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Copyright © 1996 by Ernest Metzger. All rights reserved. This is the text of a paper given on 17 September 1996 at the 50th Session of the Société 'Fernand De Visscher' pour l'Histoire des Droits de l'Antiquité, Brussels.
Scholarship in the Sunshine
Ernest Metzger*
The subject of this paper is a certain technology, the World-Wide Web. My aim is to discuss this technology from the standpoint of a legal Romanist, and to point out what I believe are its advantages and disadvantages. I suggest that at present the technology is not an essential tool for research in Roman law, but that in certain limited respects it will probably alter the way in which Romanists research and publish. The use of technology for the teaching of Roman law is not within the scope of this paper. [1]
The World-Wide Web
The World-Wide Web is the name given to a certain area set aside within the Internet, the world-wide computer network. Persons and institutions have long used the Internet to send and receive electronic information, but until the creation of the World-Wide Web, use of the Internet required training. The World-Wide Web makes it possible for a person to consult information on the Internet without training, and with only limited practice. A person has only to enter the World-Wide Web by an electronic link, and select the information he wishes to consult. To publish material on the Internet, one places material within the ambit of the World-Wide Web. That material then becomes available to any person who wishes to consult it. The material may consist of words, pictures, or sounds. Because electronic material is ephemeral, it can be removed from publication, as well as augmented and altered. Any changes are immediately apparent to the reader. While the World-Wide Web is principally a tool for publishing, in many respects it has the aspect of a seminar. Widely dispersed people may offer comments on material published on the World-Wide Web, and the material may be altered in response to those comments. The altered material is then immediately available for further comment. As a metaphor for the World-Wide Web, one might imagine a group of persons in a room, commenting on and altering a single text before them. It can be difficult to judge the usefulness of the World-Wide Web, for the simple reason that it does not promise to do a specific task or routine. In the last ten years a number of different electronic tools and publications have appeared, and because each promised to do something specific, it was possible to judge its value. The World-Wide Web, in contrast, is only as useful as the material provided; its value depends entirely on the uses made of it. The challenge is therefore to identify what exactly the World-Wide Web is suited to, with an eye to cultivating its appropriate uses, given the special features of the technology. In order to discuss the better uses of the World-Wide Web, I must first describe these special features. (1) Skills required. I have mentioned already that few skills are required to consult material on the World-Wide Web. To publish material on the World-Wide Web, however, does require training. Publishing in this way is therefore a matter better left to those with the time and patience to do so. (2) Speed and availability. Material is available at the moment it is published. Anyone who is connected to the Internet may retrieve, view, store, or print the material. Most universities are connected to the Internet, and those who work at universities are among the most frequent users and providers of materials on the Internet. (3) Communication between author and reader. For purposes of academic research, the World-Wide Web has the advantage that an author and his readers are able to communicate easily and rapidly by electronic means. This is possible because, as a consequence of the technology, an electronic link between the author and each reader is established by the very act of publishing in this way. Accordingly, if I publish on the World-Wide Web some piece of written work I might, for example, receive notes from readers indicating that a word has been misspelled or a citation omitted. I am then able to make the correction immediately, and the corrected material will replace the old material. Or, if I receive a reader's comments, I am able to publish those comments alongside the original material. (4) The material is readily altered. As indicated in the examples just given, material published on the World-Wide Web is readily altered. This is both an advantage and a disadvantage. The ability to add and change is a distinct advantage to an editor preparing a palingenesia, a translation, or a text from papyrological or epigraphic sources. Also, an author might welcome the ability to revise his views. Yet this same feature has the obvious disadvantage that comment and criticism of a work becomes difficult if the work is always changing.