Digital Papyrology II

Nicola Reggiani

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783110547597
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

The ongoing digitisation of the literary papyri (and related technical texts like the medical papyri) is leading to new thoughts on the concept and shape of the "digital critical edition" of ancient documents. First of all, there is the need of representing any textual and paratextual feature as much as possible, and of encoding them in a semantic markup that is very different from a traditional critical edition, based on the mere display of information. Moreover, several new tools allow us to reconsider not only the linguistic dimension of the ancient texts (from exploiting the potentialities of linguistic annotation to a full consideration of language variation as a key to socio-cultural analysis), but also the very concept of philological variation (replacing the mono-authorial view of an reconstructed archetype with a dynamic multitextual model closer to the fluid aspect of the textual transmission). The contributors, experts in the application of digital strategies to the papyrological research, face these issues from their own viewpoints, not without glimpses on parallel fields like Egyptology and Near Eastern studies. The result is a new, original and cross-disciplinary overview of a key issue in the digital humanities.

Part 1: Platforms Between Theory and Practice

Nicola Reggiani

The Corpus of the Greek Medical Papyri and a New Concept of Digital Critical Edition

The present contribution is published in the framework of the Project “Online Humanities Scholarship: A Digital Medical Library Based on Ancient Texts” (DIGMEDTEXT, Principal Investigator Professor Isabella Andorlini), funded by the European Research Council (Advanced Grant no. 339828) at the University of Parma (http://www.papirologia.unipr.it/ERC).

1Defining and shaping a digital critical edition

Traditionally and basically, a critical edition of a text is the printed output of a philological work, i.e. the process of reconstruction of a textual archetype (the ‘source’) among different variants, aimed at reproducing the original text as most exactly as possible, or, in other terms, as the fixed representation of a scholar’s more or less trustable opinion on that text. Accordingly, and rather intuitively, a digital critical edition should be defined as the digital output of a philological work. We will see what a “digital output” involves in methodological and epistemological terms but, to start, it must be noted that traditionally a digital critical edition is regarded as the digital transfer of a printed critical edition. Sometimes, this process regretfully gets rid of the attribute ‘critical’, so that we have digital editions or textual corpora deprived of apparatus criticus and therefore ‘uncritical’, as in the well-known cases of the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae or of the Perseus Digital Library. This treatment presents encoding advantages, since one reference edition is chosen and digitized, but also huge disadvantages in terms of usability, because search and analysis functions are limited to the chosen text, without consideration, e.g., for textual variants, alternatives or different editorial solutions.1 Somewhat ‘hybrid’ editions try to save the constitutio textus (the restitution of a text as close as possible to the supposed original) alongside the recording of variant readings: for example, the former Duke Databank of Documentary Papyri with the spelling variants (as written on the original papyrus) embedded within the ‘normalized’ text with special markup.2 A fairer transfer process preserves the apparatus criticus, which is usually displayed in a way that resembles the printed edition. The simplest examples are PDF editions (either scans of paper samples or born-digital files like the publications of the PHerc project),3 the most articulated ones are the digital editions available at the Papyri.info platform, where critical annotations, encoded as inline XML markup elements, are processed and displayed in an apparatus of print-like format, stressing the distance between the ‘correct’ text and alternatives, variants, actual textual features.

Fig. 1: PSI XV 1510, medical catechism on anatomy, III cent. AD: printed edition and digital edition at http://litpap.info/dclp/64024.

