Digital Criticism: Editorial Standards for the Homer Multitext

In this article we argue for the necessity of a digital edition to most accurately represent the textual tradition of the Homeric epics and to better understand the oral performance tradition that created the poems. We demonstrate how such a digital criticism would differ from the traditional textual criticism as practiced for editions in print and suggest how a digital criticism might open new avenues for the interpretation of the poetry. In defining our needs and goals for a digital edition, we discuss what our project has in common with other digital editions of literary works, but how the oral, traditional nature of the poetry creates special requirements as well. In addition to elaborating the editorial approach for the project, we reaffirm the principles of collaboration, international standards, and open access that we have learned from Ross Scaife, the founder of the Stoa Consortium. Digital Criticism: Editorial Standards for the Homer Multitext The so-called Homeric Question (in reality, several related questions) that has animated and in various ways divided modern scholarship on the Iliad and Odyssey since the 18th century centers on the origins and transmission of the epics. How were they composed and by whom? How were they recorded in writing, and how were they then transmitted to the witnesses that have survived until today? How is it possible that such complex poetry stands at the very beginning of Western literature, even before writing as a technology was well developed? Editorial practice for critical editions of the epics will necessarily be affected by how each editor approaches and answers these questions [Nagy 2000].[1] Yet a critical edition in the print medium will give a particular, and we would argue misleading, impression about the answers to these questions. A standard print edition will present a main text, and then record alternative readings in an apparatus (generally printed at the bottom of the page in smaller-sized font), giving the impression that there is the text — and then there is everything else. Compounding this problem and further obscuring the situation for nonspecialists, the apparatus as developed and practiced in classical textual criticism uses conventions and abbreviations that can only be deciphered by those who have received special training in these practices.[2] In effect, the standard critical edition seems to offer only one answer to these questions: that the Homeric epics are just like any other ancient text in their composition and transmission. A digital medium provides an opportunity to construct a truly different type of critical edition of the Homeric epics, one that better reflects the circumstances of its composition and transmission. The Homer Multitext of the Center for Hellenic Studies (CHS) in Washington, D.C., seeks to use the advantages of digital editions to give a more accurate visual representation of the textual tradition of Homeric epic than the current use of the printed page does. Most significantly, our digital design is also intended to reveal more readily the oral performance tradition in which the epics were composed, a tradition in which variation from performance to performance was natural and expected. The Homeric epics were composed again and again in performance: the digital medium, which can more readily handle multiple texts, is therefore eminently suitable for a critical edition of Homeric poetry — indeed, the fullest realization of a critical edition of Homer may require a digital medium.[3] To achieve our goals, the digital Multitext must be fundamentally different from these print editions in conception, structure, and interface.[4] In this article we would like to explain in more