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The study days take place in Via Porta di Massa 1, in the Aula ex-cataloghi lignei room.
Conferences can be followed online through BigBlueButton.
Collaborative notes are available here (multilingual notes and important links).

  • Schedule
    Topic / Speaker
  • [SESSION I] Paleography, HTR and digital reconstruction
  • 09.30 - 09.45
    Welcome Speech
  • 09.45 - 10.00
    Welcome speech
    Giulio Massimilla, Michael Sinatra, Serena Cannavale, Marcello Vitali-Rosati, Mathilde Verstraete
  • Chair
    Gennaro Ferrante
  • 10.00 - 10.30
    in english
    A decade of the Greek Anthology project – achievements, successes, challenges
    Marcello Vitali-Rosati, Mathilde Verstraete (CRCEN – UdeM)
    Biography Marcello Vitali-Rosati is a professor in the Department of French Literature at the Université de Montréal and holds the Canada Research Chair in Digital Textualities. He is developing a philosophical reflection on the challenges of digital technologies: the concept of the virtual, digital identity, notions of author and authority, forms of production, legitimization and circulation of knowledge in the age of the web, and the theory of editorialization – to which he is one of the most active contributors. He is the author of numerous articles and monographs, and also works as a publisher, editing the journal Sens public and co-directing the Parcours Numériques collection at the Presses de l’Université de Montréal. As holder of the Chair in Digital Textualities, he leads several projects in digital humanities, particularly in the field of scholarly publishing. These include the development of platforms for publishing enriched journals and monographs, software for editing scientific articles, and a collaborative publishing platform for the Codex Palatinus 23.
    Mathilde Verstraete is a PhD student in digital humanities at the University of Montréal. After obtaining a master’s degree in classical languages and literature at the Catholic University of Louvain (Belgium), she joined the Canada Research Chair on Digital Textualities to coordinate the collaborative digital edition of the Greek Anthology. Under the supervision of Marcello Vitali-Rosati and Elsa Bouchard, her research focuses on digital critical editions and the tools that produce them.
    Abstract Since 2014, the Canada Research Chair in Digital Textualities has been running the collaborative and digital edition of the Greek Anthology project. In the space of a decade, the project has evolved on three different platforms, brought together numerous researchers from multiple disciplines and at different stages of their careers, and spawned new avenues of research, exploiting the many facets of this thousand-year-old corpus. We propose to take stock of this project, in terms of its successes, discoveries and developments, as well as the challenges still ahead.
  • 10.30 - 11.00
    in english
    Text-Image Alignment as a Feature of Digital Editions
    Gustavo Fernandez (Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg. University Library)
    Biography Gustavo Fernández Riva is a Research Associate in Digital Humanities at the University Library of Heidelberg and works mainly on technical and conceptual development in the field of Digital Editing. He was awarded a Ph.D. in comparative literature at the University of Buenos Aires in 2018. His main fields of research are written and literary practices in non-typographical societies. His current research projects include using network analysis to study shared manuscript transmission of medieval texts and the creation of an open, collaborative dataset of philological stemmata.
    Abstract Layout analysis is the computational process by which different regions of a scanned image are identified and categorized. It is an important step in any workflow for handwritten text recognition. Depending on the document, the relevant zones can differ in nature, such as columns and lines. In this presentation, I will show how layout analysis can be used to create text-image alignments in scholarly digital editions of handwritten sources. The alignment links the typeset digital text, which — for the most part — maintains the layout conventions of the mechanical printing era, with the different and also feature-rich surface of handwritten sources. As a concrete example, I will present current developments stemming from the University of Heidelberg, particularly in the scholarly journal Pylon: Editions and Studies of Ancient Texts. I will argue that text-image alignment is a useful tool not only in editions of ancient and difficult to read documents, but also of any document with a complex layout.
  • 11.00 - 11.30
    in french
    Decoding Ancient Greek: New Perspectives on Handwriting Recognition via Palatine Anthology.
