Digital Classics and CLARIN-IT: What Italian Scholars of Ancient Greek Expect from Digital Resources and Technology

This paper presents and discusses the findings of a survey carried out to assess the use of digital resources and digital technologies with respect to work in ancient Greek scholarship, with the aim to identify the factors that are likely to constrain its use as well as to elicit needs and requirements of ancient Greek scholars in Italy. The survey is in line with the principles behind the user engagement strategy developed by CLARIN-ERIC and constitutes one of the national efforts undertaken by CLARIN-IT to contribute to the wider impact of CLARIN on Digital Classicists. The survey, as well as other surveys carried out in the sector in the last decade, points out that most of the available resources do not respond to users’ requirements. This motivated us to develop a mock-up of a digital editor of Archilochus, which, mostly grounded on previous studies by Nicolosi, draws on the outcomes of the survey. The experiment includes a sample prototype to submit for evaluation by end-users. The final aim is to identify good practices and new models to enable new approaches to the study of classical texts and profile a new workbench for scholarly digital edition.