The Vergil Project: An NEH "Teaching with Technology" Proposal (draft
3/31/96)
Statement of Significance and Impact of the Project
We propose to develop an interactive, online, hypertext resource for
learning, teaching, and
research about the life, works, and cultural context of the classical
Latin poet Vergil. This
resource is designed to be both created and consulted via World Wide Web.
It will be
distributed freely and updated constantly. It aims to address the needs
of, and to elicit
contributions from, any and all individuals or groups interested in any
aspect of Vergilian
studies, from the absolute beginner to the most seasoned scholar, from
the fanatical admirer
to the most casual browser, and to be useful to a wide variety of others
as well. Organized
around a hypertext critical edition and commentary
on Vergil's works, this resource will take advantage of the graphical and
interactive
capabilities of WWW to incorporate aspects of Vergilian studies that
print media are unable
to encompass while offering the user flexibility at a level unprecedented
in any medium. It
can be updated infinitely. It will not be the work of any single scholar,
and it is anticipated
that it will quickly evolve beyond the familiar boundaries of the
collaborative enterprise that
it already is into an important virtual community for all Vergilians,
while serving as a model
for similar humanities resources.
Project Narrative
1. Rationale
Classical studies is in large part the study of texts. Beyond the text
itself, the most basic
tool for education or research in this field is the commentary. The
annotated text, whether
written on papyrus, printed on paper, or digitally encoded on magnetic
disk, is an
inherently hypertextual medium. World Wide Web is without doubt the most
favorable
forum in which to realize the potential of the hypertext format, and Web
technology
promises to become much more powerful very soon. The basic rationale
behind The Vergil
Project is to create an online, fully interactive, hypertext critical
edition and commentary on
the works of Vergil that will be a universal resource for learning,
teaching, and research.
Exploiting Web technology to "build a better mousetrap" is, however, only
part of the
story. The rationale behind The Vergil Project emphasizes the process at
least as much as
the artifact. We envision a resource that will not only better serve the
needs of users, but
one that will allow for maximum participation and contribution on the
part of the entire
community of Vergilians defined in the broadest possible sense. Building
the site will
require the participation of scholars who have made substantial
contributions to Vergilian
studies in order to insure that it satisfies the highest scholarly
standards. It will also require
the collaboration of experienced and imaginative pedagogues who work at
all curricular
levels to ensure that it serves the needs of teachers and students in
real classrooms. Finally,
it will create unprecedented opportunities for students to make important
contributions that
will be educationally profitable both to themselves and to the Project,
even at the earliest
stage of their careers. By enlisting the active participation of all
three groups, as well as of
interested amateurs, The Vergil Project aims to create a useful resource
that will serve the
needs of all users by empowering the users themselves to create it.
The combination of Vergil and WWW is especially compelling for a number
of reasons:
- The tradition of commentary on the text of Vergil is incredibly rich.
It addresses an
enormous range of readers, from young beginners to seasoned scholars. The
tradition is
nearly as old as Vergil himself; most of it survives, and the vast
majority of it is in the
public domain. No other author in any literaturre offers such a rich and
freely
accessible1
tradition on which to build.
- The audience for this material is huge. Among all classical Greek and
Latin authors,
Vergil is by far the one who is most extensively and intensively studied
in the original
language. He also enjoys a large audience outside classical studies
itself: among scholars in
other humanities disciplines; in the general humanities curriculum; and
among lay readers.
- Much of the work that The Vergil Project requires is already
routinely done. Every
academic year thousands of students in schools, colleges, and
universities study Vergil in
Latin, thousands more in English. Nearly all of them write papers,
produce translations,
analyze sentences, and perform many other tasks. The vast majority of
this work, however
much it benefits each of these students personally, is never saved or
shared with anyone
else after the end of the course in which it is done. But even the
simplest work performed
by a beginning Vergilian can be used in building the site we envision.
For instance, one important type of hypertext commentary on the text of
Vergil is
grammatical and syntactic analysis. For a professor to undertake the
grammatical analysis
of Vergil's complete works, or even to assign this work to graduate
students would amount
to a waste of their abilities (the intellectual challenge involved would
be trivial) and a
significant opportunity cost (they could be performing more complex
tasks). But every year
thousands of secondary school teachers assign their students tasks of
precisely this sort.
