How do you coordinate contributions from a hundred editors and ensure the quality of the resulting archive? For the HMT project, that is not a hypothetical question. Our reponse involves a combination of software and project organization that differs in some significant ways from other digital projects. This post summarizes the technological systems we use. A later post will separately describe the work flow we follow as we work in teams.
Summer work at Holy Cross editing Iliad 18 and 19 in the Venetus A manuscript wrapped up on July 31. The team completed new editions of thousands of words of scholia; because they meticulously applied the HMT project’s validation system (MOM) to every page they worked on, they helped improve enormously the code libraries providing the underpinnings of MOM’s validation. As a result, the milestones in the issue tacker for the hmt-utils library now include a series of projects that will not only improve our real-time validation of editorial work, but will support increasingly sophisticated analyses with automated indexing and correlation of HMT content.
This post comes from the team of editors creating the HMT editions of Iliad 15 and Iliad 18 in the Venetus A manuscript during the Holy Cross Summer Research program in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences: Brian Clark ‘15, Claude Hanley ‘18, Stephanie Neville ‘17, Charlie Schufreider ‘17, Alex Simrell ‘16, and Melody Wauke ‘17. Their perceptive solution to the problem of this particular scholion and its lemma demonstrates their masterful familiarity with the Venetus A manuscript and the practices of its scribe. — Mary Ebbott
This post was written by Brian Clark (Holy Cross ‘15) and Alex Simrell (Holy Cross ‘16). In it they observe the practices of the Venetus A scribe when he has too much material for his usual layout of certain types of scholia on the same page, and they draw some preliminary conclusions from those observations. Their work was accomplished during the Holy Cross Summer Research program in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences and was supported by the Center for Hellenic Studies. — Mary Ebbott
The 2015 summer seminar at the Center for Hellenic Studies ended this week. We owe a debt of thanks to all the participants. Together with a team at the College of the Holy Cross that is continuing to work on HMT editions throughout July, they have helped us test and pull together an increasingly thorough set of project documentation, available at http://homermultitext.github.io/hmt-docs/.
