Work (and more) at Grenoble conference

Conference notes from MID advisor Neel Smith

Last week, Nik Churik and I spoke at the conference “Digital Humanities: the example of Antiquity” at the Université Stendhal-Grenoble 3 on “Testable distant reading in scholia, lexica and paraphrases.” Our talk was based on Nik’s senior project at Holy Cross, but incorporated new work by MID club members who, as part of their summer research at Holy Cross, classified different uses of interior scholia in the Venetus A manuscript. Thanks to Alex Simrell, Brian Clark, Charlie Schuhfrieder, Melody Wauke, Stephanie Lindeborg and Claude Hanley for that important contribution.

The Homer Multitext project was also represented by Lenny Muellner’s talk. Nik (class of ‘15) and Lenny (CHS, emeritus Brandeis Univeristy) nicely illustrated the multigenerational aspect of the HMT team’s work.

As at every successful conference, some of the most valuable interaction took place at the (sumptuous) meals and coffee breaks.

Grenoble (or Gratianopolis to the cheerfully anachronistic) was also a delightful city to visit in September. I squeezed in a trip on the funicular to the imposing fortications of Grenoble’s Bastille.

In the opening plenary session of the conference, Nik was named one of a small group of promising young scholars to receive a bursary that covered his travel expenses from Leiden, where is a Fulbright Scholar this year. We both would like to thank the organizers of the conference for this support. I only wish more American conference organizers would adopt this laudable practice.

Neel Smith (faculty advisor to MID)