Equally Different: The Performative Function of Late Republican and Early Imperial Elite Discourse on Roman Freedmen
By Kristof Vermote
Despite exponentially increasing attempts to break down analytical boundaries between freedmen on the one hand, and freeborn members of the plebs media on the other, the assumption of a status-specific discourse on freedmen has been consistently left unchallenged.
Fitting In: Freedmen Adaptation in the Roman World
By Marc Kleijwegt
Studies on freedmen in the Roman world have focused extensively on the legal process of manumission and on the standing of freed slaves in the community. I am much more interested in how slaves experienced the transition from slave to freedman and what they did in order to fit into their – new or old – environment once they had gained their freedom. Within that period of uncertain length it is unknown how they were treated by their fellow-citizens. If they were artisans, did they perhaps suffer loss of income because freeborn customers declined to pay?
How to Be the Perfect Victim of Internet Harassment
By Donna Zuckerberg
Last year, I became the target for a campaign of anti-Semitic, misogynistic harassment by email and on social media for an article written for an online publication. That negative attention was a direct result of the work I do in studying classical reception in online antifeminist communities. Although many perceive online harassment by trolls to be an entirely distinct problem from harassment in a professional setting, my experience has been that being harassed online directly impacted my interactions with my colleagues.
Strategies for Creating Positive Work Environments in Classical Academia
By Fiona McHardy
This paper explores examples of bullying and harassment in the Classics workplace at a moment in which various groups are coming together internationally to discuss this important topic and to seek solutions for it. Examples are drawn from contributions made by a range of colleagues, from PhD students to professors who have come together to discuss possible solutions within our discipline. The contributions include examples involving intersections of gender, race, sexuality, age, and disability, and it is suggested that so-called ‘double discrimination’ (cf.
Harassment in the Workplace: An Administrator’s Perspective
By Patrice Rankine
I have been in the field of Classics for over 20 years as both a faculty member and an administrator and, as a result, have had broad experiences with issues associated with harassment. Harassment is a broad umbrella that includes not only sexual harassment and bullying, but what have been called “micro-aggressions”, defined as “brief, everyday exchanges that send denigrating messages to certain individuals because of their group membership” (Sue 2010, xvi). Micro-aggressions cause work-related stresses that over time can impact one’s ability to function in the workplace.
The Editor(s) in the Classroom
By Cynthia Damon
This talk is a report from the field on an experiment in editing conducted with high school, undergraduate, and graduate students. Our work produced a text, critical apparatus, and various other supporting materials for an edition of the Bellum Alexandrinum in a format intended for delivery to an online platform currently under development. The pros and cons of the method are weighed, and I conclude with some reflections on involving students in textual criticism.
Detecting the Influence of the Corpus Platonicum on Ancient Greek Literature using LDA-Topic Modelling
By Thomas Köntges
In this talk I will share my experiences as a classical philologist who has learned LDA- topic modelling in order to apply this method to collaborative work with a number of classical languages, including Latin, Greek, Classical Arabic, Persian and Sanskrit.
While I will give an accessible introduction to LDA-topic modelling itself, I will also showcase a subset of the results obtained applying this method to the Corpus Platonicum during my residency at the Center of Hellenic studies (CHS).
Learning from Git: Critical Editions as Version Control
By Peter Heslin
Discussions of the digital critical edition of the future often promise the ability to swap alternate readings out of the apparatus and to view them as a part of the text; the website of the Digital Latin Library lists this as one of its aims. Another feature often promised is the ability to encode all transmitted variants, not just a select few. But are these two aims compatible in practical terms?
Open Greek and Latin: corpora, editions, and libraries
By Gregory Crane
The Open Greek and Latin (OGL) Project addresses the need to develop open textual corpora that provide increasingly comprehensive coverage for Greek and Latin and support new forms of born-digital annotation, new practices of reading, new audiences for Greek and Latin, and new avenues of research.
The Digital Latin Library and the Library of Digital Latin Texts
By Samuel Huskey and Hugh Cayless
For as long as the internet has existed, people have been putting Latin texts online in one form or another, but we still have few examples of fully digital critical editions. The problem is mostly a technical one. It is easy enough to put a plain text online, but the difficulties increase exponentially when you consider adding a preface, manuscript descriptions, a critical apparatus, and the other information typically found in printed editions. Linking all of that information together in a meaningful, useful way presents still another challenge.