Contents

About the Project

 Interactive Help

About the Database

 Other Resources

Structure and Uses of the Database

 Schedule

The Text

 Getting Involved

The Commentaries

 Collaborators

The Image Archive

 Support

Utilities Sample Links

About the Project

 The Vergil Project is a collaborative enterprise dedicated to collecting, creating, and disseminating resources for teaching and research about Vergil. Its main goal is to develop an on-line, interactive hypertext database of all materials that might be of interest to any student of Vergil, from the novice to the professional scholar, from the passionate amateur to the casual browser. The purpose of this resource is to facilitate the study and enjoyment of Vergil's poetry and to make it freely accessible to the widest possible audience.

About the Database

The basic idea behind the database is simple: it is a collection of information about Vergil's works that can be organized and presented as a text with commentary. Both the text and the commentary, however, are able to draw on far more information than any printed edition. Furthermore, both text and commentary can be customized to the user's specifications. The high school student reading Vergil for the first time or the professor of modern literature unexpectedly returning to the Latin text after thirty years will be able to request specific grammatical, syntactic, and lexical help on any given word or passage in Vergil's collected works. The graduate student writing a paper on a particular theme will have access to an up-to-date, annotated bibliography of Vergilian studies. A Milton specialist will be able to find a catalogue of quotations from the Aeneid in Paradise Lost. An editor preparing a new critical edition will be able to see images and diplomatic transcripts of the major manuscript witnesses. Beginning Latin classes might read the story of Aeneas' wanderings in a simple prose paraphrase. The superstitious can consult the sortes Vergilianae. And others will put these and the rest of the materials contained here to uses not yet thought of.

Structure and Uses

The database can be thought of in two ways. A technical description is available for those who are interested; but most users will probably prefer to think about the ways they might use the database rather than about its underlying structure.

As noted above, the database was designed to be used in the same way as a traditional printed text and commentary. One advantage of the hypertext medium is that it eliminates the choice between using the limited space available at the bottom of the page or forcing the reader to flip pages back and forth between text and commentary. Instead, every word of the text is linked to the appropriate points in the commentary. Moving back and forth is as easy as clicking a mouse, and it is almost impossible to lose one's place. In this respect, the database sould be much easier to use than a printed book.

Another advantage of the database is that it does not limit the user either to a single text or to a single commentary. These features are explained in the following sections.

The Text

If the database is a kind of tree (which it is not, but the image is useful point of departure), then its trunk is the text of Vergil's works. For this database a new text has been "established," to use the traditional word, though perhaps "devised" would be better; for this text is not a thing, but a system, and the user bears some responsibility for creating the text that he or she wants to use.

When you want to consult our text, you begin with a menu. The menu requires you to choose the version you want to see. The choices currently planned are as follows:

There will be no "default" text, nor will the text of any particular modern editor be offered (though the user has the option of constructing one if desired: the procedure is explained below). The reasons for this are more philosophical than legal: it is hoped that users, by being confronted with this choice, will realize that they bear ultimate responsibility for the form of the text that they read, and that consequently more readers will take an interest in editorial matters.

It is with these considerations in mind that the choice of texts has been designed. Each choice reflects an aspect The Vergil Project's editorial philosophy:

The Communal Text

The Communal Text is perhaps the most innovative editorial feature of the project. Through this link, users will participate in the "establishment" of a text that will never reach final form. Here is how it will work. All the texts at this site include a critical apparatus of variant readings, conjectural emendations, and so forth. Because this information is presented on-line, it is possible for interested users to select the readings that they prefer -- to vote, in effect, for the reading that they think should appear in a given passage. These votes can then be tabulated, and the reading receiving the most votes will appear in the Communal Text. Those who consult this version of the text must therefore do so on the understanding that it does not represent the final judgment of any single editorial expert, but the aggregate opinion of the community of users of the site, and that it is subject to change at any moment.

Your Personal Text

In addition to encouraging users to participate in the Communal Text, we hope that they will also take the time to establish their own texts of Vergil. Through this menu item they can record their preferences and use them to establish the text that they habitually consult. Of course, it will be possible to use this feature in other ways as well. Someone who wanted to use this site but felt the need of a little extra editorial authority might simply enter into his or her text whatever readings are printed by his or her favorite editor. On the other hand, a group of scholars interested in constructing a text for some specific purpose might use this resource collaboratively. So might a class on Vergil or on textual criticism. No doubt other applications will be thought of as well.

