The Digital Classics is a proposed framework for exemplifying the renovation
of teaching in classical studies through computing. It falls under the main
topic, “The Post Gutenberg Age and Classical Literature. Configuration of a
New Discipline in the Classics Curriculum”. The purpose of The Digital Classics
is to provide a means for participants in the programme to fulfil its goals
by engaging and collaborative project work. The digital nature of this work
sets the ancient cultural artefacts of GrecoRoman civilizations in the context
of contemporary scholarly tools and methods. In turn these tools and methods
bring into play new ways for analysis and the possibility for new scholarly
genres. At the same time, the demand of the digital medium for completely explicit
representation renders the means of research portable and invites collaboration.
Hence genuine research questions can be carried into the classroom, where students
are able to engage with them more or less directly. The ancient materials are
thus manifested within a contemporary idiom. These materials return the favour
by putting digital methods up against the most demanding kinds of data and
most rigorous scholarly standards.
The proposed framework is not defined by kind of artefacts, material characteristics,
language, period or subject. Rather it is methodological. The set of methods
available is broadly determined by type of data, i.e. discursive or tabular
text, number, image, sound. Nevertheless one of the framework’s objectives
is to encourage the discovery of new methods or at least of extensions to those
now in practice. Such discovery is effected by privileging scholarly inquiry
rather than the known abilities of current tools.
For practical reasons implementations within the framework are circumscribed
by commonly available tools. Nevertheless the limitations of these tools are
more than merely a potential annoyance: they are valuable clues toward the
design and construction of better tools. Projects within the framework are
therefore encouraged closely to track what cannot be done or can be done only
with difficult. These projects thus constitute research in humanities computing
as well as exemplify how research extended into classroom activity can help
to rejuvenate the teaching of classics.
2. Outcomes
The projects conducted within the framework are expected to have the following
broad outcomes: Improvement of participants’ qualifications, specifically with
the application of digital tools and methods, demonstrated in the products
of and reflections on the project work.
Increase of insights and ideas for course syllabi and classroom activities,
by providing the means for teachers to implement portable research projects
and to share them with students.
Renewal of educational methods and theories, by challenging them with the
exercise of digital tools.
Development of the participants’ capacity for and understanding of interdisciplinary
research, by encouraging their engagement with methods for which discipline
specific concerns are irrelevant.
Involvement with media other than the purely textual, by opening the possibilities
for representation of images and sound.
Connection with the international network of scholars currently involved
with digital methods and furtherance of cooperation among them.
Debate within the framework and beyond it concerning the state of the discipline
as this is reflected by the uses and possibilities for use of the digital
media.
3. Timetable
Projects within the framework will proceed according to the following stages:
(a) Broad proposal, by 15 November 2005, given below.
(b) Specific plan, submitted by 16 December 2005, finalised by 9 January
2006.
(c) Begin work, as soon after 9 January as possible
(d) First review of work in progress, 27 31 March
(e) Second review, 5 9 June.
(f) Presentation at the second Contact Session, September 2006. Work may
be begun considerably prior to the date given in (c), providing that the
plan has been worked out and agreed to.
4. Projects
For 2005 2006 the following projects are proposed within the framework:
(a) Fleshing out the classical text: how computing can substantiate
what we read
Dr. Neven Jovanović, email:
Prof. Willard McCarty
Currently there are several widely accessible software tools – mainly on the
Internet, and even outside the usual academic or scholarly environments – that
could be applied to a classical text to make us see it from another perspective.
There are tools for adding notes to images; other for connecting text with
sound and images (both static and dynamic); again other for manipulating the
typographical presentation of texts. But, such tools, and modes of presentation
they make possible, are rarely used by classical scholars and students, either
for research or for teaching. This is what I propose to explore.
Taking three different texts – an inscription, a speech by Cicero, and a poem
by Propertius – I propose to use computers and computing to present these texts
as something that can be seen, heard, reflected on, and played with. I propose
to construct a prototype, consisting of a text opening on various kinds of
notes (transcription, glosses, annotations, rhetorical "articulation marks"),
on images of
its various incarnations (original inscriptions, papyri, manuscripts, old editions),
on its read aloud versions, on a kind of movie – a reading animation similar
to the artwork by Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries (http://www.yhchang.com/).
Also, the prototype will invite the users not only to go from text to sounds,
images, animations, but also vice versa, e. g. to hear first, read later (which
is, in my experience, a very important, but rarely taken road to learning and
understanding classical languages). The tools and the presentation will be
left sufficiently open to enable the both scholars and students not only to
use the prepared content, but also to create one's own, e.g. to add notes and
comments, record own performances, create new mise en page of the text.
(b) Modelling personification in Ovid's Metamorphoses
Dr. I. Darchia
Dr. V. Gerdjikova
Dimitar Iliev
Prof. W. McCarty
Y. Sirakova
At the advanced level, close reading of a literary text in the classroom involves
philological analysis and discussion with the help of lexicons and commentaries.
Such analysis is reflected in the commentary tradition, which records the kind
and extent of detail that is convenient to record on paper and simple to decode.
Analysis of poetic effects can easily, however, make demands that exceed the
capabilities of codex based commentary procedures. The most serious limitation,
perhaps, is encountered in attempting to compare instances of a complex poetic
phenomenon, such as personification. So much must be kept in mind that enacting
such comparative analysis dynamically in the classroom is put beyond reach.
Hence reference to authoritative readings substitutes for argument among the
members of the class. Students are thus encouraged to defer where they might
otherwise be encouraged to think critically.
The aim of this project is to explore how the situation of relative passivity
just depicted might be changed for the better by he application of computational
modelling techniques. The proposal is to construct a prototype model representing
a sophisticated critical reading of personifications in Ovid’s Metmorphoses.
The intention of this model is to give advanced students of the poem a manipulability
representation with which they can explore he cogency of the reading by changing
its constituent judgements and observing the effects.
A preliminary version of the model, presented and criticized at the first
Contact Session, will be revised on the basis of the criticism, then a few
hundred instances of personification in the poem analyzed and the results entered
into the model. This model will be presented to the participants in the second
Contact Session, September 2006, for further comment.
Among the several challenges of the proposed work is that of identifying commonplace
expressions involved in candidates for personification and working out a systematic
way of determining the relative degree to which their status as commonplaces
can reasonably be represented. Other problems with the model that are already
known or are identified during the collaborative analysis of instantces will
be discussed during the project and resolved or presented as problems at the
second Contact Session.
Intersession Activities
