Completion of the Online Collaborative English Translation of the Suda

In 1998 the Stoa Consortium for Electronic Publication in the Humanities organized by Ross Scaife sponsored the online collaborative annotated first English translation of the massive Byzantine encyclopedia, The Suda —  Suda On Line: Byzantine Lexicography. This online collaboration predated the Wikipedia, which began in 2001.

Sixteen years later, on August 8, 2014 the Managing Editors of of the project announced from the website of The Stoa Consortium that all of the more than 31,000 entries in the Suda were translated into English and "vetted":

"The Managing Editors of the Suda On Line are pleased to announce that a translation of the last of the >31,000 entries in the Suda was recently submitted to the SOL database and vetted. This means that the first English translation of the entire Suda lexicon (a vitally important source for Classical and Byzantine studies), as well as the first continuous commentary on the Suda’s contents in any language, is now searchable and browsable through our on-line database (http://www.stoa.org/sol).

Conceived in 1998, the SOL was one of the first new projects that the late Ross Scaife brought under the aegis of the Stoa Consortium (www.stoa.org), and from the beginning we have benefited from the cooperation and support of the TLG and the Perseus Digital Library.  After sixteen years, SOL remains, as it was when it began, a unique paradigm of digital scholarly collaboration, demonstrating the potential of new technical and editorial methods of organizing, evaluating and disseminating scholarship.

To see a brief history of the project, go to http://www.stoa.org/sol/history.shtml, and for further background see Anne Mahoney’s article in Digital Humanities Quarterly (http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/003/1/000025/000025.html). The SOL has already proved to be a catalyst for new scholarship on the Suda, including the identification – as possible, probable, or certain – of many hundreds more of the Suda’s quotations than previously recognised. To see a list of these identifications, with links to the Suda entries in question, please visithttp://www.stoa.org/sol/TLG.shtml."