First student workshop (April 2023)

The first student workshop of the Index 2.0 project was held at Royal Holloway, University of London on 20 April 2023

The one-day student workshop, generously supported by Royal Holloway’s Rights and Freedom research cluster and the Reid Research Fund, was the first to test the feasibility of creating a relational database of the Index Interpolationum. Student participants attended an information session about the Index and its extraordinary importance to Roman law research. Giuseppe Di Donato illustrated the context in which the Digest was composed, its structure, and how it has been used in the past to date. He also explained what an interpolation is and, finally, what led to the creation of the Index Interpolationum and its current 'reputation'. Joanna Kulawiak-Cyrankowska took participants on an 'interpolation hunt' journey, explaining the essentials of textual criticism. Through examples, she showed how to identify grammatical, contextual, and stylistic indicators of interpolation, and explained their representation in the Index Interpolationum.

From left to right: core members of the Index 2.0 team, Giuseppe Di Donato (Edinburgh Napier), Joanna Kulawiak-Cyrankowska (Lodz) and Marton Ribary (Royal Holloway) with our research assistant Julien Danneau (Louvain)

Marton Ribary provided training in how to decode the shorthand of text critical comments in the printed version of the Index and how to then encode them to a relational database with a custom-made data entry interface created with Google Sheets, data validation, and Google AppScript. Student participants tested the data entry interface with and without supervision. In a concluding feedback session, we discussed the experience with the participants, who made recommendations for improving the ease and speed of the process.

During the discussion and feedback session, students recommended some adjustments to future in-person and online training in using the data entry sheet such as working-in pairs, tracking and measuring performance of participants, “signing off” their work by more experienced editors, and a mechanism of easing data encoders to more challenging tasks by allocating different parts of the Index to different levels. While there was a general consensus that optical character recognition (OCR) is not appropriate for transforming the hard copy Index to a database, we discussed the possibility of using OCR for pre-processing certain parts of the text (eg the bibliographic abbreviations) and capturing basic information (structure, keywords) for classifying text-critical entries for the purpose of creating the aforementioned levels of complexity. The participants’ comments  informed an update prepared for our second workshop held in Lodz in September 2023. [include hyperlink to Lodz workshop here]

Benet Salway (UCL History) joined us on the day and talked about the historical context of the Index project. He argued that, apart from making the invaluable information included in the Index available in a user-friendly form, the Index 2.0 project should aim to rehabilitate the Index and text-critical approach in Roman legal scholarship. There is a palpable reluctance of engaging with the material, which is overwhelming and, in some parts,  too speculative. Benet argued that the proposed crowdsourcing approach to creating the database would help the Roman legal scholarly community re-engage with the material, and it would also assist in sieving the important text-critical comments in the Index from those which are, in hindsight, overblown, and should probably be disregarded .

David Natal Villazala (Royal Holloway History) gave valuable feedback on the project proposal and met with the team for a postmortem after the workshop. David gave practical advice on how to approach the funding of the project and what schemes we might want to target. He drew our attention to some restrictions of EU schemes favouring project spearheaded by a single Primary Investigator (PI), and what other domestic UK schemes (eg AHRC general and early-career grant) may be more suitable for a genuinely collaborative project with three equal PIs. David also commented on working with software designers and software developers, and gave an indication about the cost of such partnerships.

For the student workshop itself, we recruited students from top UK universities (and beyond) at various stages of their studies who had at least a basic command of the Latin language and an interest in one or more of the following areas: Roman law, ancient history, text criticism, and digital humanities. Applicants were asked to provide a statement about their Latin language skills and a motivation statement explaining their interest as part of the application process. Student participants learned about the Index and the benefits of a digitally published text of the Digest enriched with text critical comments. They observed a digital humanities project in action and, in particular, how a computer-assisted system could contribute to the reconstruction of Roman law and the doctrine and style of Roman jurists. We are grateful for the feedback we received on the design of an interactive digital platform from our enthusiastic participants, who all left a mark on text-based Roman law research.