January, 2024 Research Update

Amici!  It is now February!

Apologies that this update comes a few days late, but I was in the final crunch to get the chapter done that I had promised for the Routledge Companion to Video Games and History.

And I was going to dive right into that, but as I was drafting this, Nat Friedman of the Vesuvius Challenge announced that they had just awarded their grand prize for the digital unrolling of a Herculaneum papyrus and I struggle to communicate what a big deal this is.

So, background: nearly all of our classical texts - Greek and Roman literature - comes to us via preservation in the Middle Ages.  It is a 'closed corpus' - finds of new texts are extremely rare.  The last really historically significant one was Aristotle's Athenaion Politeia in 1891.

Herculaneum was a smallish Roman resort town near Pompeii on the Bay of Naples which was covered with volcanic ash in 79 AD when Vesuvius erupted (like Pompeii).  Among the wealthy resort villas of Herculaneum was the Villa of the Papyri, a villa with a large private library focused mostly on philosophy.  Some 1,800 scrolls there were carbonized but preserved by the inflow of volcanic ash and have been recovered (intact to wildly varying degrees).

The problem is, of course, the scrolls are both 1) still rolled up and 2) reduced to lumps of carbon, so how on earth do you read them?  And that's what the Vesuvius Challenge was focused on: scanning the scrolls using a particle accelerator and then taking that data and digitally unrolling them to produce a readable text.  We got our first few words last year, and this year already our first large chunk of text.

It now seems almost certain that over the years to come, we're going to get a steady flow of new fragments and texts out of these, the first large-scale infusion of new texts into the classical corpus since the Renaissance.  There are 1,800 of these papyri, 340 are basically complete and another 900 have readable fragments.

Now a few papyri were physically unrolled and partially read earlier (we've had these things since the 1850s) and they were philosophical texts, mostly Epicurean and the first new block of text seems to confirm that the current scroll is...more Epicurean philosophy.  So we're probably in for a LOT of Epicurean philosophy (not my jam, but it'll be huge for ancient philosophy scholars), but even if all we get are philosophical authors the potential texts are incredible: more of Aristotle's Constitutions, missing Plato, and so on.

This won't happen quickly, but if we now have a method that works, the result is going to be an explosion of knowledge about the Greek and Roman world.  One may wistfully hope that explosion will revitalize the field of Classics and perhaps halt its steady decay as one classics department after another closes.

On to what I've been doing, rather than what other people have been doing.

So the big push this month was to finish the chapter on the ancient world in video games for the Routledge Companion to Video Games and History.  That was, as I noted last time, going to be a big push.  I was distracted through much of December by job market stuff (alas!) and being sick a bunch which put me really behind the 8-ball on getting this done.

I have a process for 'writing crunch' mode, where on every non-teaching day, writing is the first thing I do in the morning, every morning (including Saturdays and Sundays) and that was basically the mode for all of January: teaching on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and then every other day, work on the chapter from morning till a little after noon.  It is a real grind, but it works.  I ended up right at the upper-word-limit for the chapter (10,000 words) and honestly I could have said more.  Fortunately, I have the blog, so I probably will expand on these ideas (I ran through the basic pitch of the chapter last month) a bit there in coming months.

In the middle of that, I took a brief detour to write for the Chronicle of Higher Education, the premier magazine that university folks use to talk to each other.  This was prompted by a column by Dana S. Dunn and Jane S. Halonen, both very senior professors who wrote a 'how to' for Visiting Professors (that is, time-limited, non-tenure-track academics) which drew a furious response on social media (both Twitter and BlueSky) from all sorts of more junior academics more in touch with the job market and current working conditions.  I decided I could do something useful by giving this incandescent rage voice and dashed off a matching column on how departments should treat their contingents - figuring that with my increasingly formidable list of bylines, I could actually get them to run the piece.

And they did!  That now completes the Complaining-about-higher-ed hat trick of having done so in The Atlantic, The Chronicle and The New York Times.  I keep thinking I should get a trophy or commemorative jacket or something.  In any case, the Chronicle's publication agreement actually has the rights to republish revert back to me after a set period of time (30 days), so in a month or two, I can also run the piece on the blog, for those who don't have a way around the Chronicle's usual paywall.

I don't necessarily expect that piece to light the world on fire, but it has caused some ripples that I've been told of at other institutions, so perhaps it will do a bit of good for someone. I will note my own department seems singularly uninterested in discussing it, despite the fact that it is not every day that a member of your department writes somewhere like the Chronicle; to be fair, my department was equally uninterested in promoting my writing last year around this time when I was in the New York Times.  That's not uncommon: a lot of departments are reluctant to promote the work of their contingent/adjunct members, because it is embarrassing both to admit that they have so many and also to admit that there isn't really a difference in quality between the tenure-line faculty and the non-tenure-track faculty.

This was, naturally, something I specifically addressed in the Chronicle piece itself.

In any case, that means we're now moving into February.  The main task for this month is finishing the book-project chapter I was working on back in November (quite close to done) and starting the logistics chapter, along with making some progress towards an article I'm co-authoring with Michael Taylor.  I've also recorded a few podcasts which should start coming out.  The first, with History Hack on the Roman Army of the Middle Republic is out now, but I've got appearances on the Partial Historians (talking about the Early Roman Army) and Drachnifel (talking ancient navies, of course) and also on Yeah, I Got a F***ing Job with a Liberal Arts Degree hosted by Cal Poly Dean Jeff Crane, talking about preserving the liberal arts on university campuses, at least some of which should come out this month.

On the blog, I suspect marching through our treatment of Phalanx v. Legion will take up most of the month, especially given that folks are already requesting addenda on a range of related topics (feel free to add more in the comments).  Hopefully this month or next I will finally find the time for the next ACOUP Senate poll which I know I keep promising and failing to deliver - but it will happen, one day!

And so that has been the month!  Excited to be done with this companion chapter and back to the book project!  And here is another picture of Ollie colonizing my sweater: