Teaching Oedipus Tyrannos with a rich digital edition, in a pandemic

Abstract

The article presents a digital scholarly edition of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos that was used as support for an undergraduate seminar in Ancient Greek at Furman University. Our edition is a series of HTML pages, built programmatically, integrating syntactic, morphological, and lexical data. The edition is based on two of the most important acquisitions in the last decade of research in the Digital Classics: the CITE/CTS architecture and the treebanks of Ancient Greek. Our approach aims to overcome both the technical and linguistic “friction” that hinders the process of reading ancient texts in their original, unabridged format. While our work on the notion of a “zero-friction edition” predates the spread of COVID-19, all the problems that we were trying to tackle dramatically came into prominence with the outbreak of the pandemic during the Spring Semester of 2020. We discuss the outcomes and lessons-learned from this pedagogical experience.