Joseph Farrell, University of Pennsylvania Collaborative, Interactive Critical Texts and Commentaries on WWW: The Vergil Project and Beyond

  Even in their printed form, critical texts and commentaries, two of the most traditional and indispensable tools for studying classical literature, are hypertextual and collaborative ventures. Every text, every apparatus criticus, every note is linked with a network of information that sends the reader flipping pages and opening other books in a way with which everyone here is familiar. Furthermore, a comparison of any two texts or commentaries will reveal how truly every commentary is a collaborative venture between the latest commentator and every one of his predecessors. The old variorum commentaries, which collected the different opinions of previous commentators into a single corpus, made the derivative character of the commentary form more explicit than is usual nowadays, but most commentators, particularly those working on the most intensively studied authors, must be conscious of taking part in a collaborative scholarly effort that extends across the ages.

  The hypertextual environment of the World Wide Web offers us the opportunity to develop these aspects of traditional scholarly tools far beyond what the printed book allows. The Vergil Project represents one effort to create an on-line, interactive, hypertextual, multi-authored text and commentary on the works of an author central to the classical and the humanities curriculum. The project aims to create a critical edition of the works of Vergil in Latin that will be linked to an English translation, information on grammar and syntax, commentary on a range of topics including textual issues, meter, rhetoric, mythology, geography, literary models, literary influence, themes, structure, etc. The information will be arranged in such a way as to offer the user commentary appropriate to his or her interests and level of expertise; eg it will be possible to consult only commentary on mythology written for a beginner, or only commentary on textual matters suitable for an expert -- or vice versa. These materials will be created collaboratively, first by groups of participants taking part in a pair of NEH-sponsored summer institutes at the University of Pennsylvania in 1998 and 1999, then by users who will be encouraged to contribute to the commentary as the use it via WWW.

  In my presentation I will discuss and demonstrate the materials that the Project has created to date and outline plans for future work. The project is meant to be extensible beyond the study of Vergil; once the main technical obstacles have been overcome, it should be possible to undertake similar projects involving other Latin and Greek authors. Obviously, this vision implies the existence of a set of standards; and for this reason in particular, I will describe the relationship between sites like that of The Vergil Project, Perseus, and VRoma both to one another and to the effort that is underway to establish specific protocols for the publication of scholarly materials such as critical texts and commentaries via WWW.

  At the very least, projects of this sort offer us the possibility of maintaining the best features of traditional forms of scholarship while bringing them to a much higher level of utility. Beyond this, they may be instrumental in releasing the energy of a much larger, better integrated, and more involved community of scholars than our field has ever before known.