This traditional view is being challenged as rather uncomfortable by the development of digital technologies in the ancient studies, as well as by an increasing concern for the actual testimonies and the process of textual tradition: we may define it as a sort of ‘phenomenological’ approach. Digital projects like the Homer Multitext Project (HMT) or the Leipzig Open Fragmentary Texts Series (LOFTS) started envisaging a different approach to textual criticism, in deploying a text that is in fact a multitext, a fluid and dynamic network of multiple editions aligned to each other (by means of a URN architecture) rather than a traditional fixed structure of text and apparatus criticus,4 In this framework, the uneasiness of texts that are felt not being completely suitable for a ‘traditional’ critical edition (e.g. oral Homeric poetry,5 fragmentary sources6) merges with the new capabilities of digital infrastructures, which offer much more dimensions than printed paper. Hypertext is a new writing space, to which editors have to adapt the texts:7

[o]nce we are able to overcome the physical limits of printed editions by joining together variants and conjectures referring to the same texts, it also becomes possible to look at the texts from a new and broader perspective, with possible consequences for our knowledge and comprehension of them.8

Thence, an unavoidable fact:

[w]e need to move in the direction of digitally conceived and initiated types of information and away from mopping up information from print sources.9

As it has been put very effectively, the hypertext architecture is challenging the Urtext model,10 and it paves the way for exploring the possibilities of “holistic” models where editorial choices are superseded by an interactive network of all extant data, with potentially infinite information layers.11 Perhaps, the model that better describes this ideal condition is an ontology design:

an ontology is the most suitable solution to represent critical editions of ancient texts for two main reasons: first, we want to be able to link different kinds of resources […] that have in common the possibility of being referred to via URIs, which is one of the principles of the Semantic Web; second, information contained in critical editions constitutes a layer of interpretation and a description of relations about texts that is important to keep clearly distinct from the texts themselves. Indeed, the use of stand-off metadata encoded within ontology allows us to express an open-ended number of interpretations, whereas a markup-based solution would not make this possible due to obvious reasons of overlapping hierarchies.12

Fig. 2: A sample ontology model (from ROMANELLO – BERTI – BOSCHETTI – BABEU – CRANE 2009, 167).

2Papyrology: philology in flux

Papyrology is, in its more essential core, all about providing trustable critical editions (and commentaries) of papyrus texts.13 Though projected towards a broad historical and cultural evaluation of the textual data,14 it is intimately a philological discipline:15 no one can deny that without texts there would exist no Papyrology. Yet it is a very peculiar philological discipline, since it is well aware of the fluidity of its objects of study:16 texts are continuously published, updated, collected, revised, corrected, emended, republished, and there is hunger for resources that can help handling an overwhelming amount of primary data.17 It is – to borrow the successful concept that Zygmunt Bauman launched to emphasize the fact of change in the modern times18 – a ‘liquid’ philology, for which digital environments seem extremely fitting; in particular, collaborative platforms like SoSOL seem the most suitable incarnation of this complex and fluid editorial workflow.19

Moreover, Papyrology has always been facing an adventurous textual situation, having to cope with fragmentary and unique texts and idiosyncratic utterances, and has developed a remarkable interest in the scribal and material phenomenology of textual features and transmission, which affects consistency in treating the wide series of textual fluctuations occurring in the papyri. Indeed, while philological analysis would gladly treat fluctuations as deviations from a standard archetype (i.e. mistakes or, more gently, variants) and normalize them in a reconstructed critical edition, they actually bear significant socio-cultural relevance and are of fundamental importance from the viewpoint of the phenomenology of the papyrus texts, its interpretation, and ancient writing culture in general. In other words, very often fluctuations are not used to reconstruct a text but to investigate relevant socio-cultural phenomena. Accordingly, the papyrologists’ behaviour towards such textual flavours is twofold, and generates a wide variety of editorial inconsistencies that affect printed editions as well as digital databanks.

As to the latter, the issue at stake is not only critical agreement or scholarly standards, but also (as hinted above) the usability of the tools themselves, in terms of searching and encoding. The best example, from my own experience, is the case of the word ἑρμηνεία, which often occurs in the papyri in the iotacistic form ἑρμηνία. The spelling ‘variant’ is treated differently in the printed editions, being sometimes ‘regularized’ in the apparatus, sometimes not, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Foreword
• Contents
• Part 1: Platforms Between Theory and Practice
• Part 2: Linguistic Perspectives
• Indices