Collaborative Research and Digital Criticism: NEH and the Homer Multitext
by Casey Dué, Professor and Director of Classical Studies (University of Houston)
The Homer Multitext (http://www.homermultitext.org) is an interdisciplinary project that brings together conservators, photographers, and researchers from a variety of fields in the Humanities and Computer Science and from institutions across the United States and Europe. Mary Ebbott and I are the project’s co-editors, but we are partners in all aspects of the project with the project’s information architects, Christopher Blackwell and Neel Smith. Douglas Frame, Leonard Muellner, and Gregory Nagy are associate editors. The Homer Multitext seeks to present the textual transmission of the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey in a historical framework that accounts for the fact that these poems were composed orally over the course of hundreds, if not thousands of years by countless singers who composed in performance. When the tradition in which these songs were composed was flourishing, no two performances were ever exactly the same. Our historical sources still reflect such multiformity, which is natural and expected in an oral tradition, but scholarly editions in print typically obscure rather than highlight these natural variations. Using technology that takes advantage of the best available practices and open source standards that have been developed for digital publications, the web-based Homer Multitext offers free access to a library of texts and images and tools to allow readers to discover and engage with the dynamic nature of the Homeric tradition. The project publishes high-resolution images of the most ancient documents that transmit the Iliad and Odyssey (including five of the oldest Medieval manuscripts that preserve the Iliad) together with edited transcriptions of their texts, including their accompanying scholia (marginal commentary derived from ancient scholarship on the poems). The project is supported by the University of Houston’s Research Computing Center and Harvard University’s Center for Hellenic Studies, but we have received crucial funding from a variety of sources, first and foremost being the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Our editorial work thus far has been accomplished by teams of undergraduates working with professors, who are trained at an annual two week long summer seminar hosted by the Center for Hellenic Studies. Students at the seminar are introduced by myself and Mary Ebbott to the theoretical background of the project and its implications for our understanding of Homeric poetry, and they are trained by project architects Neel Smith and Christopher Blackwell and project manager Stephanie Lindeborg in our editing procedures. (For examples of the kind of topics discussed, see our research blog at http://homermultitext.blogspot.com) The students then work with faculty in teams to create an edition of the text and scholia of a book of the Iliad during the seminar. After the seminar, students return to their home institutions and continue to edit assigned manuscript folios together with their faculty mentors. The editions they create are then subjected to a number of automated tests, which are reviewed by the project editors. (On the project’s validation and verification procedures see http://homermultitext.github.io/2015/08/27/validation/.) It is safe to say that the vast majority of new discovery in connection with the Homer Multitext is made by undergraduate researchers, who regularly present at national and international conferences. Since 2014, seven Homer Multitext undergraduate researchers have been awarded Fulbright fellowships to continue their research after graduation.
The foundation for a multitext edition of the Iliad and Odyssey was laid when an NEH collaborative research grant (“The Oral Poetics of the Homeric Doloneia,” 2007-2008) gave my co-editor Mary Ebbott and me the opportunity to write a sustained demonstration of the need for a multitextual approach to the Iliad. The research leave afforded by that funding enabled us to write a series of essays and a commentary on book 10 of the Iliad (Iliad 10 and the Poetics of Ambush: A Multitext Edition with Essays and Commentary, Washington, DC, 2010) as a kind of test case. Our printed edition was multitextual in that we included an edited transcription of the Venetus A manuscript’s text of book 10 together with three fragmentary papyrus texts. Along with these texts we provided commentary on the multiforms presented by them. In our essays we articulated how an awareness of multiformity changes and in fact deepens our understanding of the poetics of the Iliad.
Building on that rationale we have directed our efforts since 2010 towards the creation of a complete digital edition of the Venetus A manuscript of the Iliad. The Venetus A is a tenth century CE manuscript (now housed in Venice) that contains a wealth of scholia deriving from the scholarship of Alexandria editors such as Aristarchus and Zenodotus. The debates preserved in the margins of this particular manuscript more than any other show us that the Iliad was not fixed and monolithic in antiquity, it was multiform—and the wider epic tradition from which the Iliad emerged was more multiform still. The Venetus A is an inherently multitextual document, because it contains material from variety of different scholarly traditions in its front matter and in its margins, including discussions of alternative versions of the text that were known in antiquity. Access to the full contents of the Venetus A will enable scholars who are open to a multitextual approach to gain a much greater understanding of the history of a poem that evolved over many centuries and the multiformity of the tradition of composition-in-performance in which the Iliad and Odyssey were created.
Our edition is funded by an NEH Scholarly Editions and Translations grant (“Editing as a Discovery Process: Accessing centuries of scholarship in one 10th-century manuscript of the Iliad.”). Work (and funding) began in 2013 and will be completed in 2017 with total funding of $276,115. The project we have undertaken is a complete scholarly edition of the oldest surviving and richly annotated manuscript of the Homeric Iliad: its text, scholia, and all other elements on its 654 pages. Our edition is based on the high-resolution digital photographs of the manuscript that we obtained (and have already published under a Creative Commons license for other scholars’ use) in 2007. The text and scholia are being transcribed (as a diplomatic edition, representing faithfully the text of the manuscript, including accents and spelling that are not “standard” from our point of view), and marked up with TEI-XML encoding for several key features. Each portion of the digital text, that is, each individual scholion, is being linked precisely to the location on the digital image of the folio that contains it. Any user can easily move from the transcription to the image of the primary source and see for herself what the manuscript says.
This NEH funding has been transformational for the Homer Multitext. Our Scholarly Editions and Translations grant has encouraged us to focus our energies on a particularly valuable and complex historical artifact, the Venetus A, which will now become the cornerstone of the much larger project. In creating this edition we have experimented with editorial processes and computational approaches and have done the hard work of trying and failing and trying again necessary for producing something that will last. We are incredibly grateful for the opportunity the NEH has given us to create a new kind of edition of the Iliad and Odyssey, one that we feel will allow for new perspectives and new questions and offer a new means for evaluating the evidence for the oral tradition preserved in the textual record of these poems.
More June, 2017 Newsletter Content
For Helen Cullyer's statement about the history of NEH funding at the SCS, see this page.
For Kristina Killgrove's article on the funding complexities in Classical Bioarchaeology, go here.
For Peter Meineck's call for strong NEH funding and his experience with Aquilla Theatre, follow this link.
For a list of resources you can use to learn more about proposed NEH funding cuts and how to get involved, check out this page.
