127 © 2016 by Gregory Crane Published under a Creative Commons cc-by license doi:10.1162/DAED_a_00383 Greco-Roman Studies in a Digital Age Gregory Crane Abstract: What is the audience for the work that we professional researchers conduct on Greco-Roman culture? If the public outside academia does not have access to up-to-date data about the Greco-Roman world, whose problem is it? Frequently heard remarks, observed practices, and published survey results indicate most of us still assume that only specialists and revenue-generating students really matter. If we specialists do not believe that we have a primary responsibility to open up the field as is now possible in this digital age, then I am not sure why we should expect support from anyone other than specialists or the students who enroll in our classes. If we do believe that we have an obligation to open up the field, then that has fundamental implications for our daily activities, for our operational theory justifying the exis- tence of our positions, and for the hermeneutics (following a term that is still popular in Germany) that we construct about who can know what. Many traditional humanists have objected–quite correctly–that digital humanists focus too much of their attention on questions of how we should ex- ploit new forms of technology in our teaching and research and not enough on questions of why. Of course, in many cases, such criticisms underestimate the immense challenges that humanists face as they attempt to implement universally desired capaci- ties in a digital space that require far more expertise than amateur digital humanists can usually acquire. (The production of annotations that we can man- age across different editions of a text and over many years is one such deceptively simple but essential task.) Of course, even if there is much that requires the attention of us digital humanists (in which we can justifiably focus upon the question of how), the most important questions always return to our mo- tivations for using technology in the first place. The digital question now before all academics is the extent to which the shift from print to a digi- tal space changes how our particular fields can con- tribute to society as a whole. From a Darwinian per- GREGORY CRANE is the Alexan- der von Humboldt Professor of Digital Humanities at Leipzig Uni- versity and Professor of Classics and the Winnick Family Chair of Technology and Entrepreneurship at Tufts University. He is also the Editor-in-Chief of the Perseus Dig- ital Library at Tufts University. He is the author of The Blinded Eye: Thucydides and the New Written Word (1996) and The Ancient Simplicity: Thucydides and the Limits of Political Realism (1998).