New Directions

Didaskalia is at long last coming out of hibernation. This issue is well over a year overdue. Fortunately, the features in this article are still as pertinent as they were in the spring of 1997. 'Crossing the Ancient Stage,' like 'The Performance of Homeric Epic,' was the title of a panel at the December 1996 Annual Meeting of the American Philological Association. Since that time Mary Kay Gamel, one of the organizers of this panel, has become co-organizer, with Eva Stehle, of a three-year colloquium on 'Varieties of Performance in the Ancient World'. In 1997 the subject of their panel was 'Varieties of Performance: What Are We Talking About?'; in 1998 the topic will be 'Unmasked Performance.' It is my hope that Didaskalia will publish some of these papers, as well, once we have finished restructuring the journal and website.

It has been an eventful 18 months for your (non?)editor. I have now retired from teaching and will be leaving the University of Warwick and moving to Berkeley at the end of October, 1998. Didaskalia will also be relocating, though perhaps not immediately. The new URL and other details will be mailed to subscribers and a link will be maintained from our present home page.

Meanwhile, it has become clear that in order to keep functioning and to improve its rate of publication, Didaskalia must change. The first change takes place as of this issue: there is no longer an ASCII version available by ftp. It takes twice as long to publish Didaskalia in two formats, and by now WWW technology has reached nearly every part of the globe.

There are still several submissions which we have not yet published, and some materials outstanding. These articles and reviews will go to make up Issue 4.2. That will be our last regular issue. Thereafter the journal and website will be combined, and reviews of books and productions will be published as soon as they are received and approved. This will not only spread the editorial workload out over the months, but also make the book publishers happy. The listings section has been operating on this basis for a couple of years now with considerable success. While I cannot promise that your book and performance reviews will be published instantly, they will now appear in a more timely fashion.

We will continue to accept feature articles as well, and to publish conference papers as self-contained supplements. Regular features will be published on the same basis as reviews and listings, though they will need more time to be refereed and edited. They will go into a new section of the website entitled 'articles.'

This restructuring will most likely not be in place until January of 1999, as it will take some considerable discussion among the editorial board as well as rather time-consuming design and markup work, not to mention the disruptive chaos of moving house and transferring the website to another server. Progress reports will be posted in a 'news' section available from the home page.

In the meantime, I am going to Turkey to look at Greco-Roman ruins and recover from these last four days of intensive HTML markup and online proofreading. Thank you all, readers and contributors, for your continuing patience. And thanks especially to all those who visit the website and send encouraging comments.

Sallie Goetsch
University of Warwick
E-mail: tssac@csv.warwick.ac.uk

14 August, 1998