Electronic media in general, and the internet in particular, have tremendous potential to change the way we present and approach information. Wikipedia has been one of the first projects to really take advantage of this potential. By utilizing the internet to mediate massive decentralized collaboration, it has accrued more and more broadly distributed information than any other single source in history, and, using hyperlinking, has integrated that information in more and more flexible ways than all but a few other sources. A few other projects have also used electronic media in revolutionary ways; the Perseus project's presentation of ancient-language sources turns every word into a hyperlink, allowing a translator to examine that word's meaning and usage across a great number of works. A number of projects, such as Project Gutenberg, have made put some meaning into the phrase "public domain" by digitizing PD works and making them available to anyone with internet access.
Recently, over at Wikisource, we've begun to explore some ways in which we can combine some of these innovations, and recent discussions have suggested new ways to add a few of our own. Wikisource hosts certain public domain texts that are used extensively as references in Wikipedia articles. We have been working to enhance both these texts and the related articles on Wikipedia by tightening the integration of the two; linking to as many relevant Wikipedia articles as possible from within the texts, and tying information in the Wikipedia articles to its textual source with citations that link directly to the line in the text cited. For examples this (still very young) project's products, I would suggest looking at http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Lives/Pericles and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephialtes; over time we hope to develop many more like this.
Linking from sources to an encyclopedia and from the encyclopedia back to those sources, however, is a relatively limited exploitation of the potential that electronic media offer us. Historians use and compare a great number and variety of sources in crafting their narratives, ranging from historical accounts in many languages to archaeological records to epigraphical and numismatic evidence. Think what a valuable source you could create by taking a whole range of different sources and data types, cataloging the names, the topics, the themes, and producing a vast web of metadata using which a reader could move at will through the entire compendium--reading a chunk out of one source, then instantaneously checking what other sources, other kinds of sources, and modern scholarship had to say on the same subject. This is what we want to do.
The topic area that has jumped out at us as particularly suitable for an experiment with this sort of project is that of Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic period. The cultural imprint of Alexander, and that of the Hellenistic empires, is massive and spreads across a great number of cultures and traditions. By compiling a database of sources, with passages and words connected to relevant passages in other sources, to encyclopedic information on relevant topics, and to modern scholarly analysis and commentary, we can make these sources available to and useable by non-specialists in a way that they never have been before.
How do we do this? Well, part of the answer is provided by how Wikipedia has been built; decentralized information gathering has a critical part to play in this effort. Large scale translation of sources and compilation of numismatic and epigraphical evidence, however, will be more challenging; some difficult programming work may also be involved. For this, we will consider applying for a grant, if other alternatives do not suggest themselves.
So this is where we are. This idea is still forming, and what we have so far is only a rough outline. We need help getting that outline right and filling in the specifics. So ask yourself; how could electronic media be used to enrich the primary sources you use? How would you apply that to this project? What sorts of sources would you like to see integrated, and in what ways? I have used as examples only a few of the fields that could be included--architectural, artistic, and literary studies, for example would all be fruitful areas of exploration as well. Suggestions, additions or alterations to this proposal, or any questions or comments, are all welcome.