Scholiastae project

[Raphaela]

This came in a couple of days ago on Classics-L; I thought it might be of interest to some of the people here.

From: Wm Annis
To: [e-mail]
Date: Sunday, February 22, 2009, 4:02:45 AM
Subject: [CLASSICS-L] A new web project: www.scholiastae.org

After years of hoping fruitlessly for web-based software to work up texts in the same way I do for Aoidoi.org, I finally gave up early this year, and learned how to write MediaWiki extensions to produce it for myself. After weeks of testing and comments from a few people, I'm ready to release this to the world.

http://www.scholiastae.org/scholia/

At the moment two small poems, one in Greek, one in Latin, are the only fully commented texts on the site, but one of Lucian's Dialogs of the Dead is nearly complete. There are a few more prose works (Lucian, Plato) I'll be working on over the next few months, but I hope others will be inspired to create accounts and share commented texts.

--
William S. Annis
www.aoidoi.org

[Laura Gibbs]

AHA, super - there is that version of CC with the dollar sign crossed out, which is to say commercial use is prohibited. For example:

If you chose the option where commercial reuse with attribution is allowed, that would totally work for me, no problem at all! Super! I put a CC-NONcommercial license on my online courses because I did not want the local copyshops in my area preparing course packets and charging the students for them! (There are some nefarious copyshop operators in town...) :-)

[William Annis]

Speaking of copyrights, what is the copyright status of the Babrius text at Aesopica?

[Laura Gibbs]

It's not public domain - it came from the Loeb. Now that there are so many editions of Babrius at GoogleBooks, I'll just take it down if I ever get a complaint about it. Back when I put up that website, there were hardly any Greek books available online; now with Google Books, I wouldn't even have bothered to put up the Greek pages at that site at all, and I won't feel bad to take them down; it's so easy to find Babrius books at GoogleBooks now - which was not the case back in 1999 when I was first working on that. (The digitization is a mess anyway, since it was done before Unicode, and originally the thing was all in BetaCode which is monstrously hard to proofread; eek, it was such a nightmare doing Greek only 10 years ago - now it is so much easier...).

[William Annis]

I've had good luck hunting for Babrius at the GoogleBorg myself, but transcribing Greek in any encoding is pain in the posterior. I just wanted to check. Thanks.

[Laura Gibbs]

I don't remember what text Perry used to start with - it wouldn't surprise me if he started with an earlier edition and tinkered with it. The whole business of the copyright on editions of classical texts is such a complicated business (I would never copy Perry's English translations, because of course he created those from scratch) - but with classical editions, just how do you measure originality? What a conundrum! Someone at Perseus once told me about a 30% rule - the idea being that if 30% of an existing edition were altered by someone else working on it, that turned it into a "new edition"... although now that the paradise of GoogleBooks has made the old editions available, I just start with a public domain edition to begin with and go from there... so I don't have to try to measure the magic 30% - and goodness knows just how one would even measure such a thing!