Citations and annotations in classics
Matteo Romanello, Michele Pasin · 2013
Annotations played a major role in Classics since the very beginning of the discipline. Some of the first attested examples of philological work, the so-called scholia, were in fact marginalia, namely comments written at the margins of a text. Over the centuries this kind of scholarship evolved until it became a genre on its own, the classical commentary, thus moving away from the text with the result that philologists had to devise a solution to linking together the commented and the commenting text. The solution to this problem is the system of canonical citations, a special kind of bibliographic references that are at the same time very precise and highly interoperable.