The new image viewer is complete. This spring we put some thought into the question of what metadata we need for images. After looking at the various metadata standards (VRACore, Library of Congress, etc.) and examining some good museum websites, we settled on a fairly limited set of fields that give 1) the basic information about the object or art work; 2) clear source credit and terms of use for the image itself; and 3) scholarly description and discussion. This information is divided into tow tabs, “Properties” (for basic data), and “Annotation.” Annotations include a straightforward description, typically taken with credit from the museum web site or other image source, and “Comments,” which will normally be original DCC content connecting the image with a particular passage in a DCC text. Under Annotations there is also space for bibliography, and links to associated passages. This is an overdue infrastructure improvement that will help us make illuminating connections between texts and images, a key goal for the Aeneid edition in progress. If you go to the Images link on the fron page, you’ll see that most of the content uploaded so far is related to the Aeneid (by Lucy McInerney and Tyler Denton). Thanks to visual resources librarian Jen Kniesch at Dickinson for advice, and to Drupal developer Ryan Burke for making this tool.

The Bryn Mawr Classical Review has just published a fine and very positive review of the new three-volume Virgil Encyclopedia edited by Richard Thomas and Jan Ziolkowski. After praising it and describing its emphases in comparison with its Italian predecessor, the Enciclopedia Virgiliana, the reviewer, Sander Goldberg of UCLA, makes what has become something of a standard plea in reviews of such print reference works that they could be better done on line. But he makes it in a characteristically eloquent way:

Students in particular have already found an inviting and increasingly popular alternative, though the VE‘s editors are not kind to it: ‘a printed encyclopedia of this sort is also a world apart from the web. It offers material that does not have to be unearthed by sorting through a dung-heap in which pearls of truth are buried amid mistakes, exaggerations, and misunderstandings. The volumes have been vetted and edited for accuracy and clarity’ (lxx). I share their dedication to vetting and editing. Virgil may have had to search for pearls in a dung-heap, but his modern readers should certainly be spared that experience. Yet the editors invoke what is, or ought to be, a false dichotomy: an encyclopedia of this sort is a world apart from the web largely because no effort has been made to unite the accuracy and clarity of the former with the flexibility and accessibility of the latter. It is clearly not (or not yet) in Wiley-Blackwell’s interest to do so, but it is most certainly in our interest to have it done, and at some point the editors and contributors to projects like this one are going to have to demand that their labor, their expertise, and their sheer love of the enterprise be given a more progressive format. Their own dedication to the field, so richly displayed in these volumes, deserves nothing less.

Well said, Prof. Goldberg. He also points out that the current print publishing model militates against the detailed exploration of language:

Nuances of Latin vocabulary are not as easily grasped as what even a Google search will quickly supply regarding “Accius” and “Alcuin”, while a philological question that goes unanswered is all too likely in time to become a question that goes unasked. Other technical matters are not so fully ignored, but can be significantly compressed: details may then be difficult to locate and extract. WhereEV foregrounded such matters as ablativo assoluto, accusativi plurali in –is, eīs ed es, and accusativo alla greca, VE relegates them to entries on “syntax” and “morphology”, with other, briefer treatments in “Grecism” and “Hellenism, linguistic”. These are, I hasten to add, very good and useful entries, but the compressed attention to linguistic form and structure is again indicative of a shift away from the tools of close reading and the basic philological information that modern readers increasingly require to read Virgil in Latin with a depth of understanding that the editors may too readily be taking for granted in their audience.

These are problems that DCC is committed to tackling and solving to the extent that we can. In the coming weeks we will publish a database of Vergilian vocabulary, based on the superb work of Henry Frieze, with comprehensive, accurate word frequency information for the Aeneid supplied by LASLA. This tool will be part of a larger planned multimedia edition that will have as much linguistic and stylistic help as we can pack into it for readers who want to dig in to the Latin. More information about the overall plan is here and here. Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you would like to get involved. I know for certain we will have our copy of the Virgil Encyclopedia handy as it develops!

Update 8/29/2014

The editors of BMCR published the following note apologizing for an omission in this review, and it contains some information about the possibility of an electronic version of the Virgil Encyclopedia:

A recent review (BMCR 2014.07.40) greeted the arrival of The Virgil Encyclopedia with admiration and approval. The online posting of the review is now prefaced, however, with an apology from the editors, which we are glad to repeat here. Professor Goldberg in reviewing had included information about the online edition of the Encyclopedia that was omitted when we transmitted it to our readers. The mistake was awkward inasmuch as Professor Goldberg made concluding comments about the future of reference works such as this which read very differently and very unhelpfully in the absence of complete information about this reference work.

