Skip to main content
The Collation

This is the story of how a tweet can grow into an amazing scholarly resource. (And it ends with a plea for you to help!)

Just over a year ago, in January 2013, I was looking through the Folger’s collection of Greek texts so that I could find works for a course assignment on describing books. (My intent was to drum into them the necessity of looking at books as an activity that is separate from reading them—and what better way to do that than to ensure that they’re in a language they cannot read?) As part of that browsing, I pulled up a 1517 Aldine edition of Homer’s works, and was blown away by the abundance of annotations in the first part of the book. And so I did what I often do when I see something exciting in the reading room, thanks to the Folger’s policy permitting reader photography: I snapped a picture and tweeted it out.

a heavily annotated opening from the Folger's 1517 Aldine Homer

a heavily annotated opening from the Folger’s 1517 Aldine Homer

  1. It’s also a nice touch that Rachel is a former student of Adam Hooks’s and a current colleague at the Folger, where she’s the Curatorial Assistant before heading off to her PhD program this fall.

Comments

[…] Właśnie trafiłem na bardzo ciekawy wpis, który poczyniła Sarah Werner z Folger Shakespeare Library na blogu tejże biblioteki The Collation. […]

O dzieleniu się wiedzą i co ma do tego Twitter | Filologia cyfrowa :: Mediewistyka 2.0 — March 20, 2014

Reply

A great example of serendipity, collaboration and social media.

Unfortunately my Greek is a bit rusty, and my Greek palaeography non-existent, so I can’t transcribe the annotations. However I did notice that pages 6–12 of the ABO version appear to have Latin glosses in addition to (or in some cases written over) the Greek annotations.

Philip Allfrey — March 20, 2014

Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *