Christopher Blackwell (Furman University)
Entirely fortuitously, in November and December of 2019, in preparation for teaching the Oedipus Tyrannos with undergraduates, in a mixed class of 4th- through 6th-semester Greek students, we undertook to build an experimental comprehensive commentary on the play, based on pre-existing collaborative work.
The basis for this edition was a Syntactic Dependency Treebank, produced by an expert scholarly reader. The second basis was an enhancement to this dataset produced by undergraduates in a previous iteration of the class. The technological underpinning was the CITE Architecture, both an online version of the LSJ lexicon with lexical entities identified, and retrievable by, CITE2-URNs, and the CITE code libraries that allowed us to generate a richly documented HTML representation of the play, including lexical, morphological, and syntactic information for every word. The edition is capable of working entirely offline (with the limitation that “short definitions” from the LSJ would not be linked to the full lexical article).
In March of 2020, when the class was abruptly dispersed across the continental United States, this working-edition became indispensible.
In this talk, we will describe how we integrated and enhanced the syntactic treebank data, and how we used this dataset as the basis for editions and exemplars following the CTS protocol. We will particularly describe the complex status of speaker-attribution, which is both vital to any reading of the play, but also exterior to the text. It would be misleading, for example, to claim that “Χορός” occurs 46 times in the language of the OT, when in fact it does not occur at all. CTS\/CITE allows us to work around this problem.
We will focus on the pedagogical implications of a “zero-friction” reading environment, in which full morphological, lexical, and syntactic information is instantly available to students. This is a departure from centuries of Classical language pedagogy, but is also (we think) the next logical extension of work on digital editions of Latin and Greek texts since the 1990s. We will also address the differing circumstances of students, suddly working remotely, and how this edition helped them.
Finally, we will discuss what would be required to generalize this kind of edition to any text, prose, poetry, or drama, for which we have treebank data.