Dickinson Summer Latin Workshop: Ovid Fasti 4

July 11-16, 2013

Claudia Quinta

The Dickinson Summer Latin Workshop is intended for teachers of Latin, as a way to refresh the mind through study of an extended Latin text, and to share experiences and ideas with Latinists and teachers. Sometimes those who are not currently engaged in teaching have participated as well, including retired teachers and those working towards teacher certification.

In 2013 we will read Ovid’s Fasti, Book 4, on the month of April. It includes Ovid’s celebration of Venus as the goddess of creation, a description of the festival of the Magna Mater, and the story of Claudia Quinta; Ovid’s discussion of the Cerialia includes his famous narrative of the abduction of Persephone, the wandering of Ceres, and the return of Persephone to Olympus. Book 4 also contains the account of the Parilia, and the story of the founding augury Rome and death of Remus. The final sections tell the story of Mezentius in connection to the Vinalia and include an agricultural prayer on the Robigalia.

Moderators:

Prof. Christopher Francese (Dickinson College)

Prof. Meghan Reedy (Dickinson College)

Participants must have a firm grasp of the basics of Latin grammar and a solid working vocabulary. But we aim at a mixture of levels and experience.

Deadline for application & fee is May 15, 2013. The participation fee for each participant will $300. The fee covers lodging, three meals per day, the facilities fee, which allows access to the gym, fitness center, and the library, as well as wireless and wired internet access while on campus. The $300 fee does not cover the costs of books or travel. The recommended book is Elaine Fantham’s Ovid: Fasti Book IV (Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics). Please keep in mind that the participation fee of $300, once it has been received by the seminar’s organizers, is not refundable. This is an administrative necessity.

Lodging: accommodations will be in a student residence hall or apartment near the site of the sessions.

The first event will be an introductory dinner at 6:00 p.m., Thursday, July 11. The final session ends at noon on Tuesday, July 16th, with lunch to follow. Sessions will meet from 8:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. each day, with the afternoons left free for preparation.

TO APPLY: Classics Latin Workshop Application   Deadline  May 15, 2013.   Please make checks payable to Dickinson College and mail to:

Classics Dept, PO Box 1773, Carlisle PA  17013

For more information please contact Prof. Chris Francese (francese@dickinson.edu).

Illustration: Woodcut illustration of Claudia Quinta, hand-colored in red, green, yellow and black, from a German translation by Heinrich Steinhöwel of Giovanni Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris, printed by Johannes Zainer at Ulm ca. 1474. Source: Penn Provenance Project http://www.flickr.com/photos/58558794@N07/6693292023/

What Should Gregory Crane Do? (DCA Wrap-Up)

Word, Space, Time: Digital Perspectives on the Classical World
An interdisciplinary conference organized by the Digital Classics Association
April 5 – 6, 2013 University at Buffalo, SUNY

One of the best aspects of the Digital Classics Association conference held recently at the University of Buffalo (April 5-6, 2013) was the way it was bookended by two veteran digital humanists who had rather different perspectives on what is needed in the future. Gregory Crane (Perseus) and Geoffrey Rockwell (Voyant ToolsTAPoR) offered trenchant but sometimes conflicting analyses of where we are now, and quite different prescriptions for the future of the larger classics DH enterprise. I’ll give my best shot at analyzing what they said, but would love to hear in the comments from others who were there and had different takes.

In his opening remarks, “Open Philology,” Crane described the nature of his new appointment to a Humboldt Professorship at the University of Leipzig, a job that comes with $12 million of essentially unrestricted start-up funds. His goals, he said, are two:

  • to advance the role of Greco-Roman culture and classics Greek and Latin in human intellectual life as broadly as possible in a global world; and
  • to advance philology (in the sense of the analysis of the ancient world in its entirety based on every scrap of written evidence) to support dialogue among civilizations.

Gregory Crane, 2011 (source: http://bit.ly/ZlHjXQ)

This new position and its unprecedented funding prompted the question that hovered over the conference, and which was formulated by Rockwell later as an acronym: “What Should Crane Do?” WSCD, indeed? If the goal is to advance philology worldwide to support a dialogue among civilizations, what is the best way? Write another article for AJP, or a print monograph? No. we must a) get all our sources available as widely as possible, and b) help people deal with them. “Everything else,” he said, “is just us having fun.” The rebuke to the profession as more interested in “being invited to fancy talks” than in making the classics available and accessible to all seemed a bit unfair to those of who spend most of our energy teaching, but there was an uncomfortable degree of truth in it when you think about the culture of print academic publishing. “How do you support a reader in Indonesia who does not speak English or a European language? That’s the challenge,” Crane said.

