Opening up Classics and the Humanities: Computation, the Homer Multitext Project and Citizen Science

Abstract: Increasingly powerful computational methods are important for humanists not simply because they make it possible to ask new research questions but especially because computation makes it both possible -- and arguably essential -- to transform the relationship between humanities research and society, opening up a range of possibilities for student contributions and citizen science. To illustrate this point, this paper looks at the transformative work conducted by the Homer Multitext Project (http://homermultitext.blogspot.de/; http://www.homermultitext.org/).