Ancient Texts and Digital Corpora
Introduction:
Classical Studies is first and foremost a literary field. While it is true that material culture (i.e. art and archaeology) contribute immensely to our understanding of Greco-Roman antiquity, adding new knowledge with each dig season, most of what we believe we know about the ancient world comes from ancient literature. The ancient Greeks and Romans produced a considerable amount of literature in a great variety of genres, such as historiography, epic and lyric poetry, drama, satire, philosophical tracts, scientific and technical writing to name but a few. Even though it is estimated that less than one percent of the total literary output of antiquity survives to the present age, there is nonetheless a massive collection of works that have survived. It is from the surviving literature of antiquity that we have come to know the most about life in ancient Greece and Rome. Indeed, even material culture requires context for it to be used effectively as evidence when we attempt to reconstruct the culture(s) of the ancient world, and that context is provided by and large by the surviving textual evidence.
But ancient texts do not always have the answers to questions modern researchers might wish to ask. While these texts might in a certain sense speak for themselves, we must bear in mind that the authors of these texts did not write them for us. They wrote for readers, or often listeners, since many people experienced literature by hearing others read it aloud, of their own time and community. Classical Studies researchers must therefore find ways to make ancient texts yield the answers they seek. In other words, we must find ways to derive meaning from text. Recovering meaning from text is the domain of ‘literary theory,’[1] and the first lecture of Module 2 provides an overview of literary theory and its place in Classical Studies scholarship. The second lecture of Module 2 then addresses the topic of how to conduct basic analysis of a literary text using some of the many digital collections of ancient Greek and Roman texts central to Classical Studies research.
Classical Studies has been at the forefront of the Digital Humanities in general, largely because text lends itself to digitization and is easily organized in formats that allow scholars to manipulate text in many useful ways.[2] Traditional methods of analyzing ancient texts so as to derive meaning is a time-consuming process requiring access to the texts themselves. Digitization of ancient literary texts has not only made all manner of ancient writing, both in the original ancient Greek and Latin and in translation, available to students and researchers whose local library holdings might be less than extant, but it also allows Classical Studies scholars to analyze larger volumes of text with greater efficiency and precision.
There are, however, several important cautionary notes. First, there is no substitute for reading entire texts fully, de