Introduction
The origins of the editorial mode of the anthology date back to antiquity. It has come to represent what Milad Doueihi describes as “the ideal form and format of digital cultur” (Doueihi 2011, 105). In accordance with this idea, the Palatine Anthology (PA) Project, coordinated by the Canada Research Chair on digital textualities directed by Marcello Vitali-Rosati, gathers severals international partners including Italian and French schools in order to establish a collaborative critical digital edition and a multilingual translation of all the epigrams of the PA. In particular, our project aims to demonstrate how a digital and collaborative edition of the PA was designed to demonstrate its own philological, editorial and pedagogic challenges, in other words to deal with its complexity. The digital collaborative publishing and the provision of common tools, of course, present technical challenges, but the complexity we mention comes more from reflection prior to editing, that of a visualization of the constitutive heterogeneity and rich of Palatine Anthology.
The Palatine Anthology
Since its discovery in 1606 by Claude Saumaise in the Palatina Library of Heidelberg in Germany (Aubreton 1968), the manuscript of the PA (Codex Palatinus 23) has had a considerable influence on literature and art. Despite the institution of a version as the main source (the Codex), the Anthology in its editorial dimension remains a work of composition and the sum of editorial events – translations, additions, withdrawals or successive losses by the compilers over more than six centuries of history. Ultimately, it derives from a collection compiled in approximately 100 BC., by the poet Meleager of Gadara (Gutzwiller 1997). This collection, entitled The Crown, was arranged by Meleager not randomly, but according to particular organizational principles. These principles have been brought to light by recent research, most notably relating to studies that focus on the literary themes of the epigrams (Cameron 1993). Anthology thus remains a complex co-construction whose truth lies less in the authority of a version than in a sum of possible versions.
The form of the “anthology” is, by nature, difficult to grasp. Indeed, the PA challenges the concept of “oeuvre” – as a unified and cohesive body of work –, insofar as it brings together 4 000 epigrams written by more than one hundred different authors from over sixteen centuries of literary production (from the Byzantine empire to the 10th century AD). If we cannot consider the anthology as a unified and un-fragmented work, what then is its nature? The anthological coherence is thus less a matter of similarity (thematic, auctorial, formal, etc.) than of dialogue between epigrams. How to report in an edition? To these questions, the digital environment presents tools and possibilities allowing us to organize our research and work towards finding some answers1.
The PA project
Technical functions
The relational database which is built from the notion of an entity type — in a repository aligned to the Perseus URIs — as a textual unit. Each entity corresponds to an epigram, which we consider an anthological fragment. In our database, we are able to relate each entity with several types of information and, most notably, with several Greek text versions of the epigram. Our epistemological model has led us to consider the different versions of the Greek text in the same way as the set of possible translations. All these versions can be aligned with one another, thanks to a software editor, which structures the relationship between the Greek texts and the various translations (English, French and Italian). In this way, the project contributes to the production of semantic data as a result of the matching of our data with associated data repositories (Romanello, Berti, and Boschetti 2009). Each entity can be attributed to one or several authors, and can be tagged with keywords, which include metadata relating to themes such as epigrams, literary genres, the characters mentioned, the reading path, or the external references established by users. Each entity can also be linked to one or more scholia, whose texts are in the original Greek or a modern translation, and be associated with iconography or other texts and their corresponding epigram. This function allows us to underline what we have called the “weak links” between the text and artistic works, and we are thus able to enrich the anthological imaginary and heighten its accessibility.
This database is available to view in JSON through an API, making it possible to search terms and easily display data. Given that the API is openly accessible for reading and writing, it is also able to enrich the database. The API allows several forms of appropriation of textual material. For example, by proposing a “scientific display,” our project makes it possible to visualize all the information available on the database. We therefore provide public display, offering navigation via thematic reading paths (our intention is that these paths “narrativize” a group of epigrams), as well as a tweet bot which posts epigrams on the social network, associating them with the corresponding manuscript image. The API queries Wikidata ad hoc, in an openly accessible environment, to retrieve existing data.
