael Kelley '18 and Corey Scannell '18 shared their work on Apollonius Sophistes' Homeric Lexicon, remarkable for the fact that they are working on the only extant copy of the work. Both Michael and Corey will be joining this year's summer seminar at the Center for Hellenic Studies.

Melody discussing scholia in depth

Alex Simrell '16, Charlie Schufreider '17, and Melody Wauke '17 shared examples from their work on editions of Iliad 14 and 15, which highlight the multitextual tradition of the Iliad. All three presenters are veterans of the summer seminar.

The conference session concluded with two seniors Brian Clark '15 and Nikolas Churik '15, both veterans of the summer seminar and both working on senior theses based on the culmination of their work with the HMT. 

Brian outlines the Epic Cycle

Brian Clark shared some of his research on additional sources for the epic cycle, retellings of the Iliad, and what the differences between these texts reveal about how the ancient world treated the epic cycle. 

Nik discusses the prose paraphrase from the Omega 1.12

Nikolas Churik discussed his research on Iliadic paraphrases, working with prose paraphrases, glosses of the Iliadic text, and what these texts reveal about the readers and the ancient art of translation.

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.

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.

Undergraduates at College of the Holy Cross and University of Houston win Summer Research Fellowships

We are delighted to announce that five students have won research fellowships to work on the Homer Multitext this summer. Christopher Rivera and Megan Truax have won Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowships from the University of Houston. At the College of the Holy Cross, Nikolas Churik, Brian Clark, and Deborah Sokolowski will participate in the Mellon Summer Research Program in the Social Science, Humanities, and Arts. The students at both institutions will spend the summer working as a team to transcribe, edit, and mark up folios from the tenth-century manuscript of the Homeric Iliad known as the Venetus A, which is the oldest extant manuscript containing a complete text of the poem. Much of their work will focus on books nine and ten of the Iliad, which feature a night time embassy to Achilles and a night raid by the Greek soldiers Odysseus and Diomedes on the Trojan camp.

In addition to the work of these students, the Homer Multitext will benefit this summer from the research of eight different faculty/undergraduate student teams. The teams come from Brandeis University, Furman University, Gustavus Adolphus College, College of the Holy Cross, University of Houston, Leiden University, Trinity University in San Antonio, and University of Washington. The teams will participate in the Homer Multitext summer seminar at the Center for Hellenic Studies in June, and will continue their work over the summer and into the next academic year. As we did last year, we will report on the discoveries of the students as they are happening over the summer, and publish posts from the students themselves about their work.

Textual criticism of the New Testament and a multitextual approach

A multitext approach is particularly important in the case of the Homeric epics, as we have argued a number of times in various publications (for just two examples, see this and this), because it more accurately represents the oral, traditional nature of the poetry. Yet that is not to say that a multitextual approach would not also benefit the textual criticism of other texts, and in ways appropriate to those texts, the state of their extant witnesses, and the history of their criticism. In a recent article, which can be read in its entirety here under a Creative Commons License, the New Testament scholar Claire Clivaz (University of Lausanne in Switzerland) examines the state of textual criticism on the New Testament and argues “that a decisive shift is taking place at this very moment in the editing of the Greek NT, a shift that can be expressed, on the one hand, as an ‘institutional deregulation’ of the scholarly critical edition, but also, on the other hand, as an opportunity to reconsider the way this text should be edited.”

It is, on one level, self-serving to link to this article, because it cites the Homer Multitext as a positive model for reconsidering ways in which the text should be edited. But I do so also because it is instructive for me to understand the state of textual criticism in another field as we continue to think through and construct our digital edition. In her discussion of the history of textual criticism of the NT, Clivaz also points out the factors influencing the ascendency of the relative recent idea of a “one, true text” that seems in our discipline of Classics to have always been the case. Such an understanding of the history of another long-standing discipline and how things have changed over time alerts us to the fallacy that there is only one method of textual criticism that has always been practiced and is therefore the only possible correct way. Such a realization frees us to be more open to the possibilities that digital tools and access to the primary sources allows. 

3rd century papyrus of the New Testament, now housed at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia,
available on line here: http://www.csntm.org/Manuscript/View/GA_P1

As optimistic as the decisive moment that Clivaz identifies in her field may seem, though, I was particularly attentive to her warning that a new on-line edition of the NT offered by the Society for Biblical Literature actually represents a step backwards in the textual criticism of the NT, because it “implies overall a return to the 19th edition of Westcott & Hort (1881; 2007) wherein all of the information provided by the papyri, for example, is omitted… and with the chief purpose of conveying the impression that scholars have finally achieved a stable, unified, and simplified Greek text of the NT.” This situation in New Testament Studies is a good reminder that just because an edition is digital and on-line, it is not necessarily progressive in its textual criticism.

The HMT Manuscript Browser · News and Updates

Summary: The old version of the Manuscript Browser at chs75.harvard.edu is going away. Its replacement will appear at amphoreus.hpcc.uh.edu. In the interim, a beta application is available at http://beta.hpcc.uh.edu/tomcat/hmtapps/. 

An archive of every digital image in the HMT library is always available for manual and automatic downloading.

Background

In 2007, shortly after we completed photography of manuscripts Marciana 822, Marciana 821, and Marciana 841, we wrote and posted online an application for browsing the high-resolution images. This application used the Google Maps API to allow users to manipulate the images; it allowed searching by the enumeration of manuscript folios and by poetic book and line.
Technological and scholarly considerations alike dictate that we take this original application offline. Using the Google Maps API is not ideal for our purposes. Google Maps assumes that it is displaying images of the surface of the earth, for one thing, and using it for serious work on manuscripts requires many workarounds, compromises, and hacks. More serious, though, is the problem of scholarly citation. In the five years since we wrote the original facsimile browser, our understanding of scholarly citation in a digital world has matured. By standardizing on citation with URNs, we can deliver effective applications today, using scholarly material that can remain valid in the future. The old application does not support citation using URNs; its replacements do.

What Will Happen

The application at chs75.harvard.edu will cease working at any moment. New “Facsimile Browser” applications are being developed on two hosts: beta.hpcc.uh.edu and amphoreus.hpcc.uh.edu. beta hosts experimental versions of HMT applications; when we consider versions of an application ready for regular public use, we will also host them on amphoreus.
In the meantime, users can use two resources for accessing digital images of the Homeric manuscripts:

• Our beta version of a Facsimile Browser is online at http://beta.hpcc.uh.edu/tomcat/hmtapps/.
• As always, users can download complete sets of images of any of our manuscripts from http://amphoreus.hpcc.uh.edu.

About the Beta Facsimile Browser

The application that lives at http://beta.hpcc.uh.edu/tomcat/hmtapps/ allows users to look up digital images of manuscripts, and associated data, by requesting citations of folios or by poetic book and line.
We wrote this application to explore a URN-driven graph of HMT data. Its state as of December 26, 2012 reflects its origin as a test-bed for this way of integrating our data.
The application will evolve over the next few weeks as we redesign the user interface with a wider audience in mind. Once that redesign is complete, we will put the application on the amphoreus.hpcc.uh.edu server and announce its public availability.

A Final Word

The Homer Multitext consists of data–images, texts, collections of regularly structured data. It is a reality of the twenty-first century that technology changes rapidly, and thus how we interact with data will change rapidly. From the outset, the editors of the HMT assumed that any particular end-user application would have a lifespan of only a few years. Our goal has been to ensure that the data remain accessible regardless of technological changes, and that the discoveries and insights generated through widespread and free access to that data is never trapped in forms dependent on any particular technology.

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."