Final Report Summary - DEMETRIOS OF SCEPSIS (A digital edition of the fragments of Demetrios of Scepis)
1. Publishable summary
The Marie Curie fellowship was one step in a larger project which started as a Habilitation thesis at the University of Hamburg in 2008 and will be submitted there during the academic year 2013-2014. The project focused on Demetrios of Scepsis, a Homeric scholar from the 2nd century BCE and aimed at giving a new account of the impact the scholar's work had on the development of classical scholarship, especially with regard to such fundamental texts as the two Homeric poems. To achieve this goal the research was divided into two parts. In the first part, the researcher prepared a monograph on Demetrios of Scepsis in which the achievements of the scholar are explained and the remaining fragments of his work analysed. The second part consisted in the online edition of the corpus of fragments that remained from his work and it was for the tasks of this second part that the researcher submitted the application for the Marie Curie fellowship. The expertise of the members of the DDH was required to help the researcher to find a technique which enables her to present fragmentarily preserved texts in a digital environment. Especially the researches carried out in the context of the SAWS-project were extremely useful for the issues the researcher's project raised. The members of the SAWS-project also worked on the transmission of texts preserved through quotations and understood from the very beginning of the fellowship the problematic of the researcher's material. The collaboration was therefore extremely fruitful and decisive for the results which have been achieved during the fellowship. As far as these results are concerned, the new approach developed when working with fragmentarily preserved texts in a digital environment is certainly the first to be mentioned. Indeed in order to define a textual fragment as a digitally understandable object its nature and especially its status within the source where it has been preserved have to be described in a completely new way. Here the SAWS-project achieved pioneering work and developed a completely new method to describe the relationship between the quoted fragment and the context in which it has been transmitted. This change of perspective, which the researcher adopted also for her own research project, will lead to the most perceptible and far-reaching impact on further studies and this even beyond the field of Classics. This conclusion became evident for instance during the workshop the researcher co-organised with the SAWS-project in May 2013 to presented the issues her projects and the SAWS-project raised to a larger audience composed of researchers from several academic fields (Classics, Theology, Philosophy and Digital Humanities). The shift from the more traditional concept of fragment used in such kind of researches to the one of reuse of textual elements was discussed and its consequences for our better understanding of this essential part of the heritage from Antiquity was highlighted. Indeed a large part of the texts from Antiquity has been preserved only through quotations which therefore provide essential witnesses for scholars in the field of Classics and also when focusing on the reception of antique knowledge in our modern societies.
Among the results more closely related to the elaboration of the researcher's project the technical work on the XML-files as a necessary basis for the online edition of the corpus of texts the researcher is working with should be mentioned first. The online publication will allow both flexible functionality and compatibility with other conformant projects. The selection of a set of sample-texts which are now ready, as proof of concept, for demonstration, should allow further steps towards the completion of the entire online edition; this will, however, only be possible through further close collaboration with research institutions promoting the development of Digital Humanities. Secondly, the scholarly contribution the researcher wrote about the newly discovered fragment of Demetrios of Scepsis (P.Oxy. 5094) figures also among the more tangible results of the fellowship. This article will be published in the ZPE at the beginning of 2014. Finally, with regard to the more conventional work which will lead to the monograph on Demetrios of Scepsis as a scholar substantial progress was made during the fellowship. The results will be presented in form of an academic publication which will be available once the evaluation process through which the work has to go at the University of Hamburg is completed. The impact of this part of the research will be seen by the new insights the study will bring about for the history of scholarship. Demetrios lived in the 2nd century BCE, a period that saw, because of the fundamental influence of the great centres of scholarship such as the libraries of Alexandria and Pergamon on the working methods of scholars of the period, the birth of textual criticism, which is still a basic research tool in many domains in the field of Humanities. Therefore, a study focusing on one of the scholars working in this crucial period will provide a better understanding of the whole tradition of scholarship and allows further considerations about its status in the present academic world. The parallelism is especially timely as the new means which the research facilities of those days offered for the development of new methods and research tools can be compared to the important advances of technologies and infrastructures which the development of Digital Humanities offers nowadays. Therefore the aim of a work on this crucial moment in Antiquity, such as the researcher is carrying out, is not only important for the field of Classics, but should also be seen, because it is combining the long tradition of scholarship with the new approaches of Digital Humanities, as a reflexion on the history of the discipline, the status it has nowadays and the function it could take with regard to the fundamental changes the academic world at large is currently facing.
