engleski

What shall we do with a text collection

A good resource must enable us to do something we could not do without it. So what new things have resources like Google Book Search, the Perseus Project, and the German neo-Latin CAMENA collection enabled me --- a scholar trained as a classical philologist, working in a small country in Southern Europe --- to do? After considering some obvious responses, it is important to note that those digital, web-based experiments, both with their successes and their shortcomings, have made it possible, even necessary, to imagine an act of building a digital collection that is also an act of building a community around the collection. Imagine a collection or an archive designed in such a way to be able to support itself, enabling its users to contribute and persuading them to want to contribute, to enrich and personalize the collection and to share their own personalizations with others. Furthermore, imagine such a collection designed not around a very famous or popular subject but around something special, something relatively unknown, exotic, or esoteric. How to create such space? What tools, what services, what strategies are needed? Do we have them already, or do they have yet to be devised? I will try to propose answers using the example and the experience of the Croatiae auctores Latini, a digital collection in the making, intended to become both a "knowledge site" and "a village of scholars" (as envisioned by Peter L. Shillingsburg) around the so far unsufficiently researched phenomenon of Croatian Latin texts, written by people of Croatian origin from the ninth to the twentieth centuries.

Croatian Latin writers; digitalization; text collection; internet service; scholarly community

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