Overview

The seminar will introduce you to the work of the Homer Multitext project. Our focus this year will be on Iliad 17 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 two manuscripts.

Schedule

Arrival day

Monday, June 24, is arrival day. For participants who check in at CHS before 5:30, a group of our seminar leaders will meet with you to install all software needed for the project. (We will repeat this on Tuesday morning for those who arrive later.) We will meet for a reception and introduction to the seminar in the CHS Main Building at 6:30 p.m.

Introductory hackathon

We will spend Tuesday, June 25, in an all-day, hackathon-style introduction to editing manuscripts for the Homer Multitext project. Those who arrived later on Monday or still to need to complete software installation should meet in House A at 9:00. We will begin the hackathon with the whole group at 10:00.

Regular seminar schedule

Beginning on Wednesday, June 267, our general pattern of work will open 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 ask working groups to break, and spent some day reading and discussing the Iliad passage they have been assigned to edit.

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 17 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 one bifolio spread 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 17 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 2019 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 2019 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 2019 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
• using docker to run platform-independent applications.

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