Such work is good for them: it helps to develop and consolidate their
understanding of the
Latin language, promotes analytical, systematic thinking, and instills
the ability to make
fine distinctions between similar categories of information.
Such work is indeed educationally valuable in itself.
But the work of enough students, properly coordinated and edited by
faculty participants in
the Project, would be even more valuable. It could, for instance, produce
a complete
grammatical
and syntactic analysis of the Aeneid in a single academic
year.2 In addition,
organizing this effort would in itself produce educational benefits,
since it would encourage
high school teachers to make excursions into parts of the poem that are
less frequently
studied in high school. Additionally, students would reap the benefits of
collaboration in a
group undertaking and experience the excitement of contributing to a
project that will have a
permanent and tangible result. Thus participating in The Vergil Project
will significantly
enhance the educational value that students already get from studying the
Aeneid.
In addition to these benefits, the students' grammatical and syntactic
analysis, checked and
corrected (as it would be in any case by their teachers), properly
marked up (something that can be accomplished by a computer program), and
integrated
into the resource we envision, will become an extremely valuable resource
for the future.
Far from being restricted to any one kind of application, it would be the
basis for a wide
range
of learning, teaching, and research activites:
- A lay reader returning to Vergil after many
years could read the online Latin text and use the hypertext links to the
students'
grammatical analysis of constructions forgotten over time.
- Teachers might use this same
information as the basis for interactive reviews and quizzes.
- A class in Maryland might
compete in a real time grammar-bee against a class in Oregon or
Oxfordshire.
- General results of online quizzing and contests might be
automatically tabulated and
analyzed to provide teachers with accurate information about problem
areas on which they
should focus their attention. (This is the sort of knowledge that good
treachers acquire
gradually with experience, but that now might be made available through
Web technology
even to first time teachers.)
- A student consortium might use the information to construct an
accurate and detailed
introduction to Vergil's latinity for the benefit of themselves or of
future students.
- A doctoral
candidate or senior scholar might use this same information to perform
sophisticated
linguistic analysis that might become the basis for cutting-edge
research.
And other uses will
surely be devised.
Thus much of the work we need done is being done and will continue. What
is
needed is for this work to be coordinated, "harvested" as it were,
edited, and organized into
a
database that the entire Vergilian community can use.
- The track record of our prototype is very encouraging. The Vergil
Project began almost
twleve months ago very much as an experiment, but
proved to be extremely successful in attracting interested participants
and in producing
results. To date we have created an online variorum critical edition of
the
Aeneid, written an entirely new, online, interactive
commentary on Book 1
of the poem, and devised and gathered a variety of additional resources
that have been
integrated into the text-and-commentary structure. The existing site is
both a part of and a
prototype for the whole, and thus is not yet fully functional.
Neverthless, only three
months after the
protoype was put online and publicized, it is averaging 500 hits per day,
can be accessed
from many classics- and literature-oriented websites, and has been
featured on Netscape's
"What's New?" directory. Our initial plan was to continue developing the
site in an open-
ended way; but the encouragement of users and the timely announcement of
this NEH
initiative opens a chance to make the resource fully operational in the
near future rather than
simply allowing it to evolve over a possibly much longer period of time.
The number of potential users of this resource is considerable:
These groups will be the primary beneficiaries of the Project; but the
benefits accruing to
them will entail further benefits to an even larger community, for three
reasons:
- First, the importance of Vergil in the school, college, and
university curricula reflects
his centrality in Roman studies generally. A very high percentage of our
knowledge
about Roman culture comes down to us from ancient commentaries and other
works of
scholarshp on Vergil. We plan to incorporate this material into our site,
thereby making
it available to other students of Roman culture as well.
- Second, we are committed to using Web technology not merely to
disseminate
information, but to remove some of the linguistic and scholarly obstacles
to the study of
Vergil and
of classics in general. The resources that we will create will make it
possible to learn
more about Vergil faster. This will be true both of young students and of
those who
may, for whatever reason, never have invested the time required to become
expert in
the Latin language or of ancient Roman culture.
- Third, the collaborative nature of the Project and the variety of
contributors who will
create it amount to a new model for integrating teaching and research in
classical studies
and the humanities in general. Students will learn early in their
schooling what it means
to contribute to a large-scale collaborative enterpriseÑto depend on the
contributions of
others, and by their labor to produce something of lasting value. They
will understand
the relationship between what happens in their classroom and what takes
place at the
cutting edge of humanistic research. The scholars who participate will
have a similar
opportunity to think more seriously about their own work as part of a
continuum that
begins very early in life. At a time when research in the humanities is
viewed in some
quarters as cut off from the concerns of the real world, this type of
collaborative
approach offers a new opportunity for humanists to make their case for
the vitality of
profession.
