Ben Crowder / Blog

On digital Greek and Latin texts

A good blog post by Gregory Crane (editor-in-chief of the Perseus Digital Library at Tufts) back in February about the Digital Loeb Classical library and the digitization of Greek and Latin texts:

We need transcriptions of public domain print editions to provide a starting point for work. These editions do not have to be the most up-to-date and they do not even have to be error free (99% may be good enough rather than 99.95%). If the community has the ability to correct and augment and to add features such as are described above and to receive recognition for that work, then the editions will evolve rapidly and outperform closed editions. If no community emerges to improve the editions, then the edition is good enough for current purposes. This model moves away from treating the community as a set of consumers and towards viewing members of the community as citizens with an obligation to contribute as well as to use.

The post has links to some fascinating projects I didn’t know about, like the Open Philology Project and the Homer Multitext Project.