    Maxime Guénette (University of Montreal, PhD Student)
    Biography Maxime Guénette is a PhD student in History at the Université de Montréal. His research focuses on religions in the Roman Empire, on the sacralization of space and on ancient globalization. Since 2020, he is editor on the Anthologia Graeca platform, and has been working on the integration of English and French translations of epigrams, as well as keywords to identify historical figures and places, and philological notes. He has recently been involved in the IAL (“Intelligence artificielle littéraire”) project to detect variations in the Greek Anthology’s corpus of epigrams. During his internship at the Canada Research Chair on Digital Textualities in Summer 2023, he also worked on the application of HTR (Handwritten Text Recognition) to the Codex Palatinus graecus 23 using the eScriptorium platform. As a result of this internship, he trained models to recognize ancient Greek in medieval manuscripts such as the Palatine Anthology.
    Abstract Following the recent technological breakthroughs, there is growing academic enthusiasm for Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR). Its prospects are promising: with the training of models for the recognition of handwriting in historical documents, we can now more easily access to our past. This presentation will focus on how this technology, based on artificial intelligence and deep learning, can be applied to ancient Greek corpus. Considering the case study of the Codex Palatinus graecus 23 (the key manuscript of the Palatine Anthology), we will present the required methodology for training an HTR model to recognize ancient Greek, to deal with specific difficulties inherent to ancient Greek and to non-Latin languages. We will also present the possible solutions developed within the project of a collaborative digital edition of the Greek Anthology.
  • 11.30 - 12.00
    Coffee break
  • Chair
    Andrea Zappulli & Sabrina Iorio
  • 12.00 - 12.30
    in english
    FAIRer transcriptions: HTR-United and the possibility of a common for training data
    Alix Chagué (ALMAnaCH, Inria & Université de Montréal & EPHE-Université PSL, PhD Student)
    Biography Alix Chagué is a PhD student in Digital Humanities, member of the ALMAnaCH team at Inria-Paris and part of the CRIHN at the University of Montreal, enrolled both at the University of Montréal and the École Pratique des Hautes Études (Paris). Under the supervision of Laurent Romary, Emmanuel Chateau-Dutier and Michael Sinatra, she works on the appropriation of automatic transcription tools (HTR) by the DH community and by cultural institutions. Her research focuses on the impact of training dataset composition on HTR models. Previous to her PhD, as a Research and Development engineer for Inria, she colaborated with numerous projets involving HTR, including LECTAUREP (French national archives), TIME US (ANR) and DAHN.
    Abstract Automatic Text Recognition technologies (including HTR and OCR) offer an opportunity to work faster with handwritten documents. However, creating and accessing transcription models remain a challenge. This is the reason why it is important to be able to rely on data created by others. HTR-United presents a solution by offering a catalog which gathers descriptions and redirects towards existing public datasets. After introducing the stakes linked to the publication of training for HTR, we will present the HTR-United ecosystem and its schema for the description of datasets.
  • 12.30 - 13.00
    in italian
    Reconstructing (and Deconstructing) to Read: The Role of Technology in the Edition of the Herculaneum Papyrus Scrolls
    Federica Nicolardi (University of Naples Federico II)
    Biography Federica Nicolardi is Assistant Professor of Papyrology at the University of Naples Federico II. She mainly works on Herculaneum papyri, focusing especially on new critical editions and virtual restoration. In 2018 she published the first complete edition of the papyri preserving Philodemus’ On rhetoric Book 1. She has just started a project funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation (RECREATE – REConstructing papyrus scrolls and REcovering Ancient TExts with the aid of a new digital tool) aimed at developing a software tool for the virtual reconstruction of papyrus scrolls. Since 2023 she is a member of the Centro Internazionale per lo Studio dei Papiri Ercolanesi ‘Marcello Gigante’. She has been collaborating with the University of Kentucky project on ‘Digital Restoration of Herculaneum Papyri’ (PI Brent Seales) supervising the spectral imaging and photogrammetry activities carried out at the Officina dei Papiri Ercolanesi (Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli). She is part of the Papyrology team of the Vesuvius Challenge, an internationalcompetition to read the unopened Herculaneum Papyri using machine learning and computer vision techniques.