The full resources of The Vergil Project website will be freely available
to anyone over
WWW. The cost of participating in Project will be negligible. Even those
individuals who
use WWW without producing their own webpages (if such there be) will
be able to use the Project and even to file contributions using online
forms developed by
us. Full participation and use will entail up-to-date Internet access
(i.e. a connection of
14.4 Kbaud/sec or better) with color graphics capability (though in fact
much the larger part
of what the Project has created to date can be used with text-only
browsers such as
LYNX). Such a platform can be purchased today for under $1,000, with
units built to a
$500 price point on the way. An Internet connection can be had for $15 to
$20 per month
in most areas. In addition, many schools, colleges, public libraries, and
universities
provide free on-site
Internet access to their students and faculty as well as (in some of
these cases) to the
general public; and since it is unlikely that any individual or
institution will invest in Internet access solely because of The Vergil
Project, participation
itself will entail no incremental cost whatsoever.
2. Institutional Context
The University of Pennsylvania is home to one of the best classical
studies programs in the
country. The department boasts highly regarded undergraduate and graduate
programs as
well as an innovative and very successful post-baccalaureate program. The
department
enjoys excellent relations with other area institutions. In particular,
department faculty have
collaborated with colleagues at neighboring secondary schools on past NEH
summer
institutes and similar programs.
In addition, Penn has made a major commitment to support and advance
humanities
computing. The Educational Technology Services (ETS) arm of the School of
Arts and
Sciences (SAS)-particularly two of its divisions, the Center for the
Computer Analysis of
Texts (CCAT) and the Faculty Prep CenterÑmaintain all the hardware and
software
facilities
necessary to publish scholarly materials on WWW; and they employ an
excellent, full-time, professional support staff whose services are
available to all SAS
faculty and students, including participants in The Vergil Project.
Penn is willing and able to provide the hardware and the staff support to
maintain the
Project. For the present and immediate future, the Project will be
serviced by CCAT.
Currently the entire site resides on an IBM RS 6000 UNIX workstation. If,
as is
anticipated,
distance participation in the Project begins to make significant demands
on CCAT storage
and CPU capacity, it will probably be necessary to reallocate or purchase
a dedicated
workstation and software for the Project. This cost is factored into the
expenses for
the second year covered by this proposal.
3. Content of the Project
The Process
In constructing our prototype we have solved most of the technical
problems involved in
creating an online variorum text and commentary. The tasks that remain
are:
- To finish entering textual evidence from the manuscripts.
- To enter and edit basic materials that will be useful in constructing
the online
commentary (and that will in some cases, such as that of Servius, be
incorporated into the
online commentary).
- To assemble and train a team of collaborators who, together with
their students, will
actually write most of the commentary.
- To create material for the commentary on the Eclogues,
the
Georgics, and on Aeneid 2Ð12.
- To devise a WWW-based toolbox that will enable students and teachers
to adapt the
resource with ease to their own purposes.
The Project thus involves all three of the activities specified by the
announcement of this
special opportunity: Materials Development, Summer Institutes, and Field
Testing and
Classroom Applications. All three aspects will be involved in the
principal activity for
which we are requesting support, the creation of the online commentary.
The distribution
of activities across these categories will be as follows:
- Materials Development.
This proposal as a whole concerns Materials Development in the broadest
sense. It is the
first year, however, that will be devoted to materials development in the
narrower sense,
i.e. that of a small team of specialists working to create materials for
the use of othersÑin
this case, for the immediate use of distance collaborators. Subsequent
phases of the Project
will carry out the business of Materials Development in a wider sense
through a series of
Summer Institutes and in a number of subsequent classroom settings.
- Summer Institutes. After the necessary preliminary materials
have been made
available, we will assemble a team of high school, college, and
university teachers and
bring them together for a six-week summer institute at which they will
learn to direct
students in the creation of specific parts of the commentary by producing
a commentary on
Aeneid 2.
