About – Deconstructing the Open Greek & Latin Project: The First Thousand Years of Greek

The workshop “Deconstructing the Open Greek and Latin Project: The First Thousand Years of Greek” will introduce participants to the work of The First Thousand Years of Greek segment of the Open Greek and Latin (OGL) project, an international collaboration between the University of Leipzig, the Harvard Library and Harvard Center for Hellenic Studies, Tufts University, Mount Allison University, and the University of Virginia. For a brief description of this collaboration and how it involved undergraduate students, please check out this blog post from the Harvard Libraries.

With a day of discussion and hands-on working groups, applicants will not only learn about the project, but have the opportunity to become active participants and contributors. Discussions and short training modules will be tailored to the applicant pool to maximize the experience based on the needs and interests of the attendees.

This is a free, open workshop with a “first-come first-served” registration.

What is the OGL? The OGL addresses the need to develop open textual corpora that provide increasingly comprehensive coverage for Greek and Latin, which will support new forms of born-digital annotation, new practices of reading, new audiences for Greek and Latin, and new avenues of research. The OGL has produced open Greek and Latin corpora available under the Creative Commons licenses that are now standard in Digital Classics. As of February 2017, approximately 30 million words of Ancient Greek and 37 million words of Classical Latin — almost two thirds of all Greek and Latin produced through approximately 600 CE, with a number of core later works such as scholia and the Suda — have been digitized as initial TEI-XML and are being reviewed and formatted to conform to the Canonical Text Services (CTS) Protocol.

The First Thousand Years of Greek is a project within the OGL that seeks “to collect at least one edition of every Greek work composed between Homer and 250CE” and make them available as part of an open access digital corpus of Ancient Greek that conforms to both newly-evolving digital classics standards (e.g. CTS, EpiDoc) and long term standards (TEI-XML), where editions can be freely downloaded and modified under a CC license. As the Perseus Digital Library is a key partner of this effort, the First Thousand Years of Greek project has focused on texts and/or editions not currently in the Perseus collections. (So, for example, neither Thucydides nor the text of the New Testament are currently part of the First Thousand Years of Greek corpus). The TEI-XML compliant versions of the Perseus Greek corpus (c. 10 million words) are available elsewhere on GitHub where they are being revised for CTS compliance.