Overview

The seminar will introduce you to the work of the Homer Multitext project. Our focus this year will be on Iliad 10 in two early manuscripts of the Iliad, the Venetus B, and the Upsilon 1.1 manuscript from the Escorial Library. Participants will work in teams of 2-3 student and faculty members to contribute to the first complete edition of the scholia from these manuscripts. Our general pattern of work will begin each morning and afternoon with a group seminar session, followed by a break-out at mid-morning and mid-afternoon to work in teams on the following projects. In the late afternoon, we will have a brief hands-on session learning how to use our large existing archive of data with short scripts.

Projects

All participants will contribute to the major collective effort (introduced in more detail in Washington) to produce the HMT project’s “total edition” of Iliad 10 in the the “twin” manuscripts, a scholarly diplomatic edition of the Iliad text, the accompanying scholia (or scholarly notes) on the text, and all other features we find in the manuscript. Teams will be assigned a single page in each manuscript at a time. Because the quantity of scholia on each page varies greatly, it is possible that some teams will complete multiple lightly annotated pages in the same time another team spends on a single page with dense commentary. With a little good fortune, we should edit a substantial part of Iliad 10 while we are together in Washington.

In addition, individual groups will also work on a presentation to the rest of the seminar on one interesting research result from their editorial work.

Greek skills covered in summer 2018 workshop

The seminar will introduce participants to the oral origins of Homeric poetry, and to the historical transmission of the Homeric poems. We will see how that historical transmission leads to a multitextual perspective on the Iliad, and to the conclusion that in 2018 only a digital multitext can fully express a multitextual archive.

Students with any level of prior background in Greek are welcome. All participants will be introduced to the distinctive language and style of the scholarly Greek we find in the scholia.

Technical skills covered in summer 2018 workshop

No specific technical background is assumed. In the course of the seminar, all participants will become familiar with the following specific technical skills:

• using version control (git) to manage collaborative work
• using the bash shell to work in a POSIX system (Linux, Unix)
• citing scholarly resources with URN notation (CTS URNs, and CITE Object URNs)
• using markdown together with URN notation to format your own writing
• editing texts in TEI-conformant XML
• brief introduction to writing short scripts to query the HMT archive

Additional technical topics may be offered in optional sessions, depending on the background and interests of participants.