The Text of a Particular Manuscript

Through this feature it will be possible to see the text as it appears in any of the manuscripts whose readings have been entered into the database. If one were interested in the Palatinus, for example, a diplomatic transcript of that manuscript would (with secondary readings and corrections available via hypertext links). In some cases images are available as well, and we hope eventually to provide facsimiles of all the mss in the database.

A Choice of Other Particular Texts

Different scholars consult the text of Vergil for different purposes. Some may not be interested so much in what Vergil wrote as in what Dante or Milton thought he wrote. Under this heading we intend to provide a selection of specialized texts of a particular importance historically or otherwise. We begin with the text of Servius, and invite interested parties to create others, taking advantage of the Personal Text feature.

Conjectural Emendations

Here will be found a repository of conjectural emendations made in the past and a mechanism for promulgating and discussing new ones.

The Commentaries

Every word that appears in the text is linked to a menu from which the user can select a variety of interpretive resources. The types of commentary available vary with each word, but the menu format in general will be as follows:

Image Archive

One important initiative of the project will be to take advantage of WWW's graphics capability to make available images relevant to Vergilian studies. These will include maps, photos of ancient monuments, manuscript pages and illuminations, artistic representations of scenes from Vergil's poetry, illustrations from printed editions, etc. The copyright laws governing reproduction rights make this part of the project somewhat more complicated than some of the others, however, but we look forward to the cooperation of all responsible parties in making these images available for educational and scholarly purposes.

Utilities

The text and commentary will be searchable via an on-line search engine capable of producing customized concordances.

Professors Ward Briggs and Alexander McKay have agreed to make available the annotated bibliographies compiled by Professor McKay and published every year in Vergilius. This bibliographical database will be linked to the commentary and will be searchable on-line.

Interactive Help

In addition to parsed and scaned versions of the text, there will be an on-line interactive scansion and parsing drill. It may be possible to develop further interactive drills dealing with other aspects of the text. these, however, will probably have to follow on the commentary, to which they would be keyed.

Other Resources

In addition to creating new materials accessible via the text site, The Vergil Project will search for and assemble references to Vergilian and related resources available elsewhere on the Web. These links are being collected at a site called "Pagina Domestica P. Vergili Maronis / Vergil's Home Page," which will be directly accessible from most sites created by The Vergil Project via the icon at the beginning of this paragraph.

Schedule

Rome wasn't built in a day. The Vergil Project was launched in June 1995. This past summer has been spent assembling materials for the text database and writing programs code to deliver a usable text, mounting the first few years of the Bibliography, and collecting existing materials for the Pagina Domestica. With the fall begins the construction of the commentary. It is anticipated that this resource, unlike a printed edition or commentary, will never be complete, but it is intended to be usable for certain purposes from the outset, and we will proceed by making portions of the whole usable by as many people as possible as soon as possible. There is no definite schedule, since we do not yet know how many workers or how much money we will have over time. We do, however, enjoy strong and stable institutional support at the University of Pennsylvania, so that progress, even if incrremental, should remain steady.

Getting Involved

The number of people who could make materiall contributions to this project is enormous. High school classes could make their parsing and scansion exercises available to the organizers for checking and then mounting on the Web. College undergraduates can collate existing commentaries and develop online exercises. Graduate students could contract to write portions of the commentary in lieu of term papers. Professors in various disciplines at all sorts of institutions can contribute their expertise by producing original work or agreeing to republish their past work oline with links to this site. The possibilities are literally unlimited. Therefore, The Vergil Project eagerly solicits the active participation of all interested parties. Vergil is read and studies more often by more people at more levels than any other classical author. Everyone, no matter what his or her level of expertise, has smething to contribute, and we will be grateful to have your help.

Collaborators

Support

The Vergil Project is grateful for the support of the following organizations and individuals:

Sample Links

Go to the text or to Vergili Pagina Domestica.

For more ideas about on-line resources of this type, be sure to visit The Perseus Project, The Ovid Project, The Peraldus Project, the Analytical Onomasticon Project, and The Rossetti Archive.

(8/23/95)