    Abstract Working on the edition of papyri often entails the need to address fragmentation. In particular, studying volumina that are today preserved divided in several pieces requires to go through a reconstruction task, which has to be based on criteria as correct and verifiable as possible. This finds support today in new digital tools. The recent results in virtual unwrapping and reading carbonized unopened scrolls, on the other hand, suggest a drastic change in perspective: in such cases, it is precisely the compactness of the intact scroll, never touched by any attempts to open it, that poses an obstacle to its reading. This state requires that which we could call a ‘digital fragmentation’, which plays a key role in the complex journey to reading the text. The paper will conclude with some reflections on the prospects and challenges of publishing a virtually unwrapped papyrus.
  • 13.00 - 13.30
    in english
    Aligning Greek and Latin texts to French translations using Large Language Models : an experiment on classical philosophical texts
    Marianne Reboul (École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, Institut d’histoire des représentations et des idées dans la modernité)
    Biography Marianne Reboul is a lecturer in Digital Humanities at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, specializing in digital humanities and classics, more precisely in “digital classics”. She works in particular on the application of artificial intelligence techniques to ancient languages.
    Abstract Aligning original texts and their translations in several languages is key to understanding how ancient texts became essential matter to our cultural heritage. The recent innovations in massive language models allow us to understand the evolution of the way ancient texts were understood up to this day. It is now possible, with very little amount of parallel training data, to compute semantic equivalences between several languages at once for modern languages. But it is also now possible to fine-tune these existing models for ancient languages. In this paper, we are going to see how fine-tuned multilingual models can be applied to ancient languages to build similarity metrics and help better alignment between a source text and its translation. As a use case, we will align classical philosophical texts in Latin and Greek to modern French translations from the 18th century to the 20th century.
  • 13.30 – 15.30
    Lunch break
  • [Workshop I]
  • 15.30 – 17.30
    in english
    bring your laptop
    registration required
    Workshop - eScriptorium
    Alix Chagué (ALMAnaCH, Inria & Université de Montréal & EPHE-Université PSL)
    Abstract eScriptorium is an open source web application that makes it easy to use automatic transcription (HTR/OCR) on documents of all kinds. This workshop presents the application’s main features and the essential steps for running a transcription campaign using eScriptorium.
  • Schedule
    Topic / Speaker
  • [SESSION II] Collaborative philology
  • 09.45 - 10.00
    Welcome
  • Chair
    Arturo De Vivo
  • 10h00 - 10h30
    in italian
    Latin philology and collaborative organization. The new platform of MQDQ Galaxy
    Paolo Mastandrea (Ca' Foscari University of Venice)
    Biography Paolo Mastandrea has been a professor of Latin at Ca' Foscari University of Venice since 1995. He is interested in Latin poetic language, from Ennian origins to Italian versifiers of the 19th and 20th centuries; late antique historiography; the tradition of classical texts, with special attention to the cultural changes produced by the passage between antiquity and the Middle Ages. He has organised repertoires of literary works in digital form, most of which are accessible online. He co-edits the magazines Lexis. Poetica, retorica e comunicazione nella tradizione classica and Studi Petrarcheschi.
    Abstract The object of this talk is to illustrate the initiative – born in 2018 – of the new MQDQ Galaxy platform, with the aim of securing a future for the Musisque Deoque and Poeti d’Italia corpora and the Pedecerto suite of metrical tools, by preserving the existing, but also augmenting and developing it. There are two main areas of intervention.
