28 CHAPTER 2. LITERATURE REVIEW to study, analyze and experiment. For example, for philologists the text itself is the data, so a library where texts are accessed can be a laboratory.
Recursively, the digital library for humanists can be the collaboratory itself.
This new digital library must providing services, beyond the texts. Services for text analysis, text mining, annotation. This vision of digital libraries as laboratories has been explored from the beginning, when humanities first met the digital worlds.
2.3. DIGITAL HUMANITIES 29
• study of instruments for attachment of multimedial meta-information
• reflection on digital documents and its features 2.3.1 Digital classics
Inside Humanities, classical philology can claim a long tradition in engage-ment with the digital environengage-ment. Father Busa himslef is a member of this community of practice, and several innovative projects has been devel-oped over few generations, such as the Perseus Project. Perseus founder, Gregory Crane, reflected for years upon the relationships between classics and the digital environment. In Crane, Bamman, Babeu, and Schreibman (2008), he recalls a vision of digital libraries and collaboratories very similar to Engelbart’s works on intellect augmentation:
The great challenge for the rising generation of scholars is to build a digital infrastructure with which to expand our intellec-tual range. We seek to advance two effects already enabled by the digital infrastructure at hand. On the one hand, we are extend-ing the intellectual range of individual scholars, enablextend-ing them to pursue topics that require analysis of more primary sources or more linguistic materials than was feasible with print. [. . . ] At the same time, we want to increase the complementary effect and further extend the audiences that the products of particular cul-tures can reach. Machine translation is one technology that aims to advance this goal, but even the simple translation-support systems already provided in environments such as the Perseus Digital Library have for years made foreign language texts intel-lectually more accessible to students than print resources alone.
— (p. 2)
The authors are in fact interested in projects providing services, because they are aware of the fact that digital libraries will grow incrementally:
On a practical level, what will happen to print collections, large or small, if large Digital libraries become larger, more ac-cessible and more flexible than any university library in history?
30 CHAPTER 2. LITERATURE REVIEW On a broader level, we are facing a shift that may eclipse the significance of print and approach the impact of writing itself:
for writing first stored human ideas outside of our brains and print enhanced the effect. Digital libraries, where books read one another in however a rudimentary fashion, have already be-gun to separate intelligence and action from the human brain.
— (Crane, 2006)
Crane, Bamman, Babeu, Breuel, and Cerrato (2009) actually thinks of a “million book library”:
What can we do with a million books with the tools now at our disposal and which we could build? What are the research questions that emergent huge collections raise for the historians, literary critics, and other humanists who study their contents and for the computer and information scientists who develop methods with which to process digital information in general?
—(p. 2)
Among the potential services and features of this ideal library, the au-thors suggest:
Multitexts: Scholars have grown accustomed to finding what-ever single edition a particular collection has chosen to collect.
In large digital collections, we can begin to collate and analyze generations of scholarly editions, generating dynamically pro-duced diagrams to illustrate the relationships between editions over time. We can begin to see immediately how and where each edition varies from every other published edition.
Chronologically deeper corpora: We can locate Greek and Latin passages that appear any where in the library, not just in those publications classicists are accustomed to reading.
We can identify and analyze quotations of earlier authors as these appear embedded in texts of various genres.
New forms of textual bibliographic research: We can automatically identify key words and phrases within scholarship,
2.3. DIGITAL HUMANITIES 31 cluster and classify existing publications, generate indices of par-ticular people (e.g., Antonius the triumvirvs. one of the many other figures of that name, Salamis on Cyprus vs. the Salamis near Athens). Such searches can go beyond the traditional dis-ciplinary boundaries, allowing students of Thucydides, for ex-ample, to analyze publications from international relations and political philosophy as well as classics. — (p. 5)
In fact, infrastructure (in this case, cyberinfrastructure) is becoming more and more important for Humanities and their goals. According to Crane, Seales, and Terras (2009):
Infrastructure provides the material instruments whereby we can produce new ideas about the ancient world and enable other human beings to internalize those ideas. Infrastructure includes intellectual categories [. . . ], material artifacts [. . . ], buildings [. . . ], organizations [. . . ], business models [. . . ], and social prac-tices [. . . ]. — (p. 5)
Yet, event in this pioneer discipline cultural barriers are yet to be elimi-nated, and they seem the most difficult osbtacles. Authors continue:
The greatest barrier that we now face is cultural rather than technological. We have all the tools that we need to rebuild our field, but the professional activities of the field, which evolved in the print world, have only begun to adapt to the needs of the digital world in which we live hardly surprising, given the speed of change in the past two decades and the conservatism of the academy. — (p. 7)
Moreover, authors confirm the importance of collaboration and openness in cyberinfrastructure:
Collaboration: While the final form of the papers in this collection may be familiar, their production and content reflects a fundamental change in scholarly practice: the majority of the
32 CHAPTER 2. LITERATURE REVIEW papers published here hav e multiple authors, while the single-author papers either report on group projects or on general meth-ods whereby classicists can create interoperable data. Open ac-cess and Open source production: All of the scholars who have contributed to this collection depend upon open access and open source production. [. . . ] In cases where authors are making particular arguments at a particular point in time, open access allows third parties to locate and automatically analyze what they hav e produced: search engines such as Google can index and then deliver their arguments to any one online; more special-ized text mining systems could analyze what has been written to search for trends in scholarship or to apply specialized services designed for classics. — (p. 17)