His plans are threefold: an Open Greek and Latin project, somewhat similar in concept to the existing Perseus, but containing searchable .pdf multitexts of classical authors, aggregating and leveraging the many hard-to-access but high quality print editions in the public domain; a site that focuses on E-learning for classical languages (few details given); and the Scaife Digital Library, an open repository for peer-reviewed scholarship.

One of the most appealing elements of Crane’s vision is its catholicity. He has hired an Arabist to start integrating medieval Arabic texts into the new Open Philology project, and in theory it could embrace all historical languages. The reason for beginning with Greek and Latin, he argued, is not because they are “best,” but because they lie at the crossroads of many kinds of knowledge networks. This vision of philology embraces science, trade, intellectual and cultural history writ large, not just the venerated totems of classical literature (another dig at publishing norms in classics). Philology uses texts to understand the world of the past in all its aspects, and Open Philology aims to provide a massive new infrastructure to make it accessible.

Geoffrey Rockwell, 2010 (source: http://bit.ly/YL0QSF)

Geoffrey Rockwell, 2010 (source: http://bit.ly/YL0QSF)

Geoffrey Rockwell gave the concluding remarks to the conference. A philosopher based at the University of Alberta, Rockwell has been influential in the development of language analysis tools, most recently Voyant Tools. He offered some interesting historical context for Crane’s kind of universalist thinking. He traced the roots of the desire to use technology get access to many documents at once, “the dream of frictionless research,” all the way back to the elaborate reading machine designed by 16th century military engineer Augostino Ramelli. There has been a persistent desire for machines that will unify knowledge and send us “like greased lighting toward the truth,” he said, despite the fact that no machine has ever been shown to make us wiser. H.G. Wells had faith that getting all of knowledge into one place would lead to the unification of the human race—“not unlike Gregory Crane,” he said with a wink.

With this gentle satire he made it clear that he would pursue a more modest, incremental approach. What is needed at this point are infrastructure experiments, he said, rather than a new, totalizing system. He seemed to favor linking together different kinds of independent efforts, perhaps along the lines of one of his other major projects, TAPoR, which is a gateway to the tools used in sophisticated text analysis and retrieval. He argued that we should be focusing on a set “Primitives”—the broad types of data that we have about the ancient world: Places (space), People (prosopography), Periods, Passages, Citations, Things (buildings, etc.), and Perspectives. We have to start collecting these separately, then get them talking to each other. Pleiades does a great job aggregating information about places and making it readily linked with other kinds of data. Where is the Pleiades for prosopography? For historical periods? If we have a common, agreed vocabulary, then these different kinds of data can start being linked in very powerful ways. It’s a linked data concept of a kind being already aggressively pursued in other corners of classics DH.

Crane and Rockwell are in agreement that ivory tower elitism is a serious problem, and that one solution is to set up ways to foster participatory research and crowdsourcing. Rockwell favors exploring modeling, counterfactual history, and gaming as modes of research and teaching. Where they most differ, perhaps, is in their desire to engage the field as currently constructed and try to change it. Peer review, a topic not mentioned by Crane, is for Rockwell an important way forward. We must get beyond a world in which anything digital is automatically greeted with applause, he argued. While Crane seems generally happy to circumvent existing academic channels by acquiring outside funding, Rockwell would work DH into the existing academic prestige economy.

Crane’s e-learning initiative is very intriguing, in that Perseus itself has always been rather disconnected from actual teaching practices and pedagogy. The attitude of the profession more generally toward pedagogy he parodied as “teaching–that’s so sweet that you do that.” This may be true of the APA program committee, but certainly not of the profession as a whole. In fact Rockwell identified the interest of classicists in pedagogy as a key advantage we have over other fields. He pointed to many examples at the conference of projects with serious scholarly and pedagogical aspects.

Crane seems to place high faith in semantic mark-up as the key to e-pedagogy, and sees it as the litmus test for a truly digital textual edition. “Linguistic annotation is the basis for the digital edition, what distinguishes it from the print edition,” he said. Rockwell did not address this aspect of Crane’s remarks, but seems not to place the same emphasis on textual mark-up as sine qua non. At any rate, his Voyant tools is designed to analyze plain text.

I have ignored here the many other fascinating talks, posters, and workshop sessions that took place in Buffalo. The organizers received a loud and long ovation at the end, richly deserved. This was an extraordinary event. Neil Coffee has promised that full video of all the talks will be posted if the quality of the recording is sufficient, and I’ll add links as they become available. Thanks to the organizers for an extraordinary two days!

