Digital Textual Editions and Corpora

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.

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).

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?

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.

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.