A Digital Environment for Neolatin Studies

The 2005 annual convention of the ACH/ALLC to be
hosted at the University of Victoria will have the
intersection of multilingualism and humanities computing as
a prominent theme. It is therefore the perfect venue for
presentation of our work.
The graduate Institute for Latin Studies at the University of
Kentucky, begun in 2000, strongly emphasizes the active use
of the Latin language via pervasive oral immersion and rigorous
assignments in written composition. The faculty conducts a
sequence of graduate classes solely in Latin, and students meet
spontaneously in various extracurricular venues for further
practice. Equally against the grain, the Institute does not restrict
its focus to Republican and Imperial Latin of the ancient world
as Classical Studies departments typically do, but rather
encourages an appreciation of Latin from all periods, from
antiquity through early modern times.
This presentation will explore the many challenges and
opportunities posed for humanities computing by the practices
and emphases of the UK Institute for Latin Studies. These
challenges fall into the general categories of availability of
materials, interface design for a reading environment, and
general computational infrastructure for the study of Latin.
Regarding materials, we are responding to a general lack of
adequate resources for the active use of Latin as well as the
diachronic study of the language. We have produced
TEI-conformant XML editions of numerous Neolatin texts,
including the Moriae Encomium of Erasmus, the Orationes of
Muretus, the Argenis and Icon Animorum of Iohannes Barclaius,
the Eudemia of Ianus Nicius, and the Psyche Cretica of Ioannes
Ludovicus Praschius. We have begun to produce the world's
only unified archive (in any medium) of all known Latin colloquia, dialogues written expressly for the purpose of
teaching people how to speak Latin. We are now completing
work on electronic editions of colloquia by Erasmus, Corderius,
Duncanus, and Vives, and have already identified many more
examples from this genre for inclusion in our archive. We intend
to have a constant stream of students writing (Latin)
commentaries on the texts that we publish. As an example, last
year a graduate student in our program made a selection from
Erasmus' Colloquia, equipping the texts with introductions,
notes and questions to help teachers guide students through
texts that may be unknown to the teachers themselves. This
kind of work will be important in advancing the utility of our
text archive.
Another current digitization project that is related to our goal
of keeping Latin learners' minds in Latin is our production of
a TEI-XML edition of an all-Latin grammar, Grammatica
classicae latinitatis by J. Llobera and E. Alvarez (Barcelona
1919). Also, with support from the UK Center for
Computational Sciences, this year we are developing a separate
grant proposal that would fund a multiyear project to digitize
important all-Latin lexica by Forcellini and Du Cange.
We realize that most teachers currently lack experience in
conducting their classrooms in spoken Latin, so we will also
create our own web-based interactive dialogues (in audiovisual
formats) of progressive sophistication. Such exercises in spoken
Latin will facilitate students' understanding and will foster an
immediate familiarization with the language.
All of the digitized materials we create will be freely available
online and will carry appropriate Creative Commons licenses,
permitting students and scholars worldwide to use them without
cost or restrictions. Our repository will link with others via the
Classical Text Services Protocol now being developed under
the auspices of the Center for Hellenic Studies, broadening the
selection of high quality marked up classical texts available
worldwide, as well as allowing our other tools to operate, at
least partially, on texts outside our project.
What we anticipate as an ultimate synthesis of all these activities
is a digital reading and learning environment, built on the
Apache Cocoon platform, that allows our own resources, and
others flowing in from elsewhere, to be tied together and used
selectively to meet the needs of a vertical spectrum of
Neolatinists. For students we will associate well spoken versions
of the source texts, allow them to click through to
morphological and hence lexical data, connect them with
grammatical and historical notes, show them a variety of
translations, and perhaps even give feedback on their own
pronunciations. More advanced scholars may be able to see
photographs of manuscripts, automatically collate manuscript
transcriptions according to their own stemmatological theories,
or call up related commentaries and other scholarship.
Many of the individuals interested in later Latin are not
professional scholars, but the Internet allows talented amateurs
back into the academic market. How can we best manage the
signal to noise ratio? Moreover, those professional scholars of
Neolatin who do exist are scattered worldwide. We need to
provide tools that not only give everyone access to rarer texts
(and ancillary resources), but also harness the expertise and
enthusiasms of the reading public to improve them. The work
done at the University of Kentucky on the Suda On Line project
showed how a web-based community of scholars could tackle
a project too large for any one individual and gradually make
real progress. Accordingly we plan on extending the results of
that experiment with a framework for lexicography that enables
the continuous improvement of our fundamental reference
works by a distributed set of users.
Bibliography
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