An open web platform relies on the API to provide a dynamic visualization of epigrams, which are organized according to authors or to the reading paths and their metadata. In addition, the API enables its users to appropriate the PA thanks to its numeric tools (Solomon 1993 ; Bodard and Mahony 2016).
We chose to structure the data in JSON rather than XML / epidoc, a decision which may seem to break the habits of the Digital Critical Edition. However, we believe that the JSON stimulates the appropriation and reconfiguration of its content without disrupting the spirit of the anthology, that is its constitutive heterogeneity and intertextual skeleton. The flat structure of the JSON, unlike the tree structure of the XML / epidoc, allows the contributor/editor to reorganize data according to various paradigmatic interpretations. From these interoperable structures, we are able to extract data and share this data. The digital allows us to create connections between texts that are otherwise difficult to identify, perhaps even inaccessibile (Coffee et al. 2012). We believe that the PA is created by its composants (scholia), and yet also by its architecture (based on intertextuality), as a vast semantic system encompassing an endless dialogue between texts and between collective imaginaries. This system is a perfect example of the multidisciplinary reader engagement dynamic that the PA project facilitates.
Objectives
- Improving existing knowledge on the PA.
- Heuristic objective: to enrich studies in intertextuel relations between epigrams and scholia.
- Editorial and translation-related objectives: to give access to the original Greek text, to a new multilingual translation, to an unedited transcription and an unedited translation of comments in the margins of the manuscript, as well as to a thematically organized reading pathway.
- Circulation and accessibility: to contribute to enriching the foundations of the Perseus project (a leading source in free access diffusion of classical texts, with whom we collaborate) which will collect – in XML / epidoc format – all text, translations and alignments, as well as other relevant information, thanks to API queries: in this way, Perseus does not have, for instance, French, English and Italian translations of the epigrams, nor the Greek text of the scholies (Crane 1992).
- Experimenting in digital edition.
- To experiment in new forms of scholarly edition. We aim to create a digital environment that develops multiple approaches to scholarly edition and that facilitates an open, interdisciplinary dialogue between different research teams.
- To rethink the boundaries between the scholarly and the non-scholarly, via a participatory and collaborative approach between university and secondary school students (facilitated by our partnership with European secondary schools). We aim to test a pedagogical model relating to ancient languages by rethinking the role of less experienced researchers in an environment of knowledge production and circulation.
- To analyze the evolution of the concept of a literary oeuvre in a digital environment. The digital environment allows us to question the nature of the textual object, and therefore the nature of the PA, the anthology of anthologies, and the evolution of the intertextual object over centuries.
The project is currently structured around an API where more than 400 epigrams have been published (we foresee the total edition of the Anthology in the coming years)
and a current output to a site to view the API data. (site available and being improved).
By providing the users of the API a link to the Greek epigrams and to any related literary or artistic object, our project leads contemporary readers to appropriate these complex ancient texts and use digital possibilities to visualize a collective imaginary or topoï (Lévy 1994). Users are able to participate with the system, to discover this complex material, and to contribute to philological research on origins and influences of the PA (Crane, Seales, and Terras 2009).
The project of a PA’s digital and collaborative edition represents a significant development of knowledge in the Digital Classics (with mutually accessible and reusable tools), in the Scholar Edition (testing a new type of contents producing), but also in Digital Critical Edition (the relationship between data and document). Our project aims to foreground the complex nature of the Greek Anthology by creating a participatory platform capable of understanding such a text. If the Greek Anthology represents a diversity of collective imaginaries and centuries of literary thinking on places, civilizations and media, we believe that our collaborative and multidisciplinary approach renders these timeless echoes accessible and dynamic.
Our presentation will be structured as follows :
- Presentation of the PA and its unique editorial features
- Structure of the editorial project
- Collaborative edition and Heuristic aims
Bibliography
In this, the PA project is moving closer to other digital publishing projects of fragmented classical corpora such as Hyperdonat http://hyperdonat.tge-adonis.fr/, and Digital Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum http://www.dfhg-project.org/.↩︎