Curculio – Michael Hendry

A Public On-Line Textual-Interpretative Seminar (POTIS) is a new thing for me and – as far as I know – the classical world, though the APA has announced plans for something similar. No doubt it will take some time to work out the best way to do a seminar in the form of a blog with comments, but here are my thoughts on where to start:

1. We are speaking in public. Let’s try to show the world (or that small part that is at all interested in such things) how technical scholarship is done. I am very reluctant to delete a comment just because the commenter has had second thoughts. Please don’t embarrass yourselves or each other or (especially!) me. Of course, I will be very quick to delete obvious trollery and spam, but I hope I will never have to ban any Persius scholar for bad behavior. Factories often post large signs saying “This facility has gone 127 days without an injury”. I would like to be able to post a message “This blog has gone 127 days without a banning”.
2. Please check your politics at the door. On this site, I am emphatically uninterested in knowing what any of you think about any contemporary politician or political issue whatsoever. Save it for more appropriate sites, as I do. The most political thing I will ever have to say on this site is that I did enjoy rereading Persius 4 while waiting in line to vote last November.
3. Try to keep it (relatively) clean. If any of my former students – many of them still in high school – visit, they are unlikely to stay long, but let’s try to make sure that they will be much more likely to leave bored or confused than offended or titillated. See Con #3, ‘The Other Side of Access’, in my post Why Publish Original Scholarship On-Line?
4. Try to be pertinent and specific – not that those are strong points of mine! There will be posts dedicated to reporting tiny problems (typos, formatting inconsistencies, and so on), posts asking about general (?) issues (“How should I improve my formats?”) and specific technical issues (“How can I . . . .?”) and maybe even the occasional open thread (“What’s on your mind?”) – though the last will only be repeated if it works well the first time. If you get tired of waiting for an appropriate post for your Persius-related thoughts, you’re welcome to e-mail with suggestions for a post. I may allow guest-posts.
5. How to address each other when agreeing or disagreeing? I lean towards avoiding first names and titles, and sticking with plain last names, with or without a first name or initial (which may be needed to avoid confusion). There are too many duplicate first names, many of us will have never met, and it will be a lot clearer to newcomers. As for titles, I don’t really want to have to worry about who’s a Professor, who a Doctor, and who a Mister, Ms, Miss, or Mrs.
6. Don’t be bashful. Feel free to toot your horn, but don’t get carried away. If you’ve written something pertinent to the discussion, say so, and feel free to quote yourself or update your thoughts (“no one else seems to believe me, but I still think . . .” or “maybe I went too far, but my basic point seems sound” or “please ignore what I said about x – I’ve changed my mind – but read the other part on y”.)
7. Avoid gush.
8. Puns are allowed and even encouraged.

Comments – or would these be metacomments? – on any or all of these, and suggestions for additons, changes, or deletions, will be much appreciated.

Before I put together my Adversaria database (here), I made a simple Index file for Persius (here). Should I try to combine the two, or keep them separate? Does anyone have any advice on that? (Please note: your first comment will be moderated, but once that is approved, all others will appear immediately, unless you do something to make me ban you.)

Apologies for the long delay in my Persius project. As soon as I uploaded my first few Persius Adversaria, I realized that I needed to rethink the whole web-publication process, since blog posts with links to printable PDF versions would not suffice. It would be awkward enough comparing a text in forwards order with blog posts in backwards order. Worse, I found that blogging passages strictly in their order in the text was slowing things down way too much. I wanted to be able to blog them as I finished them, and move some of the more interesting ideas to the head of the line as I try to attract commenters.

What I needed was a way to blog the pieces bit by bit, while allowing readers to read them in their order in the text, or in the order in which they were published, as they pleased. I also needed to allow multiple versions of each note, since I was already itching to edit the ones I’d put up just a few days before. In short, I needed a database. (I like databases.) It only took a couple of days to put together the basic table, but several more to get the links working.

Each note now exists in four different formats, all interlinked, and will eventually exist in five:

1. Each one is composed and edited as a Word document, with footnotes and standardized headers and footers. This is for my own use, and will probably never be seen by users.
2. PDF versions for printing are easily made from these with Adobe Acrobat.
3. Blog posts for commenting are made by pasting in the Word text and adding appropriate HTML formatting. Macros should be able to automate most, if not all, of this process, though I haven’t done that yet.
4. With only slight changes in the HTML, the blog post version can be pasted into my Adversaria database table. This process will also be automated with a private PHP input module based on some I already use to update other database tables.
5. Once the whole set of Adversaria has been edited to my satisfaction, I will be able to put all the Word docs together into one big one, make a PDF, and send it off to a POD publisher, if it looks like anyone will want a hard copy.

The Word, PDF, and Database versions (1, 2, and 4) will all have multiple versions, as I rewrite each note to improve the style or argumentation, meet objections, add suggestions, and so on. This is where the POTIS (Public On-Line Textual-Interpretative Seminar) comes in. Version control should be easy, as long as I’m careful to put changes in the Word version first.

The Adversaria database (4) is here. The buttons below the title allow the reader to sort individual notes by their order in the text (the default), date posted, and length of comment, all either upwards [Λ] or downwards [V]. Once I begin revising them, I will add an option to sort by date last edited, and anything else that seems useful.

I plan to add a Filtering option just below the Sorter: this will allow readers to see only notes that fall into particular categories: Textual, Exegetical, Realien, Meter, Puns&Wordplay, and so on: many comments will of course fall into more than one category. My next post will give my tentative list of categories, and ask for suggestions to improve it.

Some bits of the Adversaria software are hard-coded for Persius, but as soon as I parameterize them, I will start adding comments on other authors, some new, some recycled from published articles. The aim is to aggregate all my Juvenalia (for instance) in a form convenient for readers.

I should mention that it occurred to me just yesterday that I could use this software to compile a complete commentary on a text. All I need to do is to make the references more granular. Right now, they refer to poem and line of Persius, but I would need to specify author, work (if the author wrote more than one), book (if the work has more than one), poem, beginning line, beginning word, ending line, and ending word. (The last two or three will be NULL if the note refers to a single whole line, or a single word.)

I should also mention that the reason I haven’t yet put up my list of manuscripts, list of editions consulted, and bibliography is that I realized a few days ago that these also need to be database tables. (I was trying to decide whether editors should be listed alphabetically or chronologically in my HTML file when I realized that this is yet another case where the reader should be allowed to decide.)

Now what I need is comments. I’ve drafted a Comment Policy, which I will be posting later tonight. Even if you’re not interested in Persius, or do not feel qualified to discuss his text (some of the most difficult Latin ever written by a semicanonical author), you may have ideas about how an on-line textual seminar ought to be run. If this works out, I plan to start a couple more on the first of April.