[2] Possibly this disadvantage may be removed by (1) a more detailed system of citation which identifies an electronic publication precisely, or (2) a system of archiving, under which an institution simply stores the definitive version of a work. One also hopes that authors will come to recognize that electronic publications that frequently change will not receive the critical attention they may otherwise deserve. (5) Costs. The costs of using and publishing on the World-Wide Web vary according to one's private arrangements. The principal costs of running a World-Wide Web 'server'--the instrument which sends and receives information--are borne in the first instance by an institution, which pays for the privilege of using server software, for connection time, and for all necessary hardware. Users and publishers make two demands upon these institutions: access time and storage. Either or both of these costs may be assessed against the user or publisher. In general, however, for those who work at universities, the costs assessed against a publisher or user tend to be low or non-existent. This is a consequence of the fact that computer accounts are often allotted to members of universities as a matter of course, and to use one's account to access or publish on the World-Wide Web does not impose a large, additional burden on the operator. In the aggregate, of course, the increasing traffic of information created by the World-Wide Web may put significant burdens on operators. Thus it may become common for universities to assess the costs of access and storage against individuals or faculties. Other costs are more certain: (1) A person pays a fee to visit commercial sites that charge for access. (2) If a person uses a commercial Internet service provider, there are charges associated with the service. (3) If a person uses the World-Wide Web through the telephone lines, there may be charges, depending upon the arrangements with the telephone company. (6) Hypertext. 'Hypertext' is an undescriptive and ostentatious word that in fact refers to a genuinely useful feature of material on the World-Wide Web. An electronic publication--most often a piece of text--sometimes presents a word or phrase in a highlighted form. The highlight indicates that that word or phrase is associated with another piece of material, e.g., an article other than the article one is reading. When the reader selects (with his computer equipment) the highlighted word or phrase, that other material is retrieved and presented to him. The highlighted 'link' will usually be descriptive; if the words 'Smith's piece on iniuria' is highlighted, selecting those words will present Smith's piece on iniuria. For academic publications in law, hypertext is perhaps most useful in presenting footnotes (which, on a computer screen, would otherwise interrupt the text), and cross-references to other sources. (7) Technical compatibility. Those who use computers are accustomed to the problem of preparing material with a particular piece of equipment or software, but then discovering that the material cannot be used with another piece of equipment or software. The creators of the World-Wide Web sought to avoid this problem by standardizing the way in which material appearing on the World-Wide Web was encoded. The result of their efforts is that new equipment is able to read old material without difficulty ('backward compatibility'). Moreover, by and large it is possible for old equipment to read new material ('forward compatibility'). The consequences of these efforts are that (1) one does not need to purchase the newest equipment and software to read new material, and (2) there is no danger that material one publishes today will become unreadable tomorrow.
Usefulness
To Romanists the World-Wide Web is useful in two respects: in providing materials to readers, and in creating materials. So far as providing materials is concerned, the challenge is to determine exactly where the new technology brings benefits and to identify the sorts of materials that are suitable for publication on the World-Wide Web. (1) Suitable material. The most important material in this category is material that might otherwise not be published. That a person can consider publishing this sort of material has everything to do with costs. The low costs associated with publishing on the World-Wide Web make it possible to consider publishing material which is useful in some way, and perhaps useful only to certain persons, but otherwise might not be published. Below is a list of examples.
- Conference proceedings Corrigenda/addenda/errata/indices to a published work Lecture notes and teaching materials
- Open correspondence
A second category of suitable material is material that changes frequently. The most important item in this category is the bibliography. Printed bibliographies go out of date very quickly. The bibliographies that a person can now consult on the World-Wide Web have the great advantage that they are up to date--at least if someone has taken the trouble to keep them up to date.
