The Suda On Line: Applying Computer Technology to Ancient and Byzantine Studies

The Suda On Line: Applying Computer Technology to
Ancient and Byzantine Studies

Ross
Scaife

U of Kentucky
scaife@uky.edu

Raphael
Finkel

U of Kentucky
raphael@cs.uky.edu

2003

University of Georgia

Athens, Georgia

ACH/ALLC 2003

editor

Eric
Rochester

William
A.
Kretzschmar, Jr.

encoder

Sara
A.
Schmidt

Using highly interdisciplinary methods we have built a collaborative
infrastructure for translation and annotation of ancient texts. This
generalizable infrastructure is now fully deployed in the Suda On Line ). The Suda is a 10th century Byzantine
Greek lexicon of some 30,000 lemmata. After four years of continuous development
we have implemented a complex yet effective and practical system. Our goal is
not only to provide the SOL as a useful tool for researchers, but also to
explore and facilitate the modes of scholarship now made possible by open source
technology and the internet: this effort is cooperative rather than solitary,
communal rather than proprietary, worldwide rather than localized, evolving
rather than static. Our international team of managing editors, editors, and
translators has now worked up approximately one third of the material in the
Suda, quite a satisfactory rate of progress. ACH/ALLC in Glasgow had an initial
presentation concerning this project; we feel that substantial further
development and our positive results warrant an update at this time.
In order to encourage the participation of translators and editors, and in order
to make the SOL database a useful scholarly resource as quickly as possible, we
make our materials available to users as soon as it is submitted. We acknowledge
that this philosophy raises concerns. One of the major issues with electronic
publication of scholarship is the potential it has for circumventing time-tested
procedures for quality control. While we do not want simply to add to the sea of
uncontrolled material on the Web, at the same time we insist on our right to
experiment, and we have no desire to replicate the print-publication paradigm in
electronic format. Many of the advantages that electronic publication offers,
including immediacy, accessibility and adaptability, are seriously handicapped
by traditional editorial processes, where chronic bottlenecks frequently develop
in the effort to keep the publishing house’s imprimatur off of anything with any
detectable shortcomings. In order to exploit these advantages of the web while
at the same time maintaining a reasonable level of quality control, submissions
to the SOL database undergo the following process of editorial evaluation and monitoring:
1. Initial submissions immediately become accessible to users
searching or browsing at the SOL site, but their “draft” status is
clearly marked.
2. Once a submission has been carefully vetted by one of the SOL
editors for errors and significant omissions, its status as part of the
SOL database may rise from draft into one of two categories: low or
high. At every stage of this process, the editors who participate in
vetting and improving the entry will be prominently identified to the
user, along with any descriptive comments they may provide concerning
their editorial work.
3. Most importantly, even an entry that has achieved high status will
not be considered perfect and immutable. At the discretion of the
editors, improvements, changes and additions of links and bibliography
can continue indefinitely.

While this way of doing things puts more of the burden of quality control on the
end user, our system of marking editorial status gives researchers significant
assistance in coming to an informed decision about the reliability of the
material in SOL. In fact, our system offers definite advantages over the
canonical paradigm of peer review from the consumer’s point of view. In print
scholarship (and electronic scholarship that merely follows the traditional
model) the number, identity, and qualifications of reviewers remain hidden, and
one must usually base one’s estimate of the reliability of the scholarship
solely on the identity of the author and the general reputation of the venue. In
the standard paradigm, moreover, the end product is more or less fixed, whereas
our database is being improved continuously.
This presentation will describe our project from various perspectives, including
the following principal points of discussion. (1) An overview of the Suda
itself, including a few examples that illustrate its diverse composition and
unique value for several fields of humanistic scholarship, despite its flaws and
peculiarities. (2) The multiyear interdisciplinary collaboration among computer
scientists, historians, and philologists that has produced our results so far.
(3) The academic ideology that guides our production of a freely-available and
open-ended e-text, including significant ways in which our editorial practices
diverge from more traditional ones. (4) The most important features of the
online site available on a hierarchical basis to the participants and the
general public. (5) The specific applications and programming technologies that
enable those features. (6) Our most recent effort: generation of a unified,
complete, and self-documenting XML snapshot of our data. This latest ability
addresses our responsibility to ensure the long-term archival security and
viability of our results, and it also allows us to experiment with powerful new
technologies centered around XSLT programming and the Cocoon environment for the
transformation and publication of electronic documents. The presentation will
include a demonstration of these experiments and conclude with the prospects for
future developments.