A New Manuscript Browser

We recently noted that the old Manuscript Browser application, which lives at http://chs75.harvard.edu was going away. That application, written in 2007, had fallen behind the times.

There is a new Manuscript Browser online at http://folio.furman.edu/rumba.
This application offers several paths of entry to our collection of manuscript images:

• A user can request a particular folio (by number and side, “recto” or “verso”), or a particular manuscript to see all available images of that manuscript.
• A user can request a particular passage of the Iliad (by Book and Line), and see every manuscript folio on which that line appears, and thence to go a particular folio and its images.
• A user can request a particular passage of the Iliad (by Book and Line) and a particular manuscript, to go to the page where that line appears.

This new application represents another experiment in our project of rapid development of end-user applications and tools based on an RDF graph of canonical citations. People interested in this kind of thing can do “view source” on any page to see the underlying data, which is simply XML output of SparQL queries.

Gratia Amicorum

Our embrace of RDF for structuring and organizing the HMT’s data was greatly accelerated thanks to the Linked Ancient World Data Initiative [LAWDI], and their NEH-funded workshop held at ISAW in 2012; we are extremely grateful to the NEH and to Sebastian Heath, Tom Elliott, Hugh Cayless, Sean Gillies, and the other organizers, faculty, and participants in that event. It led directly to one of the most exciting and productive years in the life of the Homer Multitext.

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.

Analyzing the layout and design of Homeric manuscripts with scholia

The digital scholarly publishing initiative Academic Anvil has announced the results of its first call for proposals.  Academic Anvil is a digital publisher for scholarship in the humanities founded by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) and the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education (NITLE).

Of the three submissions accepted (announced here), one builds upon the digital archive of the Homer Multitet project.  The proposal, entitled "Design and Layout of the Richest Manuscript of the Iliad" and available here, is co-authored by HMT project co-architect Neel Smith, and long-time HMT project contributor Nik Churik, an alum of the 2012 CHS summer seminar.

Churik, currently a sophomore, started Greek in his first year at Holy Cross, and began volunteer work for the HMT in his first semester of college.  The publication should appear in May at around the same time that Nik takes his final exam in intermediate Greek.

His contribution illustrates two important ways that work on the HMT leads to new discoveries:  first, if you look thoroughly at incompletely published or studied material, you will make new discoveries; and second, if you apply automated methods to analyze material systematically, you will find previously unnoticed patterns of evidence.

We will post links here when the final publication is available.

Sunoikisis Undergraduate Research Symposium

The Sunoikisis Undergraduate Research Symposium, hosted at Harvard University’s Center for Hellenic Studies in December, 2012, included a panel on "Research on manuscripts of the Homer Multitext project." Video of the session was recently posted on vimeo. The panel was planned as a single, continuous presentation, split across four videos.  This page from the Holy Cross Manuscripts, Inscriptions and Documents Club links the four videos from the panel in sequence.

Page updated:  on the linked pages, a link to a fifth video of the q/a discussion following the panel has now been added.  The undergraduate panellists' responses to questions from the audience may be more impressive than the formal presentations.

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.

Transformative Undergraduate Research

Casey Dué wrote last week about the accomplishments of some undergraduates at Brown University who, given the opportunity and the “extreme academic freedom” to pursue original research using primary sources (namely, a book of Roger Williams’ containing some hitherto undeciphered handwritten notes), were able to solve a long-standing mystery. Their access to these primary sources and the freedom to work on a scholarly problem with them demonstrates the transformative nature of real undergraduate research, both for the study of these primary sources and for the students’ education.

Most of the primary sources in our discipline are not available at libraries in this country, and that is why the digital photographs of them are so important to the Homer Multitext project. The digital technologies of creating these images and making them available to all interested researchers is similarly transformative of how research in our discipline can be (and even should be) conducted. What’s more, digital technologies can change how research is shared, and therefore how undergraduate researchers can join the scholarly conversation on a topic. William Pannapacker wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education last month about how these digital technologies eliminate the “Indiana Jones Warehouse” effect that was the traditional outcome for undergraduate research. As Pannapacker put it, “There’s no guarantee that the world will beat a path to your online project, but at least it’s available, and updatable. It’s not a moribund, bound manuscript shelved in a university library’s off-site storage warehouse.” Perhaps the least expected and most gratifying part of the Homer Multitext project so far has been how it has changed how we work with students and get them involved in original research of their own within the project. Some of their initial work is already available here on the blog (search for the tag “undergraduate research” to see them all) and on the project website, but the next stages of the project will do even more to bring their work to the scholarly community.