    (1) Establishment of an organizational model centered on XML/TEI as the archiving and interchange format and the development of a technological infrastructure designed to make it effectively and readily operational;
    (2) Creation of a web platform that would expand the audience of contributors by providing all the tools needed to independently prepare new critical texts and apparatuses: documentation, format conversion utility, visual interface for easy entry of apparatus data, manuscript archive.
  • 10.30 - 11.00
    in italian
    Collaborative canons and catalogs for sustainable philology in the digital environment
    Monica Berti (Leipzig University)
    Biography Monica Berti works at Leipzig University where she teaches and conducts research in the field of digital humanities applied to ancient history and classical philology. She has been collaborating for many years with the Perseus Project and has been directing several projects concerning the indirect tradition of Greek and Latin sources with a focus on fragmentary literature. She has alsofounded the international consortium Sunoikisis Digital Classics for teaching digital technologies applied to the ancient world in collaboration with the Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies and the Institute of Classical Studies in London."
    Abstract The goal of this paper is to present collaborative projects for the creation of catalogs of ancient authors derived from the extraction and annotation of bibliographic citations in the corpus of ancient Greek literature. Reflections will address epistemological questions about the ancient language of bibliographic citation and practical issues arising from the use of digital technologies employed for the identification and extraction of this type of language from the ancient Greek textual heritage. Particular emphasis will be placed on the collaborative aspect of the philological and exegetical practice, which, while being revitalized today by the necessary interdisciplinary nature of digital projects, is not new and has parallels in the ancient world.
  • 11.00 - 11.30
    in italian
    Digital Editions and Epigraphic Poetry: Reflections from the ‘Epigraphic Poetry in Ancient Campania’ Project
    Serena Cannavale (University of Naples Federico II) & Cristina Pepe (University of Campania Luigi Vanvitelli)
    Biography Serena Cannavale is Associate professor of Classical Philology at the Department of Humanities (Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici) of the University of Naples Federico II and teaches courses of Classical Philogy, History of the classical tradition and Digital classics for undergraduates, graduates and PhD students. Her main research interests are related to the Hellenistic epigrams, with a special attention to Callimachus, Greek poetry on stone, literary culture in ancient Campania and the history of classical studies.
    Cristina Pepe is Associate Professor in Classical Philology at the University of Campania ‘Luigi Vanvitelli’. Her research interest focuses mainly on Greek and Roman rhetoric and its reception in modern and contemporary times, literary and epigraphic epigrams, history of classical scholarship, classics and gender studies. She is P.I. of the Project ‘Epigraphic Poetry in ancient Campania’ and member of other national and international scientific projects. She is also Associate Editor of Rhetorica. A Journal of the History of Rhetoric, and correspondent member of the Pontificia Accademia Romana di Archeologia.
    Abstract The paper aims to reflect on the potentialities of ‘collaborative philology’ moving from the experience gained in the project ‘Epigraphic Poetry in ancient Campania’. This research project proposes the first comprehensive study of the Greek, Latin and bilingual metrical inscriptions from ancient Campania, a corpus of around 200 documents, dating from the 3rd cent. BC to the 5th cent. AD. Through the collaboration between scholars of philology, literature, epigraphy, archaeology and the history of law and the dialogue with projects already launched in the field of Digital Epigraphy (in primis EDR) including also metrical inscriptions, the project aims to provide a new digital edition, accessible through an open-access platform, as well as information on material (support, palaeography, context of discovery, etc.), linguistic, metric, historical and legal aspects related with these documents. Only in recent years has it been recognized the need to adopt an integrated approach to the study of carmina epigraphica which considers in a unitary way the philological-literary aspects and those of a historical-archaeological nature, by recognizing the indissoluble link between written text and support, between text and monument.. Moving from selected case-studies, the paper will address the critical-exegetical advances that such approach can provide.
