Thomas Koentges

  

Digital Humanities, Satire, Comedy, and Textual Criticism are my main research interests. My PhD thesis had a text-critical focus, while I researched the political thought in Horace’s early work in my Master’s thesis. During my Master’s, I also encountered the field of Digital Humanities for the first time. I worked within in a multinational and interdisciplinary team on the digital reconstructing of Greek papyri in eAQUA, a digital text-mining project of several institutions, for instance, the Univer- sity of Leipzig and the Perseus Project. After having handed in my PhD thesis, I am working now on new methods of social network analysis in the digital Colenso Project. It is the first time that I work outside the Classical focus and I enjoy it. In Latin literature, I enjoy facing the philological challenges of Petronius and the bellum hispaniense and would like to focus within the next years on text-critical problems of Latin authors and employ new digital methods to correct, edit, and publish their texts. Thereby, it is my intention to endeavour the possibility of reconstructing ancient texts employing e-teaching and crowdsourcing tools and collaborate with fellow Classic scholars, medieval historians, librarians, and IT experts, and then share this knowledge with students of all levels. Next to the Classics-focused digitally supported reconstruction of texts, I am interested in the conser- vation and transferability of metadata. When enriching any corpus with metadata, transferability is a challenge because of the multitude of competing standards. The tradition of text-critical publishing teaches us that reversibility and transferability are the most important aspects when enriching the text with metadata. I think that we have to look outside of the box and instead of looking for the right standard, we have to develop a work-flow that constantly adapts. Darwin’s rule of survival of the fittest is correct for metadata.