Classicists face a unique opportunity. Google, Microsoft, the Open Content Alliance and other emerging projects (such as the European i2010 initiative) have begun to create very large collections ultimately designed to exceed in size the largest academic print libraries on earth. Classics stands to gain more than many disciplines. Among work published in the United States, many useful editions, reference materials and publications are in the public domain and thus are among the first texts to be included in these projects....
Immense digital libraries based on open access and aimed at massive audiences put scholars under an obligation to avoid a new access divide opening up between ourselves and the wider community that we serve....
The expectations for digital editions should be higher than for their predecessors: we expect dynamic textual notes (compare witness A vs. B), links to high resolution images of the manuscript, papyrus, inscription or other source, and potentially even new forms of annotation (e.g., syntactic markup as a component of a standard edition). Our job is to make these huge new collections a foundation for this next generation of more expressive and sophisticated editions.
New digital tools should go beyond their print counterparts in at least three ways.
First, reference materials and scholarly editions should provide a knowledge base to support advanced services...
Second, reference materials and scholarly editions should be updatable in a continuous, documented, versioned fashion....
Third, human and machine decisions should reinforce each other. Just as OCR should provide a first draft that editors may correct, named entity identification, syntactic analysis, morphological analysis and similar processes should provide useful initial results that human readers can correct and augment....
Recommendations:
1) We should do our best to build on what Google, OCA and other projects are doing, augmenting and enhancing it for the uses of classicists....Centuries of classical scholarship and a generation of digital classics have put us in a position where we can add value to these raw materials, making them intellectually accessible to audiences at any point on the globe.
Enhancements may take several steps. First, we must establish a service with materials on which we can freely experiment (these include many of the image books entering the Open Content Alliance). Second, academic libraries such as Michigan can apply these techniques directly to the sources files that Google has digitized from their collections. Third, these services, once published, will, we hope, become standard within large commercial libraries....
2) Core open source content: While we may rely on Google etc. to digitize the vast majority of content, we must as a profession take responsibility for creating and maintaining a rich core of reliable editions and reference works described above that can be uploaded into any digital library, and which individuals and groups can use to provide a starting point for the new, open source knowledge base on which scholarship will depend. In this case, the Open Content Alliance, with its commitment to the free distribution of ideas, provides a natural collaborator.
3) Open source services: e.g., GATE (Generalized Architecture for Text Engineering), Zotero, Canonical Text Services, Morpheus, the University of Chicago’s PhiloLogic, TextGrid, EpiDoc (discipline-specific XML for epigraphy), Duke Databank of Documentary Papyri, components of the Perseus Digital Library, interoperable geo-referenced data via protocols disseminated by Pleiades....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/15/2006 04:50:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