  • 11.30 - 12.00
    Coffee break
  • Chair
    Lorenzo Miletti
  • 12.00 - 12.30
    in italian
    Collaborating and Sharing. Challenges and Opportunities in the Digital Edition of Some Epigrams from the Anthology
    Marta Legnini (University of Parma, PhD Student)
    Biography Marta Legnini is a PhD student at the University of Parma under the supervision of Massimo Magnani and Lucia Floridi. After graduating in Classical Literature at the same institution, since 2021 she has been collaborating in the Erasmus+ ENCODE project, an project for the diffusion of digital skills in the study of ancient written cultures. Her PhD research focuses on the Lyric Poets in the Meleager Crown. Her other research interests are pseudo-epigraphy and the indirect tradition of epigram.
    Abstract This paper will present the embedding of the Anthologia graeca platform (adding translations, comments and bibliographical notes) as part of a philological study on the ‘anacreontei’ epigrams of the Palatine Anthology. It will focus on the choices made during the transition from paper to digital edition and on the scientific and educational opportunities provided by a ‘collaborative philology’ project that relies on specialist contributions.
  • 12.30 - 13.00
    in french
    Promoting critical thinking in high school history and ancient literature courses through the use of collaborative editions: the case of the Greek Anthology
    Émile Caron (University of Montreal, PhD Student)
    Biography Émile Caron holds a master’s degree in Classical Studies and a graduate certificate in Digital Humanity from the Université de Montréal. He is currently a PhD student in Educational Sciences in the Department of Didactics at the same university, where his research focuses on the engagement of critical thinking in the study of ancient civilizations through the reading of ancient sources, and on the adaptation of ancient documents through the study of curricula. Émile is also interested in the place of classical culture in Quebec and Canada through a comparative approach to European school curricula (Italy, France, Germany…). He is currently a student researcher at the Laboratoire de Recherche en Didactique de l’Histoire in the Faculty of Education at the Université de Montréal, where his research is directed by Prof. Marc-André Éthier.
    Abstract In recent decades, in North America as well as in Europe, the use of critical thinking has become an increasingly important objective in history and literature curricula. The educational community has put in place a large number of resources to support teachers. The purpose of our presentation is to outline the pedagogical and didactic benefits that can be expected from the use of collaborative editions in the history and literature classroom, using the Greek Anthology as an example. Integrating these collaborative editions into school curricula would enable students to actively participate in the creation of collaborative educational resources. In addition, we want to show that involving students in the creation of collaborative editions engages them in a process of research and analysis that strengthens their critical thinking skills. By getting them to evaluate interpretations, collaborative editing can prove a powerful tool for developing a set of skills that are increasingly being promoted in school curricula.
  • 13.00 - 13.30
    in italian
    The study of Ancient Greek in Italian secondary schools: between rigour of the “apocalyptists” and innovative will of the “integrators”, a fascinating Forge of philology on the Palatine Antology
    Annalisa Divincenzo (Liceo classico Luca De Samuele Cagnazzi, Altamura)
    Biography Annalisa Divincenzo, PhD in Greek and Latin Philology, has been teaching Classics at the Liceo Classico Luca de Samuele Cagnazzi in Altamura since 2005. Following a specialization in software development for didactics, her teaching methods are motivated by the inclusion of digital tools in the classroom. For several years, the project of the digital and collaborative edition of the Greek Anthology (CRCEN) has benefitted from important contributions thanks to the involvement of her students in the editing process on the project’s platform.
