Professor Christopher W. Blackwell (Furman University)
Thursday January 17th, 13:00
Room B.7, Classics Department, King's College London

The heart of humanist scholarship is “quotation”, reproduction plus citation. Reproduction lets us focus on an object of study—a word, a verse. Citation saves us from having to reproduce more than we need, while still affording access to an object-of-study’s larger context. Citations are concise. If done correctly, they allow graphs of knowledge to survive across technological revolutions.

Christopher Blackwell will talk about citation as implemented for the Homer Multitext. This is a 21st Century model of unambiguous, machine-actionable citation of texts, data, and images. This presentation will be both conceptual and practical. It will describe a decade-long process of refactoring and separation of concerns toward a generic and highly flexible approach to a complex digital library problem. It will end with demonstrations of tools that allow efficient citation of details on images, and tools for adding to html documents citations of texts, images, and data that can automatically resolve to the quotations they cite.

All tools and data developed by the Homer Multitext are freely available under open content licenses and are as platform agnostic as possible.

[ Christopher W. Blackwell is the Louis G. Forgione University Professor at Furman University, in Greenville, South Carolina, USA. With Neel Smith he is a Project Architect of the Homer Multitext, a project of the Center for Hellenic Studies of Harvard University under the Editorship of Casey Dué and Mary Ebbott. ]