Digital humanities, libraries, and crowdsourcing: Foundations of digital textual technologies

ABSTRACT The Greek Key is a prototype Virtual Research Environment (VRE) for the analysis of patterns in ancient texts and manuscripts. A Powerpoint presentation demonstrates how the VRE functions through a comparative case study of the organization of information in Plato and Aristotle. The interdisciplinary method combines historical, philological, and philosophical techniques with approaches from the digital humanities. The Greek Key is a collaborative, scalable, multidisciplinary project that has the potential to engage librarians in participatory strategies such as crowdsourcing (or “Citizen Science”). The Greek Key tools for visualizing textual data have the potential to: reveal previously undetected patterns in books and collections; make connections among different works; help users bring new information to bear on interpretation; demonstrate the significance of findings; and generate fresh insights about works of literature that have had a central and enduring influence on both our scholarly traditions and the history of libraries and librarianship. The VRE will make it possible for academic researchers and librarians to pursue perennial questions in innovative ways, and respond to questions that do not lend themselves to more traditional methods.