Suda On Line milestone

Thanks to Simon Mahony for posting an excerpt of this announcement previously sent to contributors and registered guests of SOL.   Below is a version of the full announcement tailored for the stoa.org audience.   Many people who contribute to and read this site have made important contributions to SOL’s database and infrastructure over the years, and we thank you wholeheartedly for helping us reach this point.   Quick facts: home page is http://www.stoa.org/sol; and to find out about participating in SOL’s future, please contact the managing editors at sudatores@lsv.uky.edu.   Here comes the announcement:

The Managing Editors of the Suda On Line are pleased to announce that a translation of the last of the >31,000 entries in the Suda was recently submitted to the SOL database and vetted.   This means that the first English translation of the entire Suda lexicon (a vitally important source for Classical and Byzantine studies), as well as the first continuous commentary on the Suda’s contents in any language, is now searchable and browsable through our on-line database (http://www.stoa.org/sol).

Conceived in 1998, the SOL was one of the first new projects that Ross Scaife brought under the aegis of the Stoa Consortium.  Ross also took the lead in turning the inchoate ideas of the project’s originators into a workable digital reality, oversaw the project’s technical development along with Raphael Finkel, and served as one of the Managing Editors until his untimely passing in 2008. After sixteen years, SOL remains, as it was when it began, a unique paradigm of digital scholarly collaboration, demonstrating the potential of new technical and editorial methods of organizing, evaluating and disseminating scholarship.   The current Managing Editors hope that the SOL will stand as a lasting tribute to Ross’s visionary leadership.    From the beginning the SOL has also benefitted from the cooperation and support of the TLG and the Perseus Digital Library.

To see a brief history of the project, go to http://www.stoa.org/sol/history.shtml, and for further background see Anne Mahoney’s article in Digital Humanities Quarterly (http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/003/1/000025/000025.html). The SOL has already proved to be a catalyst for new scholarship on the Suda, including the identification – as possible, probable, or certain – of many hundreds more of the Suda’s quotations than previously recognised. To see a list of these identifications, with links to the Suda entries in question, please visit http://www.stoa.org/sol/TLG.shtml.

Although all the entries are translated, our work is not done. One of the principles of SOL is that there will never be any limit to the improvement of our database.   From here on our editors will be scrutinizing every entry for opportunities to introduce improvements to the translations, additions to the annotations, updates to the associated bibliography, and so on.

We also invite the participation of qualified scholars who can contribute their expertise toward the betterment of SOL.  If you are interested in working on the project, please visit our home page and follow the appropriate link to submit an on-line application to be registered as an editor.   Normally our editors are scholars who possess professional credentials in Classical or Byzantine Studies or in other fields relating to the content of the Suda, but we consider all applications.

If you are already registered as an editor for SOL, and want to get back to work on it after a long layoff, feel free to contact the Managing Editors if you need help getting started (sudatores@lsv.uky.edu).  Also, those who have registered before as translators or guests may submit a request to the Managing Editors to have their status changed to that of editor.

 

The Managing Editors (David Whitehead, Raphael Finkel, William Hutton, Catharine Roth, Patrick Rourke, Elizabeth Vandiver)