- Field Testing and Classroom Applications. Each of the
Institute participants
will return to his or her home institution and during the subsequent
academic year lead a
group of students in constructing a portion of the online commentary.
This activity will
involve field testing of those portions of the commentary previously
created, and a
laboratory for developing applications for those materials beyond the
major activity of
building the commentary itself and using this activity as a pedagogical
tool. The work of
the different groups working on their individual parts of the commentary
will be
coordinated in part by an email discussion list.
During the Summer Institute and Field Test portions of the Project, we
will maintain a
small team of specialists at Penn whose responsibilities will shift from
the Materials
Development activities of the first year to technical support and
coordination of efforts
undertaken by institute participants and their students.
It is our hope and expectation that the pedagogical methods that we
employ in the course of
this Project will serve as a model for bringing research into the
classroom and for
encouraging teachers to devise ways of enabling their students to
participate as fully as
possible in their field of study even from a relatively early point in
their careers.
The Product
The materials that we develop in this Project will be entirely new. We
will incorporate
materials that are in the public domain, and any money spent on materials
development will
go towards the digitization and editing of these materials, not on
acquiring rights to
materials under copyright.
The basic nature and approximate dimensions of the resource we envision
can best be
grasped by approaching it as would an online user. Given the nature of
WWW, many,
many avenues of approach are possible, but here we will consider two:
- Reading the Annotated Text. Many readers will use the site as
they currently do
a printed text with commentary. To do so, the user would access a webpage
containing a
form by which s/he would specify what passage of Vergil's works s/he
wished to read or
consult. Submitting the form would produce a page containing the passage
in question.
Every word of the Latin text displayed on this page would be linked to
the online
commentary. Clicking on, e.g. Arma in Aeneid 1.1
would produce
a page of notes
containing basic information and containing further links. In general,
this "top" page of
commentary will contain links to basic notes on how to construe the poem
and an indication
of topics on which more detailed commentary is available.
- Browsing the Commentary. The commentary that (from the
perspective
described above) lies behind the text might just as well be approached
from the opposite
direction. It will contain notes of varying size, complexity, and detail;
but among them will
be extensive essays on specific topics that will fully situate the poem
in its ancient cultural
context. One such essay will treat of the goddess Juno, who in the
Aeneid
plays the role of the heroÕs divine antagonist. In order to understand
this role, it is
important to understand how Juno was viewed by the Romans: as identical
with the
Carthaginian goddess Tanit, for example, an identification that led the
Romans to propitiate
Juno with extra care during the Second Punic War; as the goddess who
opposed Roman
expansion in the early days of the republic and favored the rival
Etruscan city of Veii; as the
analogue of the Greek Hera, who was considered a divine symbol of
meteorological forces
(hence her attempt to destroy AeneasÕ fleet with a violent storm in
Aeneid 1);
and the list goes on. An essay fully explaining JunoÕs role in ancient
Roman culture is
essential to the purposes of the explicating the poem; but it would also
be useful to teachers
of mythology, history, religion, literature in translation, cultural
studies, and many other
subjects. Such an essay could be accessed directly from WWW-based course
syllabi,
resource sites, and so forth, thereby serving the needs of a wide variety
of users who
would not necessarily approach the information via the text of the
Aeneid.
Fron the description given above, it will be apparent that the commentary
will, at its most
detailed level, approximate the scope of an encyclopedia of Roman
culture. This is entirely
in keeping with the tradition of commentary on Vergil since antiquity:
ServiusÕ commentary
on Vergil is itself is a kind of encyclopedia of Roman culture, and the
Saturnalia of ServiusÕ contemporary Macrobius, which
actually is an
encyclopedia in the form of a dialogue, is also one of our most important
commentaries on
Vergil. And it is no accident that there exists a modern encyclopedia
devoted exclusively to
Vergil. But while we anticipate that this site will in fact
eventuallyÑi.e. at some point
beyond the term of this grantÑassume encyclopedic dimensions and that it
will even serve
some of the purposes of an encyclopedia in the near term, the specific
goal of this proposal
is more focused: to create a fully functional online text and commentary
that will meet the
immediate needs of students and scholars of Vergil in reading and
interpreting his poetry.
The simple visual design of these pages is intended to be familiar to any
reader. The
appearance is that of a number of crosslinked hypertext pages. In
fact, however, the simple appearance of these pages belies a rather
complex underlying
structure:
- The Text Database. The site seems at first to be built around
a single text of
Vergil's
works; but this is not the case. The text that is displayed is derived
from a file directory
containing an encrypted text including a selection of manuscript variants
and proposed
corrections of passages where the manuscripts are thought to be corrupt.
