July 30, 2020, via Zoom webinar Pliny’s Natural History, published in Venice in 1472, is the oldest scientific book in Library’s collection. The book is a large-scale encyclopedia containing more than 1.1 million words from the first century CE that provides a snapshot of scientific knowledge in the Roman Empire with sections devoted to topics such as math, geography, geology, zoology, botany, anthropology, and an important overview of the history of Greek art. For this presentation, Dr. Jeff Rydberg-Cox discusses the nature of Pliny’s work, how other scholars and editors have tried to make this massive work more manageable, and then talks about the ways that network analysis and other quantitative approaches can help us understand the sources that Pliny used when writing his work. The speaker: Jeff Rydberg-Cox, the Library’s first-ever Scholar-in-Residence, is a Curators’ Distinguished Professor in the Department of English, director of the Classical and Ancient Studies program, director of the First Semester Experience program, and an Affiliated Faculty member in the Department of Computer Science at UMKC. He received his BA from Colorado College in Classics, History, and Politics. He holds an MA and PhD from the Committee on the Ancient Mediterranean World at the University of Chicago. Prior to joining UMKC, he served as Assistant Editor for Language and Lexicography at The Perseus Project; based at Tufts University. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the European Commission, and the National Library of Medicine. His research and publications focus on digital humanities and the computation analysis of ancient Greek texts. Professor Rydberg-Cox regularly teaches courses on ancient literature, digital humanities, and representations of the ancient world in film.

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