–Chris Francese

 

 

 

Favorite Commentaries: Ariana Traill

What is your favorite classical commentary?  What place did it have in your intellectual development? Recently I asked the members of the DCC editorial board to write for the blog about these questions. Here is the response of Ariana Traill, Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Sidney Gillespie Ashmore (1852-1911), Professor of Latin Language and Literature at Union College from 1881 to 1911, was the author of what is still the only complete commented edition of all six of Terence’s extant plays in English. A fine scholar and exacting teacher, Ashmore had little patience for the encroachment of non-traditional subjects into the college curriculum. According to Union’s Shaffer Library website:

He considered Latin, Greek and English literature and language far more important for a student than mathematics or the physical sciences and felt that Union was straying from the path of true education when it began offering programs in what Ashmore termed “pseudo-practical” fields such as electrical engineering.

Sidney Ashmore, circa 1881

His passionate nature also occasionally made “Ashy,” as students nicknamed him, a target of student pranks. In October of 1883, again according the researchers of the Shaffer Library, a group of sophomores got an organ grinder to play outside his classroom. Ashmore paid him to go away, but when the organ grinder was found playing at the back window, Professor Ashmore jumped out the window to chase him away, famously putting on his hat prior to doing so.

Whatever his failings as an appreciator of music, his Terence commentary is still very valuable, and I have retained a fondness for it first gained during my own days as an undergraduate student. It is an old-fashioned commentary in the nineteenth century style (you can find all of Suetonius’ Life of Terence in the introduction – in untranslated Latin), published by Oxford in 1908. What I liked about it as a student was Ashmore’s unerring sense of the stumbling blocks for novice readers. He supplies the missing words, without wasting any space about it (Eun. 666, “miserae: sc. mihi”), and will helpfully tell you when an ellipsis “was hardly felt” (as at Ad. 326, quis ergo: sc. fecit). He always names the construction (especially when it isn’t what you might think it should be, like facis at And. 322, “the pres. is more vivid than the fut.”) and he anticipates issues that stump first time readers (Who is subject of inquit at Eun. 581? Oh yes, Thais. The dum at Phorm. 512? “Purely temporal; ‘while’.”) Ashmore doesn’t miss much: it’s a rare line that does not have its own entry in the comments. You can count on him for admirably brief, but informative, definitions of unfamiliar vocabulary: frugalior (HT 681) “comparative of frugi; ‘more exemplary’”; depexum (HT 951) “combed down,” “curried,” hence “flogged.” The notes are sometimes amusing (e.g., perduint, “the form was archaic even in Terence’s time, and confined mostly to this curse”, HT 811).

And Ashmore did more than explain grammar and translation questions: he provided reminders of what one character knows that another doesn’t; he pointed out staging (HT 731, for instance, was “said in a loud voice, that Clinia and Syrus may hear”), explained characters’ motivation and noted ironies. Even more useful, he presented the information needed to follow the plot on a scene-by-scene basis. There were no long plot summaries to read (and forget) at the beginning of the play: just three to four sentences every few pages, throughout the commentary, where they helped most. Yes, you had to flip back to cross-references to find the first time a question was answered; you had to know Greek to get the point of the untranslated phrases that appeared regularly throughout the comments; and, despite the introduction and occasional notes, there was not enough help to elucidate the far-from-simple scansion of Terence’s iambo-trochaics. But there was never a lot of reading to get the essential information from Ashmore’s elegant, concise, and lucid comments, and it was never a waste of time to read his note on a line. He did what the Bryn Mawr Commentaries, and now the DCC, do: he helped students understand the Latin with a minimum of explanation.

What I came to appreciate later, as a scholar and teacher, is that Ashmore wrote with a view to teaching reading comprehension, not just translation. He glosses in the target language (HT 723 Syri promissa induxerant = Syrus promissis induxit). He explains much that is implicit, what we might call the cultural competence of a native speaker. For example, a note on cistellam, at Eun. 753, explains birth-tokens, infant exposure, and the implication here that “Pamphila had been kidnapped.” His comment on ridiculum at Ph. 901 explains what Demipho is not saying but clearly means, namely “that it’s absurd to ask such a question, as if their purpose in coming to him were not self-evident. Phormio must return the money, which (in their view) he is no longer entitled to keep.” Ashmore understood that there is much more to following a Latin conversation than simply glossing the grammar and the vocabulary. He translated frequently, but always with a view to elucidating the Latin, often juxtaposing a literal translation with a freer one. Eatur (HT 743) is a good example: “let a start be made (then),” “let us go.” After years of teaching myself, I recognize the scene summaries as a well-tested pre-reading strategy to promote comprehension of passages that are being read for the first time. Ashmore also integrated his scholarship so deftly that, to be perfect honest, I ignored it almost entirely as a sophomore reading Terence for the first time. I came to recognize later that this text and commentary was a substantial work of scholarship. Of course, recent and fuller commentaries on individual plays have superseded Ashmore, notably R.H. Martin’s Adelphoe, John Barsby’s Eunuchus and A.S. Gratwick’s Brothers. Yet Ashmore’s remains a model of a commentary with a keen awareness of what students actually need.