The files in which
this information is stored would be useless for actual reading. Their
purpose is to enable a
program to assemble and display, not a single text, but several versions
of the text.
Currently, in addition to the default text (which is called "The Common
Text"), the user
may choose from among trasncripts of four of the most ancient manscripts.
This flexibility
marks an advance over textual study via the compendious but often
confusing medium of
the appartus criticus, and should, as more information is entered into
the database, become
the medium of choice in which to study the text and manuscript tradition
of Vergil when
autopsy is not possible.
In the nearer term, we will add two additional interactive features to
our textual
resources, both of them involving improvements over the print medium:
- Existing critical editions of classical authors are forced by the
nature of the printed page
to present a single coherent text out of the many that are possible,
relegating variant
readings to a marginal position at the bottom of each page or in an
appendix. This
unavoidable convention has had the unfortunate tendency of removing
editorial
considerations from the purview of the average reader and encouraging
even quite
advanced readers to relinquish all authority for the condition of the
texts they read to
specialists. In order to encourage readers to become better acquainted
with the actual
condition of Vergil's text as well as to provide them with a text that
meets their particular
needs, this site will provide them with the option of editing their own
text online via a form
linked to a CGI script. Their preferences will be saved by CCAT and a
special page will be
created for them from which they may display their text (or any other
that they may wish to
consult). This flexibility will benefit not only those who hold strong
opinions about
editorial matters, but will serve the needs of those who wish to learn
more about editing;
readers who might prefer to read from a text that preserves ancient
orthography, but teach
from a normalized text; users interested in consulting the text of Vergil
believed to be
prevalent in a particular time and place (e.g. Dante's Vergil); and a
wide variety of other
uses not yet anticipated. This level of flexibility is practically and
economically unattainable
via the printed book; but from our site it will be readily available to
all.
- Not all users will take the trouble to edit their own text. The text
displayed to them will
be The Common Text. Currently, this text is a selection of readings drawn
from the two
standard critical editions now in use, those of Mynors and Geymonat. But
this will soon
change. Users who edit their own text or texts will have the option of
submitting one set of
readings to a common pool. Every twenty-four hours a program will collate
the preferences
in this pool and on the basis of user preference will adjust the readings
displyed as The
Common Text. What this means is that, unlike a printed edition, our site
will not dictate a
cononical text to the user; instead, users will collectively edit and
revise the default text on a
regular basis. The Common Text will thus represent a modern vulgate.
Paterns of selection
in and of themselves will present us with a kind of information currently
unavailable about
the text of Vergil as it is actually used.
The basic structure of the text database is already essentially complete.
This was a
necessary first step, because in practical terms the text serves as the
backbone for the rest of
the site, the commentary, which contains a much wider variety of
information. The text
database does, however, need to be expanded by the addition of more
manuscript
readings, information about the manuscripts, conjectural emendations, and
other
information. The essential elements will be added by Project staff at
Penn during the first
year of the grant.
- The Commentary. The main business of the project will be the
construction of
the
commentary, including completing the structure that has been begun and
adding to it in
ways that have not yet been envisioned. The commentary will consist of
two main parts:
one, the Òauthorized,Ó fully edited commentary that will be created by
The Vergil Project
and stored on the CCAT workstation; and a second, ÒvernacularÓ commentary
consisting of
individual sites, discussion list arcives, and similar material that will
be stored on servers
elsewhere and accessed from the authorized commentary through CCAT search
engines.
Like the textual database, the authorized commentary is contained in its
own file directory
accessed by
online forms linked to CGI script. This structure is necessitated both by
the flexible
structure of the text from which the commentary is normally accessed, and
by the fact that
the commentary will be updated and expanded over time-a process that will
be much
easier to manage by adding small data files to well-defined directories
and then providing
dynamic user access to this information via CGI scripts, rather than by
constantly rewriting
a collection of static
webpages.
The commentary contains a wide variety of material that illustrates the
text of Vergil.