    Abstract To come
  • 13.30 - 15.30
    Lunch break
  • [Workshop II]
  • 15.30 - 17.30
    in english
    bring your laptop
    registration required
    Workshop – Digital and collaborative edition of the Greek Anthology
    Canada research Chair on Digital Textualities (University of Montreal)
  • Schedule
    Topic / Speaker
  • [SESSION III] Epistemology of texts: critical edition of classical texts
  • 09.15 - 10.30
    Welcome
  • Chair
    Giulio Massimilla
  • 09.30 - 10.00
    in english
    Ecdotical problems of ‘intricate’ texts : the case of P. Oxy. IV 659 (Pindar, Parthenii) and 662 (Anthology of Epigrams)
    Giambattista D’Alessio (University of Naples Federico II)
    Biography Giovan Battista D’Alessio, after his formation at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, spent 3 years as the first Arnaldo Momigliano Research Fellow at University College, London. He has subsequently been Lecturer and Associate Professor of Greek Literature at the University of Messina (up to 2007); and Professor of Greek Language and Literature at King’s College, London (2007-2014). He is now Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Naples “Federico II”. During these periods he has regularly and intensively taught on various Classics- related subjects and supervised several undergraduate and postgraduate students. His research interests have focused mainly on Greek poetry, with particular attention to Greek Lyric and Hellenistic poetry and on Greek Literary papyri. Publication list available at this adress.
    Abstract In this contribution I examine the complex reciprocal implications that come into play in the edition of texts copied on the recto and verso of a papyrus from Oxyrhynchus now preserved in the British Library, also considering the question of the material condition of the medium.
  • 10.00 - 10.30
    in italian
    ‘The medium is the message’? Essay on the ecdotics of epigrams from multiple traditions.
    Valentina Garulli (Alma Mater Studiorum, University of Bologna)
    Biography Valentina Garulli is Associate Professor of Greek Language and Literature at Bologna University and teaches courses of Greek Language and Greek Grammar for undergraduates, graduates and PhD students. Her main research interests include Greek and Latin poetry on stone, Greek and Latin epigram, the new and the old Posidippus, Hellenistic poetry. Other research themes are Callimachus, ancient biography, history of classical scholarship, didactics of ancient Greek.
    Abstract In editing ancient Greek epigrams, more than any other type of texts, the medium holds an undeniable value: since epigram is the written genre par excellence, the material context has to be regarded as an integral part of the message. What happens when the same epigram is preserved in more than one contexts of transmission? What are the fundamental points in editing these texts and what should be the role of their history in the constitutio textus? A few representative examples will be examined, in order to make some epistemological and methodological remarks.
  • 10.30 - 11.00
    in italian
    Epigrams, anthologies, critical editions. For a rethinking of the publishing tradition of Anthologia Graeca
    Lucia Floridi (Alma Mater Studiorum, University of Bologna)
    Biography Lucia Floridi is a Professor of Classical and Late Antique Philology at the Department of Classical Philology and Italian studies of the Alma Mater Studiorum - University of Bologna. Her main research interests are Greek and Latin epigrams, with a focus on the erotic and scoptic genres, Hellenistic poetry, prose poetry of the Imperial Age, and the relationship between literature and visual arts. Among her major publications are Stratone di Sardi. Epigrammi (Edizioni Dell’Orso, 2007), Lucillio. Epigrammi (De Gruyter, 2014), Edilo. Epigrammi (De Gruyter, 2020), as well as numerous contributions on authors such as Palladas, Ausonius, Longus the Sophist, and Lucian. Her recent publications include the miscellaneous volume Intervisuality. New Approaches to Greek Literature (with Andrea Capra; De Gruyter, 2023) and the commented critical edition of the treatise On the Seven Wonders attributed to Philo of Byzantium (with Federico Condello; De Gruyter, 2023).
    Abstract In this paper, I first consider what does it mean to produce a critical edition of epigrammatic texts, focusing on the ways epigrams have been transmitted from the Hellenistic age to the present day and outlining a brief editorial history of the Anthologia Graeca. I will highlight how the editorial praxis established since the first half of the 19th century is questionable from a methodological point of view and in need of rethinking. I will therefore present alternative criteria for publishing. I will then emphasise the relevance of the editions of each of the epigrammatic anthologies that have survived to this day, starting with the Planudea, whose inner organisation is the result of a precise editorial project that deserves to be fully valued. I will conclude with a few examples of the specific problems that an editor of a Sylloge Minore may encounter, mainly based on my ongoing edition of the Sylloge Parisina. This is intended to indicate some possible research directions for future epigrammatic studies.
