{"id":947,"date":"2015-03-10T23:18:48","date_gmt":"2015-03-10T23:18:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/dcc\/?p=947"},"modified":"2015-03-11T11:27:51","modified_gmt":"2015-03-11T11:27:51","slug":"liberating-the-text","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/dcc\/2015\/03\/10\/liberating-the-text\/","title":{"rendered":"Liberating the Text"},"content":{"rendered":"

Gregory Crane has written a fierce new manifesto <\/a>directed at editors of classical texts, in which he\u00a0urges scholars\u00a0to \u201cliberate textual data from corporate control\u201d by publishing editions only in open (Creative Commons) licensed venues and only in TEI-XML tagged formats, thus making them interoperable and freely accessible to a global audience. He laments the lack of progress\u00a0in this direction, noting that\u00a0TEI encoding has been around since the 1980s, and open licenses since the 1990s. The main culprit, he says, is academic politics, and the perceived need to publish under an established university press to receive formal academic credit. The publishing of critical texts only in book form is “preventing Classical Greek and Latin from shifting to a fully open intellectual ecosystem.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"source:<\/a>

source: http:\/\/goo.gl\/yPDNIw<\/p><\/div>\n

The solution he proposes is for scholarly editors to publish their work themselves:<\/p>\n

If editors wish to work on their own to create editions of Greek and Latin texts, they should buy a TEI-aware XML editor and learn how to produce a modern edition. Anyone smart enough to edit an edition of Greek and Latin is smart enough to understand the necessary TEI XML.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Why TEI? Working in interoperable TEI XML will allow for competing editions to be compared:<\/p>\n

Here the goal is to have as many TEI XML transcriptions as possible and to help researchers visualize the degree to which different editions differ and to be able to compare different editions.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The ideal of a universal, interoperable apparatus criticus that collates all textual variants and conjectures of scholars based on existing print editions is probably, he admits, an unattainable one. He\u00a0argues instead for a more pragmatic approach to apparatus, one that allows for word search that links to page images of the original print resources:<\/p>\n

Here our goal is to have a maximally clean searchable text but not to add substantive TEI XML markup that captures the structure of the textual notes \u2014 the structure of these notes tend to be complicated and inconsistent. Our pragmatic goal is to support \u201cimage front searching,\u201d so that scholars can find words in the textual notes and then see the original page images.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Another proposal\u00a0is to create a series of open-licensed textual commentaries that collate the textual variants that are deemed most significant:<\/p>\n

Strategy one: Support advanced graduate students and a handful of supervisory faculty to go through reviews of recent editions, identifying those editorial decisions that were deemed most significant. The output of this work would be an initial CC-BY-SA series of machine-actionable commentaries that could automatically flag all passages in the CC-BY-SA editions where copyrighted editions made significant decisions. In effect, we would be creating a new textual review series. Because the textual commentaries would be open and available under a CC-BY-SA, members of the community could suggest additions to them or create new expanded versions or create completely new, but interoperable, textual commentaries that could be linked to the CC-BY-SA texts. Here the goal is to create an initial set of data about textual decisions in copyrighted editions and a framework that members of the community can extend.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Crane imagines\u00a0the objection that all this infrastructure is not really needed, since those who use critical editions of classical texts have access to all that they need, and that nobody else really needs scholarly critical editions of classical authors. But this view he sees as essentially suicidal for advanced research that is publicly funded:<\/p>\n

If we think that specialists at well-funded academic institutions alone need access to the best textual data, we should express that position clearly so that the federally funded agencies and private foundations know where we stand.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Rather, scholars have an obligation (the word occurs four times) to share their ultimately public-funded work with the public that has ultimately paid for it.\u00a0The driving force behind this passionately argued essay is a profound sense of duty, a commitment to \u201cour obligation as humanists to advance the intellectual life of humanity.\u201d<\/p>\n

My questions and comments are as follows:<\/p>\n