Greek, Latin, and Digital Philology in Germany and the United States
Gregory Crane
Abstract
This is the first section of a three part essay. This part begins by briefly (and somewhat autobiographically) referencing the changing role of the German philological paradigm in Greco-Roman scholarship in the United States over the past forty years, then goes on by augmenting some published statistics about the decline in German publications cited in English language journals of Greco-Roman studies and concludes by providing some statistics for the size and composition of the German Professoriate in Greek and Latin Philology, Greco-Roman History, and Greco-Roman Archaeology (along with comparable data for Byzantine studies, Medieval Latin, Egyptology and Assyriology). In part 2, I will move on to describe the scale of Greco-Roman studies in the US. Part 3 will compare and contrast the two very different systems. Here, as elsewhere, my goal is to initiate discussion. All comments -- especially any corrections or information about how to interpret governmental statistics quoted below can be sent to gcrane2008@gmail.com
Gregory Crane
Summary:
I have now released a draft for part 2 of Greek, Latin, and Digital Philology in the United States. This part includes some information about Greco-Roman studies in the US, with some comparisons with the situation in Germany, and then moves on with a very brief and preliminary start for suggestions as how Germany can make itself an (even more) attractive location for a research career in this field.
Gregory Crane[Draft as of July 20, 2015]
Abstract: Who is the audience for the work that we professional researchers conduct on Greco-Roman culture? Frequently heard remarks, observed practices and published survey results indicate most of us still assume that only specialists and revenue-generating students really matter. If the public outside of academia does not have access to up-to-date data about the Greco-Roman world, whose problem is it? If we specialists do not believe that we have a primary responsibility to open up the field as is now possible in a digital age, then I am not sure why we should expect support from anyone other than specialists or the students who enroll in our classes. If we do believe that we have an obligation to open up the field, then that has fundamental implications for our daily activities, for our operational theory justifying the existence of our positions, and for the hermeneutics (following a term that is still popular in Germany) that we construct about who can know what.
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