  • 11.00 - 11.30
    Coffee break
  • Chair
    Giancarlo Abbamonte
  • 11.30 - 12.00
    in italian
    On How to edit Greek Riddles : Questions and Answers
    Simone Beta (University of Siena)
    Biography Simone Beta is Professor of Greek language and literature at the University of Siena. He is the author of numerous monographs and articles on multiple topics such as ancient theatre, rhetoric, epigrammatic poetry (especially enigmas and oracles) and reception of classical culture in the modern era. Regarding comedy, he has mostly worked on Aristophanes and his adpatations (on the history of the Lysistrata character, see La donna che sconfigge la guerra. Lisistrata racconta la sua storia, 2022). Among his latest publications, we cite Io, un manoscritto: l’Antologia Palatina si racconta (2017) – which has been translated in french and published by Les Belles Lettres (2019) – and Il labirinto della parola. Enigmi, oracoli e sogni nella cultura antica (2016).
    Abstract The edition of Greek riddles, especially those composed during the Byzantine period, is often troublesome. In fact, the same text is sometimes witnessed in quite different versions depending on the manuscripts in which it appears: we do not find the typical textual variants present in other similar compositions (epigrams, for example), often limited to a single word, but with much more significant differences, which may even concern one or more verses. After presenting some examples of these variants, the paper will propose some publishing possibilities, which could benefit greatly from new technologies.
  • 12.00 - 12.30
    in english
    Between the symposium and the countryside: the epigrammatic topoi of Theocritus’ 7th Idyll
    Elsa Bouchard (University of Montreal)
    Biography Elsa Bouchard has been a professor of Greek language and literature at the University of Montreal (Department of Philosophy / Centre for Classical Studies) since 2012. Her research interests range from ancient philosophy to Greek literature and religion, including poetics and rhetoric.
    Abstract Theocritus’ 7th Idyll is famous for its central section containing two short songs performed by bucolic singers, both of which refer to bits of intriguing stories and situations that seem rather loosely connected to one another. In a largely ignored paper published in 1959, François Lasserre proposed that these enclosed songs are in fact patchworks of references to epigrams composed by various persons, and furthermore, that these epigrams were part of an anthology (presumably called the Σωρός) recently published by a group of poets associated with the Alexandrian circle of avant-garde poetry. The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, I look afresh at the evidence adduced by Lasserre concerning the epigrammatic sources of Idyll 7 and propose some amendments to his theory. Second, I investigate the intermedial nature of Theocritus’ use of an epigrammatico-anthological format within a work like Idyll 7, which otherwise presents itself as an unambiguous piece of bucolic poetry.
  • 12.30 - 13.00
    in italian
    Collation of the witnesses of the Appendix Barberino-Vaticana through ChrysoCollate
    Alessia Borriello (Università degli Studi di Roma ‘Tor Vergata’, PhD Student)
    Biografia Alessia Borriello graduated in ‘Classical Philology, Literature and Tradition’ at the Alma Mater Studiorum – University of Bologna, and is currently pursuing a PhD in ‘Classical Antiquities and their Fortune: Archeology, Philology, History’ at the University of Studies of Rome ‘Tor Vergata’, under supervision of professors Emanuele Dettori (Uniroma2) and Lucia Floridi (Unibo). Her project focuses on the anthological tradition of ancient Greek epigram, in particular on the Appendix Barberino-Vaticana, of which she is preparing a new critical edition with Italian translation and introduction of a philological and literary nature.