A third category of suitable material is material that is difficult to obtain in one's own library. The best example is an article in a periodical: if an author retains the copyright to an article submitted for print publication, he may wish to publish that article on the World-Wide Web as well. This will permit readers to see the article before the printed publication is available. It will also make the article available to readers at institutions which do not subscribe to the periodical. Photographs are also sometimes difficult to find: the ability of a person readily to consult photographs of papyri, inscriptions, coins, archaeological sites, etc., is one of the principal benefits the World-Wide Web brings to legal historians. The last category of suitable material is material that uses the hypertext feature I mentioned above. This material is suitable to the World-Wide Web for the simple reason that it cannot be displayed in paper form. The occasional use of hypertext in what is otherwise a conventional publication is undoubtedly useful: in a bibliography, it may be used to link related references; in an article, it may be used to link text sources or photographs; in a curriculum vitae, it may be used to link publications. It remains to be seen, however, whether material which uses hypertext more prominently and deliberately will be genuinely useful. For example, one might attempt to compose a hypertext textbook of Roman law. Hypertext would be used to divert the reader, where the reader chose to be diverted, to a pertinent discussion of the law of a modern state. (2) Unsuitable material. One can safely say that certain material is unsuitable for publication on the World-Wide Web. Generally speaking, the World-Wide Web is more suitable for short and discrete pieces of material than long and developed pieces. Thus, overview literature (unless it is painstakingly adapted with hypertext) is not suitable to the World-Wide Web. In consulting this sort of literature a reader tends to turn pages frequently and jump from one part of the book to another. This is very cumbersome on a computer. Also, a monograph on a given subject, setting out an argument, is not suitable to the World-Wide Web. A monograph is written with the understanding that it will be read from beginning to end; again, this is cumbersome on a computer. (3) The necessity for culling and presentation. To speak only about suitable and unsuitable material passes over a fairly obvious fact: no material is useful to a person unless he can find it. The most serious problem with the Internet at present is that a given piece of material is often difficult to find unless one knows precisely where to look for it. Various tools for searching have been developed, but they are far from perfect. They will discover only some of the material that is sought, and at the same time will discover a great deal of irrelevant material. A search of the Internet based on a word or figure from antiquity is especially hazardous, as such terms are used widely in other disciplines. This means that material on the Internet must be deliberately organized by subject. Efforts at organization are taking place at many institutions, and in every discipline. It is a task undertaken by government agencies, commercial institutions, universities, and individuals. Few claim a subject exclusively to themselves; several locations on the Internet will be devoted to organizing the same subject. One location may have certain advantages over another. Thus the Internet is slowly organizing itself. In most disciplines--including Roman law--it is not yet a place for serious research. It will probably become a place for serious research as efforts at organization become more widespread. (4) Creating materials The World-Wide Web is useful not only for providing materials, but for creating materials. Its usefulness in creating materials arises from the fact that the technology makes it possible (i) for persons who live at a distance from one another to see the same material at the same time, (ii) for those persons to alter the material in some way, and (iii) for those persons to see immediately the altered material. This makes it possible and desirable to publish material that is incomplete in some way. At the University of Aberdeen we are making a modest experiment of this.[4] It concerns the edition of Justinian's Digest published by the University of Pennsylvania Press ten years ago. This edition contains many errors. The aim of the experiment is solicit and present corrections to that edition through the World-Wide Web. Thus the corpus of errors can be supplemented by anyone who wishes to do so, while that same corpus will be available to consult as it accumulates. Quite apart from a collaborative project, one might simply publish one's own unfinished material on the World-Wide Web, and allow others to make comments on it. The usefulness of the World-Wide Web in creating materials in this way is uncertain and remains to be discovered. Clearly, improving a piece of material by receiving occasional comments on it is too haphazard for many projects. And publishing unfinished work will not appeal to everyone.
Inevitable Change
At present it is not necessary to use the World-Wide Web in order to do research in Roman or ancient law. By and large, materials on the World-Wide Web are available elsewhere. It is difficult to know for how long this will be true. I suspect that, fairly soon, certain types of materials will be less available in printed form and available more exclusively on the World-Wide Web. One of the first likely casualties are printed bibliographies. They change too frequently to be useful in printed form, given the alternative of electronic publication. Also, printed conference proceedings may become more rare, given the low costs associated with publishing on the World-Wide Web.
* Lecturer in Jurisprudence, University of Aberdeen.
1 Roman law resources, for both research and teaching, are maintained at the University of Aberdeen at the following World-Wide Web address: http://www.abdn.ac.uk/~law113/rl/rl.htm 2 The comment of Boudewijn Sirks, when this paper was presented. 3 The problems of citing electronic publications generally are only just beginning to be addressed. See, e.g., the recent proposed changes to the citation of judicial opinions in the United States. 'Changing Cites', Journal of the American Bar Association 82 (1996), p. 108.
4 The site may be found at http://www.abdn.ac.uk/~law113/rl/dig/dg_main.htmi
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