As my current project is a philological commentary on a Latin poem, it was extremely helpful for me to hear various perspectives on practical questions which arise in writing a commentary or intensively studying the intertextual associations of a passage. Discussion focused on how to handle the enormous volume of data generated by digital tools such as Tesserae and Musisque Deoque. These tools shift part of the scholar’s focus from collation of data to the creation of efficient, large-scale representations of results. A related question concerned the methods by which scholars should communicate such work. One vision involved a publicly accessible repository of ancient texts where scholarly interpretation of allusion is communicated in part through text markup. The challenges to making this vision a reality are well-known: unlike other humanities fields, there is no generally accepted mechanism in place as yet for peer review of collaborative digital work in classics.
Pedagogy was briefly mentioned in various discussions, and might be profitably made a theme for a future session. We might want to reflect not only on how to teach our students to use the currently available digital tools but also how to best apply the abilities our students already have as so-called “digital natives.” Many of our students think of digital tools as primary and print-based tools as secondary, and of writing an app as the natural way to solve a problem rather than turning to an app only when traditional philological methods have proven insufficient. How to meet our students’ needs and how to decide which of the skills they already possess are applicable to the questions being asked in our field are questions well worth our consideration.