Currently there exist the following categories of material pertaining to
Aeneid
1:
grammatical and metrical analysis; a glossary of proper names; and brief
notes linked to
extended essays on Vergil's relationship to Homer and other Greek epic
poets; themes from
the Eclogues and Georgics that appear in the
Aeneid; Roman historical background;
references to visual and material culture; archaeology of Italy,
Carthage, and Troy; the
Aeneas legend before Vergil; wordplay; etc. The commentary will not be
entirely self-
contained, but instead will incorporate links where appropriate to sites
that offer useful
resources.
The vernacular commentary will be much more informal and less thoroughly
integrated
than the authorized commentary. It will consist of archives of email
discussion lists,
transcripts of MOO sessions, essays published by individual on their own
websites, and
similar materials. This section of the commentary will be visually
distinct from the
authorized section and will not carry the ÒimprimaturÓ of The Vergil
Project. It will,
however, enhance the commentary by providing a forum for informal
contributions, some
of which may indeed be incorporated into the authorized commentary. The
vernacular
commentary will also provide one natural avenue for continuing the work
of the Project
after the period covered by this grant comes to an end.
Schedule
The schedule we envision is as follows:
-
September 1996-June 1997
-
Digitization of basic materials. In order to build the site, it will be
essential to have certain
resources available in digital form. These include the work of Vergil's
most important
surviving ancient commentator, the 4th c. AD scholar Servius; the most
authoritative
modern commentary on the complete works that is in the public domain,
that of
Conington-Nettleship-Haverfield; a bibliography; images, including
artifacts, sites, maps,
and other
materials to illustrate the topography and material culture of the poem;
and similar
resources. To avoid duplication of effort, we will coordinate our efforts
to the fullest extent
possible with those of other projects (e.g. Roman
Perseus).
Recruitment of participants in summer institute.
-
July -August 1997
-
Institute at Penn: training faculty to teach with The Vergil Project. The
institute will last six
weeks and will involve all participants in the creation of an online
commentary on
Aeneid
Book 2. The purpose of this approach will be training faculty to use this
approach as a
teaching tool. All participants will be committed to teaching a course
during the following
academic year in which they create portions of an online commentary with
their classes.
The institute will function mainly as a workshop. The director of the
institute will supervise
and coordinate the efforts of the participants. We will also hold
seminars in which we will
explore the kinds of information that can be most effectively presented
in commentary
form. We will further consider the complementary questions of what new
elements Web
technology enables us to add to the traditional commentary structure, and
how the needs of
humanist, literary education can shape the ways in which this technology
develops in the
future.
Adjunct faculty will visit at least once a week. These faculty will be
individuals who are
recognized experts in the fields of Vergilian studies, pedagogy
(including language
acquisition), and information technology. Several of them will be members
of the advisory
panel that will assess the outcome of the Project in year 3.
-
September 1997-June 1998
-
Work on commentary by Institute participants in conjunction with
individual classes at the
participants' home institutions. Our goal will be for these classes to
produce an online
commentary for books 3Ð8 of the Aeneid. Their efforts will
be coordinated by
an email discussion list.
The activites of contributors at different institutions will be
coordinated, and the general
sense of collaborative effort enhanced, by means of an email discussion
list. The list will be
open to lurkers and contributors who are not formally affiliated with the
Project. All
contributions to the list will be archived, and may be incorporated into
the commentary.
-
July-August 1998
-
Institute at Penn; format as above. We will convene a new group to
evaluate the previous
year's work, to work intensively on evaluating, editing, and
supplementing the previous
yearÕs work
and to plan for the following year. Members of the group will undergo a
training period
similar to that of the previous yearÕs group by producing a commentary of
a single book of
the Aeneid, this time Book 9. Previous Institute
participants will be among the
adjunct visiting faculty and will speak to new participants about their
experiences in
teaching with the Project.
-
September 1998-June 1999
-
Work on commentary by Institute participants in conjunction with
individual classes at the
participants' home institutions. Our goal will be for these classes to
produce an online
commentary for books 10Ð12 of the Aeneid and for the
Eclogues
and >cite>Georigics as well. Again their efforts will be
coordinated by an email
discussion list.
-
July-August 1999
-
Institute at Penn: format as above. Assessment and extension of Project
activities to date.
The task for this Institute will be to expand and enrich
the exsisting commentary well beyond traditional boundaries by laying the
foundations of
an online encyclopedia of
Vergilian material to which the existing commentary can be linked.
Final editing.
Meeting with evaluators. Draw up a plan for future activites.