As we understand it, the state of play is that there is indeed an e-version of The Virgil Encyclopedia available from Wiley-Blackwell, chiefly of interest to institutional subscribers. From the descriptions we have seen, it is an e-book in the contemporary mode, that is, a digital representation of a traditional print volume. It contains internal links, but does not reside in the fullness of the web of outward, to say nothing of inward, links. In Professor Goldberg’s review, he expresses regret that more movement in that direction did not happen and by implication suggests that more will happen in the new Oxford Classical Dictionary for which he will be responsible. Professors Thomas and Ziolkowski, editors of The Virgil Encyclopedia, are understandably unsettled that the review was released in a way that exacerbated intellectual disagreement with a muddled statement of facts for which we are responsible. For that indeed, we do apologize.

The larger question of the fate of reference works is one that many will continue to discuss. As always these days, we live in a moment of dazzling innovation that will, doubtless, seem palely antique more quickly than we might imagine.

(l to r) Laurie Duncan, Wells Hansen, Jacqueline Lopata, Hugh McElroy (foreground), Daniel Cummings, and Will Harvard, collecting notes for Book 6 of the Aeneid (photo: Chris Francese).

Jennifer Larson and Paul Perrot working on the DCC edition of the Aeneid in the Info Commons of the Waidner-Sparhr Library, Dickinson College (photo: Chris Francese)

DCC summer research assistants Lucy McInerney, Tyler Denton, and Nick Stender in the Alden Room of the Waidner-Spahr Library, Dickinson (photo: Chris Francese)

The DCC gang is hard a work this summer on several projects, including the multimedia edition of Vergil’s Aeneid, for which we are currently choosing notes. Several members of the 2014 Dickinson Summer Latin Workshop are helping this week in the afternoons (after a morning of translating Lucretius), by selecting notes for Book 6. Two DCC summer research assistants are involved in the same task, over a number of weeks: Lucy McInerney (Book 1) and Tyler Denton (Book 2). All this is taking place on Dickinson’s campus, in the Alden room of the Waidner-Spahr Library. Three other teachers are helping from elsewhere: Sarah Buhidma (Vandegrift High School, Austin, TX; Book 3), John Siman (The Old Stone School, Hillsboro, VA; Book 5), and Richard Davis (The Hotchkiss School, Book 4).

Meanwhile, Nicholas Stender (Dickinson ’15) has finished the vocabulary lists for Callimachus’ Aetia, and is now moving on to revisions to the Lucian True History site, which should go live shortly.

Very exciting things are happening at Haverford, under the direction of Bret Mulligan. Grammar links in the notes fields of the Nepos and Ovid Amores commentaries are now going straight to the new DCC version of Allen & Greenough’s New Latin Grammar, and are opening in an attractive color box, thanks to the team at Haverford. Most exciting is the Bridge, an app being developed to help take learners from the vocabulary they know (be that a particular textbook, the DCC core, or something else), to the specific vocabulary for the text or author they want to read. Just finished Wheelock and want to know what more vocabulary you need to master the DCC core or to read Cicero’s Pro Caelio? The app will tell you, and give you spaced repetition flash cards to get you there. Watch this space for further details!

The new Allen & Greenough is up, though still undergoing final revisions by Meagan Ayer at Dickinson. You will see that the first several hundred chapters look great, but it’s still slightly rough towards the end. A key advantage of our version is that it includes the index of the print book. No other version has this, and it makes a big difference when trying to find a specific construction. You can also search by chapter number, and do a straight word search as well.

With Derek Frymark (Dickinson ’13), I am editing a new digitization of Henry Frieze’s Vergilian Dictionary, and coordinating its head words with the lemmatizations of LASLA’s Dictionnaire fréquentiel Index inverse de la langue latine. In combination with some data kindly provided by LASLA, this will allow us to soon create full and accurate vocabulary lists for the whole of the Aeneid.

If you would like to get involved in any way, please don’t hesitate to drop me a line. We’re hoping to have the AP Aeneid selections up in spring 2015, but covering the whole Aeneid is the longer term goal. There is plenty to keep us busy!

