Ajax: Narratives, Textual Histories, Orientations, and Scholarly Strategies

Objective

ANTHOS (Ajax: Narratives, Textual Histories, Orientations, and Scholarly Strategies) reassesses conjectural emendation – the act of proposing corrections to faulty manuscript readings – as a central, creative practice of philology. Taking Sophocles’ Ajax as a pilot case, it digitises and encodes the unique Van Paassen Sophoclean archive (over 60,000 conjectures, 18th–20th c., expanded to date), producing the first interoperable dataset of conjectures on a classical author. This corpus provides the foundation for a scalable digital infrastructure applicable to any manuscript-transmitted tradition, since conjectural reasoning is universal across literatures. Four objectives structure the project: (1) corpus recovery and TEI/XML encoding; (2) historical and interpretative reconstruction of transnational editorial logics; (3) typological modelling and visualisation of conjectural reasoning; and (4) analytical synthesis in a prototype multi-text integrated into the Perseus Digital Library. The project not only documents outcomes of emendation but reveals the interpretative strategies, debates, and contexts that shaped them, creating a dynamic atlas of textual reasoning. Attention is given to gender, highlighting Dr. Liny van Paassen’s neglected contribution and the editorial treatment of female voices in Ajax. Interdisciplinary in scope, ANTHOS combines philology, intellectual history, and digital humanities and is embedded in a transatlantic partnership between Tufts and Verona. The fellowship provides advanced training in digital infrastructures, historiography, and project leadership, while ensuring transfer of knowledge through open science, teaching materials, and outreach. By recovering neglected archives, modelling interpretative logic, and releasing reusable digital resources, ANTHOS sets a new benchmark for textual criticism, establishes a transferable framework for future editions, and strengthens the researcher’s trajectory towards academic independence.