4. Project Staff and Participants
Identify those who will conduct and administer the project, define
their roles, and state their qualifications for undertaking the
specific responsibilities assigned to them. Applicants may also
identify appropriately qualified consultants--including additional
humanities scholars and technical specialists--and should describe
their qualifications and their roles in the project. Applicants
for materials development projects should assemble an advisory
board, whose members should not all come from the same institution.
In an appendix include one-page resumes from the project director
and all other scholars and other experts contributing to the
project, along with letters of commitment from each. Where
applicable, describe the nature of the commitment and duties of
advisory board members.
For projects in which participants should be identified at the time
of application, provide names and pertinent information in this
section. Otherwise, describe the criteria and procedures by which
they will be selected.
- Director:
-
Joseph Farrell, University of Pennsylvania
Professor Farrell is a specialist in Vergilian studies and is the founder
of The Vergil
Project.
- Evaluators
- Robert Kaster, University of Chicago
Professor Kaster is a specialist in the field of ancient scholarship and
is himself and expert
textual critic and commentator. He is President elect of the American
Philological
Association and a past winner of the AssociationÕs Goodwin Award of Merit
for his book
Guardians of Language. He is also the former editor of
Classical
Philology, one of the worldÕs leading journals in the field of
classical studies.
- Lee T. Pearcy, The Episcopal Academy, Merion, Pennsylvania.
Dr. Pearcy is Chair of the Classics Department at Episcopal. His teaching
experience spans
the middle school, high school, college, and university curricula, and he
has served as
director, codirector, or faculty member of several NEH projects. His
scholarly interests
include Latin poetry, the classical tradititon, and ancient science and
medicine. He is
associate editor of Classical World, the journal of the
Classical Association of
the Atlantic States.
- Christine Perkell, Emory University
Professor Perkell has published extensively on Vergil; her work
emphasizes literary
interpretation. She was director of the NEH Summer Institute ÒVergilÕs
Aeneid in the Humanities Curriculum, and is editor of a
volume of essays that
grew out of this Institute, which will be published by the University of
Oklahoma Press.
- Jeffrey Wills, University of Wisconsin
Professor Wills is a specialist in Latin poetry. He is also an innovator
in the field of Latin
pedagogy.
5. Evaluation
Include a specific evaluation plan that closely corresponds to the
project's objectives. The plan should include formative and
summative evaluation. Evaluation plans should describe the criteria
by which the success of the project would be measured.
The evaluation of materials development projects should focus both
on the software design and on its uses in the classroom.
Describe the qualifications of external evaluators if they are to
be used, and include in an appendix letters indicating their
willingness to serve.
Project activities will be evaluated on an ongoing basis. During the
first year, a board of
evaluators will assess and comment on the structure of the existing
prototype by using it as
a teaching resource in actual classes when possible. The criteria they
will be asked to apply
will be:
- Does the online resource surpass in terms of scholarship and
pedagogical utility the
standards set by existing print resources?
- Does the resource fully exploit the possibilities of Web technology
in such a way as to
achieve a formal superiority to comparable resources in the medium?
These will be the main criteria of evaluation employed throughout the
Project.
After this initial evaluation, and following any consequent adjustments,
Summer Institute
participants will perform their own evaluation on the same terms. Each
successive stage of
the Project will repeat this process. At the end of three years, he board
of evaluators will
undertake a final assessment. At that time we will attempt to have the
site reviewed by the
most influential electronic and print journals in the fields of classics
and humanities
computing.
6. Follow-up and Dissemination
At the end of three years, we will have created a resource that will be
useful to all the
audiences described herein. It will be freely available over WWW. It will
be capable of
being upgraded in whole or in part at any time. There will be a sizable
number of faculty
and students at all curricular levels who will have participated in its
construction. We expect
that a significant majority of these individual participants will remain
committed to the
Project and will continue to contribute to it. We also expect that the
Project will spawn
imitators. The existence of similar resources devoted to other authors or
topics will create
new possibilities for extending The Vergil Project, for realizing
economies by sharing
resources, for more extensive collaboration, and for many new activities
that we cannot yet
foresee. Part of the final evaluation of these three years will be to
plan for this future. To
attempt to define that future at this point would be premature, but we
are committed to
maintaining, revising, and expanding the site indefinitely and to
creating mechanisms to
insure that this commitment will be realized.