–Chris Francese

By request, a reprise of my 2009 Op-ed on Latin college diplomas.

By CHRISTOPHER A. FRANCESE
Published: May 14, 2009
Carlisle, Pa.

CONGRATULATIONS. You are graduating this month with a Baccalaureatus Scientiae in Compertis ad Salutem Pertinentibus Administrandis. It sounds impressive, but what does it have to do with your degree in health information management? Almost no one knows, and that’s why the Latin diploma needs to go.

Latin is a beautiful language and a relief from the incessant novelty and informality of the modern age. But when it’s used on diplomas, the effect is to obfuscate, not edify; its function is to overawe, not delight. The goal of education is the creation and transmission of knowledge — not the creation and transmission of prestige. Why, then, celebrate that education with a document that prizes grandiosity over communication?

A disclosure: Diploma Latin has caused me some personal pain and humiliation. I am in charge of adjusting the complicated Latin dates on the diplomas at the college where I teach, a project I’ve always taken pride in.

Last year, I was asked to update the text, and I made a mistake; the details are almost too painful to recall. An extra keystroke of mine changed “anno” into “annno.” This went unnoticed — because most people couldn’t read the Latin anyway — until the diplomas had been printed and distributed. Later, some people did catch the mistake, including one of my best students, who assumed that a king’s ransom in tuition guaranteed her a proofread diploma. The college had to spend $4,000 to print new diplomas.

So, yes, I am scarred. But even before the recent unpleasantness, I had my doubts about the wisdom of using the language of Livy for this particular purpose.

I know that getting rid of the Latin diploma will not be easy. While most colleges and universities now issue English diplomas, some prominent holdouts — including Yale, Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania — still use Latin. Many students and alumni cherish the tradition. In 1961, when Harvard switched to English diplomas, about 4,000 students protested in the “diploma riots,” and criticized the new documents as “Y.M.C.A. certificates.”

We Latinists have also been resistant to change. Like most keepers of arcane knowledge, we savor our rare moments of prominence.

I say this from personal experience: Once, the hardened leader of the local SWAT team asked me for a Latin version of his team’s credo, “The strength of the wolf is in the pack, the strength of the pack is in the wolf.” I told him: “Robur gregi in lupo, robur lupo in grege.” He thanked me and then said the nine most comforting words a SWAT team leader could say to anyone: “Let me know if you ever need a favor.”

Admittedly, this pales in comparison to the fame gained by the Columbia University Latin scholar who had the high honor of translating for the press the tattoo of the woman at the center of the Eliot Spitzer scandal from “Tutela valui” to “I use protection.”

This all sounds very exciting, but these stories of linguistic derring-do obscure the fact that Latin diplomas have outlived their usefulness.

Originally, diplomas were letters of introduction given to travelers by the Roman government. For centuries, Latin served as a convenient common language among educated people around the world. This is no longer the case. Graduates don’t pull diplomas out of their glove boxes, and fraud is resolved by checking college records. But diplomas are still supposed to convey information, and Latin diplomas fail to fulfill that function. When one Dickinson College alumna recently applied to work at a public school, she had a photocopied version of her Latin diploma returned as foreign and illegible.

I’ve heard some argue that Latin is on diplomas because it’s beautiful and the language of Virgil and Cicero. The sad fact, though, is that diploma Latin is a far cry from Cicero’s Latin.

Roman writers composed some of the world’s most thrilling verse and were masters of historiography, oratory and philosophy. But diploma Latin is some of the most depressing and long-winded legalese you can find. Hiding behind the lovely calligraphy are maddening syntax and appalling neologisms. How do you say the name of every college town in Latin? You shouldn’t have to.

(Nor should you have to struggle to read the text in the illustration that accompanies this piece, so let me help you out. It says: “I can’t understand this either.”)

As a college professor, I try to tell my students that education is more than a status symbol. Its purpose is the development of the mind and social usefulness through the clear communication of information and ideas. Why contradict that with the very piece of paper that is meant to represent the work they’ve done? A college education is something to be proud of, but its prestige should lie in its content, not its form.

I love Latin, but when the last American diploma is finally converted to English I will say, “Ita vero.” Right on.

[A version of this article appeared in print on May 15, 2009, on page A39 of the New York edition of the New York Times, and on the Times’ web site.]