Hugh McElroy (Independent Scholar)
Rather than presenting a standalone project, I would like to demonstrate a workflow for integrating independently-developed open-access resources to rapidly create annotated editions of lesser-known Latin texts for student use. There is a rich vein to be mined of early modern Latin editions on Google Books, the Internet Archive, and the websites of libraries around the world. One may find a natural history of dragons, a 16th century play based on Heliodorus’ Aethiopica, and a scientific treatise on the exploration of underground volcanic passages. The pedagogical potential of these texts is huge, catering as they do to interests (in the fantastical, in a plot-driven romance, in science) our students already have. Creating editions of these texts for classroom use has been
labor-intensive. Online lemmatizers like the Bridge and Johan Winge’s Latin Macronizer have vastly sped up the process of generating vocabulary and macrons for, say, a text pulled from the Latin Library, but many digitized Latin texts are only available as untranscribed scans. Until recently, hand-transcription from a PDF was the only viable way to prepare such a text for the kind of processing and analysis that digital lemmatization and macronization facilitate.
New OCR tools, designed with early modern printed Latin in mind, substantially speed up the process by which an individual instructor or team can convert a scanned PDF to editable text (and from there to a macronized edition with customized vocabulary lists for students.