Individual Developments and Systematic Change in Philology

Individual Developments and Systematic Change in Philology

Gregory Crane

May 1, 2018

At the end of March 2018, my collaborators and I finished enjoying five years of support -- 5,000,000 EUR(!) -- from an Alexander von Humboldt Professorship, support which allowed young researchers from many different countries to work both as a team and on their own. Documenting all that work will be a significant task and requires its own publication(s).  Work, at Leipzig, Tufts and elsewhere, on Open Greek and Latin (OGL) and on the Canonical Text Services (CTS) protocol upon which OGL builds  provides the starting point for much of the work described below. A tremendous amount of support for OGL came from the European Social Fund and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, but collaborators at Perseus at Tufts University, at Mount Allison University in Canada, at the University of Virginia, at the Harvard Library and Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies (CHS) have contributed time and significant sums as well. As a group, they have made 37 million words of Greek and Latin available in CTS-compliant epiDoc TEI XML via GitHub.

This paper, however, does not focus primarily upon what happened at Leipzig but takes note of a number of events that have taken place in the opening months of 2018 and that have some connection to, but also depend upon efforts outside of, the Digital Humanities Chair at Leipzig. Each taken separately is important. All of these events taken together reflect a broader, systematic change -- and change for the better -- in Ancient Greek and Latin philology in particular and, ultimately, for all philology...