Ancient Manuscripts and Virtual Research Environments

This volume of Classics@ explores and analyses a methodological turn in ancient studies: the practice of presenting harvested data in ancient manuscripts within virtual research environments (VREs). What changes when research on ancient manuscripts occurs in a VRE, especially in early Jewish and Christian literature, New Testament, and Classical works? Does it matter if we undertake research in a digital medium rather than in a traditional print context? How does working with digital images and born-digital data intersect with the traditional print mentalities that have until recently defined philological research? Because VREs offer wide and usually free access to diverse information regardless of one’s geographical location, they continue to have an outsized influence on the research landscape of the humanities in more complex ways. Most notably, perhaps, is the required emphasis on collaborative forms of research in these contexts, representing a profound change to the usual humanist paradigm that is defined by the Romantic representation of the nineteenth-century lonely scholar. The caricature of the textual scholar as a solitary genius sifting through dusty volumes in medieval university libraries is now surely passé. … At their core VREs foster collaborative research. … The methods and outputs are becoming more complex, more multi-modal, and less-attributable to the labors of an individual scholar. The long and short contributions of this fascicle are selective examples of this move in research, and they have been collected from the first conference organized by the MARK16 project. A five-year project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), MARK16 works, as its primary methodological challenge, to build a Virtual Research Environment (VRE) focused on the last chapter of the Gospel according to Mark. Consequently, the online conference organized by the project in September 2020 from Lausanne focused on this point by gathering together a range of scholars working on ancient manuscripts in diverse fields, as well as scholars from the digital humanities. We are very grateful to the SNSF for their support of this event and the production of the resulting publication.