And with feebleness of memory comes lack of prophetic vision as well. The transformation of our worlds by information technology that looms before us beggars all description, but the most timid ventures in projection are chided as unrealistic. This volume stakes out a precise piece of territory and does a good job. It contains reports from the field from all the major American projects applying information technology to datasets from classical antiquity. The Berkowitz-edited Canon makes a quantum leap past what any other reference source has ever been able to do.
Further articles outline other projects.
There are several audiences for this work. The most important, perhaps, is posterity. This will be an extremely valuable record, written by the people in the best position to know, of where we came from and where we had gotten to by 1990. The next audience will be individuals interested in humanities computing outside classics who want to be briefed about what the Greeks and Romans and the students thereof are up to. For the approach is not proselytic but homiletic, preaching to the choir or at least the congregation already in the church.