This volume comprises ten chapters, written by authors who apply digital methods to their research projects in Classics. In recent years, Classicists have been exposed to a growing number of notifications and reports about digital humanities projects, lauding the utility of digital tools – envisaged as a mysterious black box – to the humanities. However, this volume does not focus on the tools, but rather the rationale, methods, issues, and new questions and perspectives that may arise as a result of their use.

The main themes discussed include interdisciplinarity, scholarly collaboration and communication, open access to research tools and results, open standards and licensing policies permitting the reuse of materials, the long-term duration of electronic editions and archives, and the impact of digital procedures on research. Such issues recall ‘digital’ debates on software development teamwork, open standards, open access, open source and data sustainability. It is not difficult to acknowledge, as they are outlined in the present volume, that they are inherently relevant to the humanities.

The book has an interesting introduction outlining the aforementioned issues, followed by three sections: ‘Archaeology and Geography’ (Chapters 1–3); ‘Text and Language’ (Chapters 4–6); and ‘Infrastructure and Disciplinary Issues’ (Chapters 7–10).

In Chapter 1, ‘Silchester Roman Town: Developing Virtual Research Practice 1997–2008’, M.G. Fulford, E.J. O'Riordan, A. Clarke and M. Rains give a report on the Silchester Town Life Project, an excavation in which digital procedures were adopted throughout the whole process, from the recording of trench finds to the publication of results. It has thus become possible to provide the academic community with a great quantity of archaeological data, stored in a database designed ad hoc and published digitally, alongside the traditional print publication.

In Chapter 2, ‘Diversity and Reuse of Digital Resources for Ancient Mediterranean Material Culture’, S. Heath shows that several digital archives of ancient coins and Roman pottery drawn together by commercial enterprises or private hobbyists are more accessible to those studying classical antiquity than many of the research-oriented archives belonging to museums and universities. He raises concerns about scholarly circulation, reuse and the long-term durability of this trove of digitised evidence.

Chapter 3, ‘Space as an Artefact: a Perspective on “Neogeography”’, by S. Dunn, explores the virtual experience of space and landscape provided by Web 2.0 tools like Google Earth. He suggests that geographical digital Classics projects that adopt an ‘open’ policy on contributions and data exchange, like Pleiades, can use a similar approach to move on from the task of mapping the Ancient World to the more ambitious one of providing a deeper insight into its geography.

Chapter 4, ‘Contextual Epigraphy and XML: Digital Publication and its Application to the Study of Inscribed Funerary Monuments’, by C. Tupman, opens the second section of the book. Epigraphy is one of the fields in which the discipline's traditional goals are best attained through digital publication, as this allows for the encoding and presentation of a text with integrated information on the monument and its archaeological context. The application of EpiDoc guidelines to the publication of funerary inscriptions is discussed in detail. Digital Epigraphy projects implementing these open standards normally adopt a research policy based on open collaboration and ‘open source’, allowing other researchers to access and reuse the whole set of data underlying the ‘surface’ publication.

In Chapter 5, ‘A Virtual Research Environment for the Study of Documents and Manuscripts’, A.K. Bowman, C.V. Crowther, R. Kirkham and J. Pybus illustrate a set of projects based in Oxford aiming to develop hardware and software tools to assist scholars in deciphering barely-legible ancient documents. Key issues include, again, the implementation of an ‘open source’ approach, fostering the reuse of data and interoperability.

In Chapter 6, ‘One Era's Nonsense, Another's Norm: Diachronic Study of Greek and the Computer’, N. Toufexis discusses scholarly digital editions of classical texts built upon a full set of transcriptions by all of their relevant witnesses. Such editions fulfil one of the original promises of Classical Philology: not only do they reconstruct the most ancient form of the text, but they also account for the history of its tradition. This perspective has never seduced editors of classical texts, who often argue that the benefits of a complete digital encoding of manuscripts simply do not outweigh the effort involved. Toufexis argues that a large archive of such editions would constitute an invaluable resource for Greek language historians, as manuscript ‘errors’ preserve evidence of language change throughout the centuries. His argument shows how the application of digital methods, rooted in the tradition of Classical Studies, may allow new research questions to arise.

In Chapter 7, ‘Infrastructure and Disciplinary Issues: Digital Infrastructure and the Homer Multitext Project’, N. Smith illustrates the scope and outcomes of the Homer Multitext Project, and sets forth its rationale and methodological choices. Digital technologies for text and image processing allow the project's research team to represent the text of the Iliad in a ‘plural’ way: the textual variance of witnesses is not reduced by the constraints of a slim apparatus criticus, but digitally displayed in its entirety. Once more, issues are raised regarding open standards, collaboration and interoperability.

In Chapter 8, ‘Ktêma es aiei: Digital Permanence from an Ancient Perspective’, H.A. Cayless analyses the textual traditions of Virgil, Sappho and Augustus' Res Gestae. He argues that the reason some ancient texts succeeded in surviving throughout the centuries lies in the broad, open dissemination of copies as opposed to contemporary licensing policies based on restrictive copyright.

Chapter 9, ‘Creating a Generative Learning Object (GLO): Working in an “Ill Structured” Environment and Getting Students to Think’, by E. OKell, D. Ljubojevic and C. MacMahon, summarises a collaborative process that brought together learning technologists and humanities higher education practitioners in creating eMI (evaluating Multiple Interpretations), an e-learning module designed specifically for fostering the development of critical thinking.

Chapter 10, ‘The Digital Classicist: Disciplinary Focus and Interdisciplinary Vision’, by M. Terras, concludes the volume and discusses the concepts of disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity, as well as outlining the challenges of managing digital classics research projects.

While it may be pointed out that the complex question of text modelling in the digital humanities may still need deeper reflection than that lying behind most digital editions, the relevant chapters in the volume move in the right direction inasmuch as they refuse to eschew the issue. The main interest of the book lies in its choice of focussing on issues, rather than on digital mirabilia.

This book will be relevant to classicists interested in the new frontiers opened by digital research, and eager to scrutinise its methods and perspectives rather than fleetingly scratch its surface.Footnote ¹