The Marie Curie fellowship was one step in a larger project which started as a Habilitation thesis at the University of Hamburg in 2008 and will be submitted there during the academic year 2013-2014. The project focused on Demetrios of Scepsis, a Homeric scholar from the 2nd century BCE and aimed at giving a new account of the impact the scholar's work had on the development of classical scholarship, especially with regard to such fundamental texts as the two Homeric poems. To achieve this goal the research was divided into two parts. In the first part, the researcher prepared a monograph on Demetrios of Scepsis in which the achievements of the scholar are explained and the remaining fragments of his work analysed. The second part consisted in the online edition of the corpus of fragments that remained from his work and it was for the tasks of this second part that the researcher submitted the application for the Marie Curie fellowship. The expertise of the members of the DDH was required to help the researcher to find a technique which enables her to present fragmentarily preserved texts in a digital environment. Especially the researches carried out in the context of the SAWS-project were extremely useful for the issues the researcher's project raised. The members of the SAWS-project also worked on the transmission of texts preserved through quotations and understood from the very beginning of the fellowship the problematic of the researcher's material. The collaboration was therefore extremely fruitful and decisive for the results which have been achieved during the fellowship. As far as these results are concerned, the new approach developed when working with fragmentarily preserved texts in a digital environment is certainly the first to be mentioned. Indeed in order to define a textual fragment as a digitally understandable object its nature and especially its status within the source where it has been preserved have to be described in a completely new way. Here the SAWS-project achieved pioneering work and developed a completely new method to describe the relationship between the quoted fragment and the context in which it has been transmitted. This change of perspective, which the researcher adopted also for her own research project, will lead to the most perceptible and far-reaching impact on further studies and this even beyond the field of Classics. This conclusion became evident for instance during the workshop the researcher co-organised with the SAWS-project in May 2013 to presented the issues her projects and the SAWS-project raised to a larger audience composed of researchers from several academic fields (Classics, Theology, Philosophy and Digital Humanities). The shift from the more traditional concept of fragment used in such kind of researches to the one of reuse of textual elements was discussed and its consequences for our better understanding of this essential part of the heritage from Antiquity was highlighted. Indeed a large part of the texts from Antiquity has been preserved only through quotations which therefore provide essential witnesses for scholars in the field of Classics and also when focusing on the reception of antique knowledge in our modern societies.
Among the results more closely related to the elaboration of the researcher's project the technical work on the XML-files as a necessary basis for the online edition of the corpus of texts the researcher is working with should be mentioned first. The online publication will allow both flexible functionality and compatibility with other conformant projects. The selection of a set of sample-texts which are now ready, as proof of concept, for demonstration, should allow further steps towards the completion of the entire online edition; this will, however, only be possible through further close collaboration with research institutions promoting the development of Digital Humanities. Secondly, the scholarly contribution the researcher wrote about the newly discovered fragment of Demetrios of Scepsis (P.Oxy. 5094) figures also among the more tangible results of the fellowship. This article will be published in the ZPE at the beginning of 2014. Finally, with regard to the more conventional work which will lead to the monograph on Demetrios of Scepsis as a scholar substantial progress was made during the fellowship. The results will be presented in form of an academic publication which will be available once the evaluation process through which the work has to go at the University of Hamburg is completed. The impact of this part of the research will be seen by the new insights the study will bring about for the history of scholarship. Demetrios lived in the 2nd century BCE, a period that saw, because of the fundamental influence of the great centres of scholarship such as the libraries of Alexandria and Pergamon on the working methods of scholars of the period, the birth of textual criticism, which is still a basic research tool in many domains in the field of Humanities. Therefore, a study focusing on one of the scholars working in this crucial period will provide a better understanding of the whole tradition of scholarship and allows further considerations about its status in the present academic world. The parallelism is especially timely as the new means which the research facilities of those days offered for the development of new methods and research tools can be compared to the important advances of technologies and infrastructures which the development of Digital Humanities offers nowadays. Therefore the aim of a work on this crucial moment in Antiquity, such as the researcher is carrying out, is not only important for the field of Classics, but should also be seen, because it is combining the long tradition of scholarship with the new approaches of Digital Humanities, as a reflexion on the history of the discipline, the status it has nowadays and the function it could take with regard to the fundamental changes the academic world at large is currently facing.