Serving as moderator, James DALY acknowledged the generosity of all the
presenters for giving of their time, counsel, and patience in planning
the Workshop, as well as of members of the American Memory project and
other Library of Congress staff, and the David and Lucile Packard
Foundation and its executive director, Colburn S. Wilbur.
DALY then recounted his visit in March to the Center for Electronic Texts
in the Humanities (CETH) and the Department of Classics at Rutgers
University, where an old friend, Lowell Edmunds, introduced him to the
department's IBYCUS scholarly personal computer, and, in particular, the
new Latin CD-ROM, containing, among other things, almost all classical
Latin literary texts through A.D. 200. Packard Humanities Institute
(PHI), Los Altos, California, released this disk late in 1991, with a
nominal triennial licensing fee.
Playing with the disk for an hour or so at Rutgers brought home to DALY
at once the revolutionizing impact of the new technology on his previous
methods of research. Had this disk been available two or three years
earlier, DALY contended, when he was engaged in preparing a commentary on
Book 10 of Virgil's Aeneid for Cambridge University Press, he would not
have required a forty-eight-square-foot table on which to spread the
numerous, most frequently consulted items, including some ten or twelve
concordances to key Latin authors, an almost equal number of lexica to
authors who lacked concordances, and where either lexica or concordances
were lacking, numerous editions of authors antedating and postdating Virgil.
Nor, when checking each of the average six to seven words contained in
the Virgilian hexameter for its usage elsewhere in Virgil's works or
other Latin authors, would DALY have had to maintain the laborious
mechanical process of flipping through these concordances, lexica, and
editions each time. Nor would he have had to frequent as often the
Milton S. Eisenhower Library at the Johns Hopkins University to consult
the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae. Instead of devoting countless hours, or
the bulk of his research time, to gathering data concerning Virgil's use
of words, DALY--now freed by PHI's Latin authors disk from the
tyrannical, yet in some ways paradoxically happy scholarly drudgery--
would have been able to devote that same bulk of time to analyzing and
interpreting Virgilian verbal usage.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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