Appetitive: Cool Manuscript Research

I'm supposed to be working on an article about knowledge in the Meno and the Theaetetus right now, but instead I've been reading, flitting from one thing to another.

One of the things I found this morning was a post on the Homer Multitext about a group of undergraduates at Brown who were given a thus-undecoded set of  notes in archaic shorthand by Roger Williams, founder of the colony of Rhode Island and the First Baptist Church. The students actually managed to not only decode it, but find that it contained a great deal of historically relevant information about the Baptist church. I think it's pretty awesome that they let undergraduates do the work, and it's wonderful that the digitization of old and ancient manuscripts allows a much wider range of individuals to work on primary sources.

Appetitive: Cerinthus and Homer on the iPad

I am going up to visit Cerinthus this week. Posting may be a bit spotty, but since he has midterms I may have some more time to work on my blogs.

In other news, the coolest iPad app I've ever heard of has just been released: you can now own your own copy of Venetus A, one of the preserved Homeric manuscripts. The Homer Multitext reports that the text has been fully digitized and can be downloaded from the iTunes store. Now that's a cool reason to get an iPad.

Appetitive: Paleography is Sexy Again

"Paleography is sexy again," is one of my favorite of the strange statements by Messalla, my thesis adviser. It came up in a conversation about the works of Bacchylides [1]. But it seems that his assessment, however amusingly worded, is true. In the digital age, archives come up all the time and more and more work is digitized to bring it to a wider audience. AWOL catalogues a number of these digital resources.

One of the digital resouces (still in progress) that Propertius II brought to my attention is the Homer Multitext. The purpose of the Homer Multitext is to compile a digital archive of Homer in which scholars can easily compare and cross-reference materials. A partial facsimile prototype of some of the manuscripts is being released by the project, as they explain in a recent blogpost. The original texts seem amazing and the story of the students who worked on them is worth a read.

Endnotes

1. Bacchylides' works were lost until in 1896 they were discovered in a ransacked tomb in Egypt (or possibly as Messalla originally told us in a trashpit). The Wikipedia article makes the archaeologist sounds a bit like Indiana Jones.

Reasoning: Scholia

For those of you who do not know, "scholia" (singluar scholium) are the marginal commentary notes  on classical texts (and possibly stretched to include some of the ancient scholars works in their own right). Until last weekend, I knew next to nothing about ancient scholarship. Now I know a little bit. Last Saturday, while proctoring an exam, I read the kindle free sample of Eleanor Dickey's Ancient Greek Scholarship: A Guide to Finding, Reading, and Understanding Scholia, Commentaries, Lexica, and Grammatical Treatises: From Their Beginnings to the Byzantine Period, which first discusses the scope and format of ancient scholarship in general, and then about the bodies of scholia on texts (such as scholia on the Iliad or Euripides' works). The second half of the book is essentially a textbook on how to read ancient scholarship. It sounds great, but I have so many other things to read that I have not bought the full version yet.

Recently, the Homer Multitext ran a post about a particular book with scholia on the Iliad. The post discussed an individual text of the Iliad (and a specific folio within that text) and the unique summery in the scholia of the particular manuscript. It then compared this text with other texts of various time periods. The article was very interesting and I recommend it.