Why does your core bibliography list 18 commentaries, if the AjMC provides provides actual access to only 7 of them?

Only public domain commentaries are accessible online, as we do not have the rights to redistribute copyrighted commentaries.

Why the multi-commentary does not have a critical apparatus?

Since each commentary implies its own critical text, creating a critical apparatus for a multi-commentary is radically different than doing so for a single edition/commentary, both conceptually and in terms of user interface rendering. Given the complexity of this endeavour, and our project's focus on commentary practices (rather than text editing), we decided to leave this for future work.

What do the different coloured highlights mean in the central column of the Multi-Commentary page?

They illustrate the density of glosses on a particular lemma or line. Darker shades of blue indicate a greater number of glosses on the highlighted portion of text. Hovering with your mouse cursor on the highlight will show the exact number of glosses.

How comes that the transcriptions of commentary glosses contain typos? And why haven't you fixed them?

The commentary text displayed in the right column was produced by means of automatic text recognition and, as such, it is likely to contain a certain number of errors. Instead of manually correcting them, we decided to enable users to directly see the page facsimile, which obviates the presence of transcription errors.

This project explores the notion of a digital commentary by focusing on one commentary’s tradition: that of Sophocles’ Ajax. In this project we focus on the historical and epistemological dimension of such publications, and study the history of this genre and of its exegetic practices. In order to enable the study of all published commentaries on the Ajax, digitized commentaries are being processed through an ad-hoc pipeline and transformed into a multi-commentary.

The project (Sept. 2020 - Dec. 2024) has been generously funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation under an Ambizione grant (no. PZ00P1_186033).

Project team

• Matteo Romanello – UNIL, Principal investigator
• Sven Najem-Meyer – EPFL, PhD candidate
• Charles Pletcher – UNIL, Research Software Engineer
• Carla Amaya – Student assistant
• Kevin Duc - Student assistant

Outputs and publications

Code, datasets and models developed in the context of this project can be found on GitHub. For an up-to-date list of publications and presentations see the SNSF data portal.