    Abstract The present contribution displays an unpublished collation of the witnesses of one of the so-called Syllogae minores of the Anthologia Graeca, the Appendix Barberino-Vaticana. The collation was carried out with the help of the ChrysoCollate freeware, developed by Sebastien Moureau. The collation table made it possible to optimize both data collection and analysis times, through the predictive completion of the witnesses’ variant readings, the synoptic juxtaposition of variant readings and comments, and the export of the results in ‘.odt’ format.
    The anthological conformation of the Appendix lent itself well to the use of the program: each epigram constituted a work cell, divided by words or syntagms. The collation led to a revision of the stemma codicum of the Sylloge proposed so far by scholars, who based themselves on partially inaccurate collation data, repeated starting from 1890 Leo Sternbach’s reference edition. The nineteenth-century edition of the Appendix was also based on only two of the four witnesses known today, all examined in this analysis.
  • 13.00 - 13.30
    in french
    LaTeX or writing as text programming
    Robert Alessi (CNRS, UMR 8167 Orient & Méditerranée)
    Biography As a research fellow, Robert Alessi holds an academic position at the French CNRS Joint Research Unit “Orient & Méditerranée” (UMR 8167, Paris, France). His research concentrates on the edition of Greek and Arabic medical texts, on the history of medicine, but also on computing applied to classical studies.
    Abstract In this presentation, I will attempt to correct the idea that TeX is merely a markup language, in favor of the more intellectual approach taken by its author, D. Knuth, in the lecture he gave to the American Mathematical Society in January 1978 under the title ‘Mathematical Typography’ (Jan. 4, 1978). TeX, whose programming had not yet been completed, was presented as an input language based on the construction of boxes, which should be seen as atomic units, each containing a character, assembled in horizontal or vertical lists, as many times as necessary to form pages. Each box is separated from the others by a kind of glue with three components: space, extensibility and compressibility. TeX is the system that performs all the calculations required for the composition of these sets; it calculates where each character will be on the page. The drawing of each character is carried out by another language, METAFONT, which is inseparable from TeX.
    To understand TeX as a markup language is therefore to ignore the great idea on which it was built, that of the page conceived as a gigantic matrix made up of 0 (white) and 1 (black), that of a purely mathematical vision at the service of the new printing machines operating on dot screens.
    A lack of understanding of this atomic vision of TeX has led to it being reduced to a markup language. In fact, TeX immediately interprets a document in which you’ve simply inserted a few simple commands. What you don’t see is that these commands are actually operating functions that process data and produce results, and that it’s possible to modify them to obtain other results, or to program new functions to obtain the same or different results. TeX doesn’t prescribe anything by itself; instead, it provides the text programmer with all the tools of digital writing.
  • 13.30 – 15.30
    Lunch break
  • [Workshop III]
  • 15.30 – 17.30
    in english
    bring your laptop
    registration required
    Workshop - Ekdosis in a single-source publishing chain in digital critical editing
    Robert Alessi (CNRS, UMR 8167 Orient & Méditerranée)
    Biography As a research fellow, Robert Alessi holds an academic position at the French CNRS Joint Research Unit “Orient & Méditerranée” (UMR 8167, Paris, France). His research concentrates on the edition of Greek and Arabic medical texts, on the history of medicine, but also on computing applied to classical studies.
    Abstract Whether the critical edition is digital or printed, it must preserve the traditional form of the apparatus criticus as it is inherited from over two centuries of continuous tradition. We understand it as a paragraph written in Latin with nuance and economy of style. Admittedly, this way of writing is immediately accessible to human intelligence. However, it remains incomprehensible to machines. In this workshop, we will show through concrete examples how ekdosis can be used as a starting point in a “single source publishing” editorial chain. From a simple, structured source code, ekdosis can be asked to produce two completely different outputs in a single operation: one intended for traditional printing, with fully written critical notes, and the other in the form of a TEI xml database directly interpretable by machines.
    For this workshop, it is recommended to have a basic knowledge of LaTeX (an interactive and step-by-step method can be found on the LearnLatex website). You will also need an Overleaf account or an installation of TeXLive.

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