ShareTweet In 1892, at the age of 27, while serving as teacher of Greek at the Packer College Institute, Emily James Smith published translations for selected works of Lucian. She later served as dean (1894-1900) and then trustee (1900-1905) of … Continue reading
ShareTweet Gregory Crane Henry Watson Fowler (1858-1933) and his younger brother Francis George Watson (1871-1918) are best known for their 1906 publication, the King’s English and the 1926 Modern English Usage, composed by Henry George after the 1918 death of … Continue reading
ShareTweet Gregory Crane Another update for our NEH-funded Next Thirty Years of Perseus work. We have now updated Lucian. First, we have fixed issues in the Greek for Lucian works 1-52 as editing by A. H. Harmon. These were originally … Continue reading
ShareTweet Gregory Crane Under our new Perseus the Next Thirty Years NEH grant, we have added a set of new translations for Thucydides, including translations in English, French, German, Italian and Latin. These are now available on Github and (with … Continue reading
ShareTweet A lot is happening at Perseus. I am writing now to point out the first result from a new NEH grant that formally began one month ago (July 1, 2023). We have released a much revised Greek edition of … Continue reading
ShareTweet I am writing to express my gratitude to the National Endowment for the Humanities for awarding us a new grant entitled “Perseus on the Web: Preparing for the Next Thirty Years.” We will receive just under $348,881 for this … Continue reading
ShareTweet Gregory CraneMarch 15, 2023Medford MA, USA Five years after the March 15, 2018, announcement of the Scaife Viewer, we are announcing Beyond Translation, the first version of the sixth generation Perseus (Perseus 6.0). The current NEH-funded phase of work … Continue reading
Tufts University will introduce a new course in spring 2023: “Natural Language Processing and the Human Record.” Students at Boston College and Boston University can already cross-register to take this course for credit but, insofar as space allows, it will be open to others in person and to a wider potential audience participating online. This project-based course will not only provide opportunities for students of Greek and Latin, but also for students of other historical languages. It also addresses a major gap between the curricula to which most students of historical languages have access and the realities of doing research in a digital age. Continue reading
This paper announces the creation of a version of the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey that links each line of each poem with those other lines in the Iliad and the Odyssey that share the most significant vocabulary. Each line has at least one parallel. The line with the most parallels (Od. 2.569) has 227 parallels but that is exceptional. The average line has 24.4 parallels. Forty-eight files, one for each book in the Iliad and Odyssey, are available on GitHub and I expect to add them to other repositories in the future. This paper describes how similarity is calculated. Continue reading
Our work explores the hypothesis that a new mode of reading is taking shape, one in which dense, machine actionable annotations allow readers to work directly and effectively with sources in languages that they do not know – a new middle space between reliance on translation and mastery of the source text (Crane et al. 2019, Crane 2019). This hypothesis has substantial potential importance for our ability to use source texts to explore cultural diversity in general and the diversity of Asian cultures in particular. Our particular work focuses on two challenges for a traditionally Eurocentric subject, Classics (or Classical Studies), which is still used to describe the study of Greco-Roman culture. On the one hand, university students without training in Greek and Latin in secondary school have difficulty mastering the languages and learning about the subject. In spring 2021, the Princeton Classics Department provoked controversy when it made it possible for majors to study Greco-Roman antiquity without learning any Greek or Latin — too few students, especially students of color, had access to Latin, much less Greek, before college (Wood 2021). At the same time, Classics and Classical Studies are far too narrow – we must include other classical languages – Sanskrit, Classical Chinese, Classical Arabic, etc. – if we are to continue using these terms. We report on work that addresses both challenges. Continue reading