Author Archives: Gregory Crane

Course on Arabic Sources by West African scholars about the Mali and Songhai empires: Digital Humanities and a new model of Classical Studies at Tufts

At Tufts University, the course on Classical Historians (Classics 141 — details in the departmental course booklet) will focus on Classical Arabic sources composed in, and about, pre-colonial West Africa. While we will consider Arabic sources produced outside of West Africa and accounts of European travelers, we will focus primarily on two different historical sources from West Africa istself: the Tārīkh al-Sūdān and (what has traditionally been called) Tārīkh al-Fattāsh. Our goal is not just to learn about the Mali and Songhai empires but to use what we learn to create openly licensed, digital sources of various kinds that will help others explore a major historical period that has attracted far too attention in the teaching and research. Continue reading →

by Gregory Crane Posted on April 1, 2022
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Perseus and new, enhanced introductions to Ancient Greek: Fall 2022

Tufts University will offer two different sections of introductory Ancient Greek in fall 2022, each of which takes a complementary approach. Both sections of the class have been designed to exploit increasingly powerful digital tools for understanding Ancient Greek and other languages — the skills that you learn will also help you exploit, and go far beyond, what you can do with translation, whether those are literary translations by human beings or the product of systems such as Google Translate or DeepL. Both sections build directly on an emerging new version of the Perseus Digital Library. Neither section has any prerequisites. Continue reading →

by Gregory Crane Posted on March 25, 2022
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Thoughts on Classical Studies in the 21st Century United States

ShareTweet Abstract: This paper consists of three complementary parts. The first section describes three instances where very technical scholarship on Greek literature overlaps with, and draws attention to, particularly dramatic historical contexts. This section describes an aspect of Greco-Roman studies … Continue reading →

by Gregory Crane Posted on September 16, 2021
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Looking for a new language? Consider Ancient Greek.

Are you interested in studying a new language in fall 2019? Whether you want to try something different for your language requirement or you have a year — or even a semester — you have an opportunity to travel thousands of years into the past and to confront the oldest sources in the continuous tradition of European literature.This is not your parents’ language class, and it is not high school Latin. You have an opportunity to participate in the reinvention of an ancient field and the development of a new track within the humanities as a whole. And you also have a chance to begin developing a research agenda of your own, one that can bring together the humanities and emerging fields such as data science. Continue reading →

by Gregory Crane Posted on August 25, 2019
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Individual Developments and Systematic Change in Philology

At the end of March 2018, my collaborators and I finished enjoying five years of support — 5,000,000 EUR(!) — from an Alexander von Humboldt Professorship, support which allowed young researchers from many different countries to work both as a team and on their own. Documenting all that work will be a significant task and requires its own publication(s). Work, at Leipzig, Tufts and elsewhere, on Open Greek and Latin (OGL) and on the Canonical Text Services (CTS) protocol upon which OGL builds provides the starting point for much of the work described below. A tremendous amount of support for OGL came from the European Social Fund and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, but collaborators at Perseus at Tufts University, at Mount Allison University in Canada, at the University of Virginia, at the Harvard Library and Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies (CHS) have contributed time and significant sums as well. As a group, they have made 37 million words of Greek and Latin available in CTS-compliant epiDoc TEI XML via GitHub. Continue reading →

by Gregory Crane Posted on May 1, 2018
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Its alive! Perseus and the Scaife Digital Library Viewer

On March 15, Eldarion released the initial version of the Scaife Digital Library Viewer. The release is, of course, a first step, but this first step changes the world in at least two fundamental ways: (1) Perseus is alive — it can finally include new materials on an on-going basis; (2) the Scaife Digital Library Viewer provides a foundation for an environment that can publish a growing range of born-digital, openly licensed, and networked (and fully networkable because they are openly licensed) annotations and micro-publications that cannot be represented in the incunabular digital publication systems that still internalize the limitations of print publication. Continue reading →

by Gregory Crane Posted on March 19, 2018
Posted in Features, General, Release, Scaife Viewer | Tagged | Comments Off on Its alive! Perseus and the Scaife Digital Library Viewer

First Version of the Scaife Digital Library Viewer goes live: building the future while remembering a friend

I am pleased to announce the first release of the Scaife Digital Library Viewer, a reading environment for source texts that follow the Canonical Text Services (CTS) data model. Our initial focus is on pre-modern sources, but the underlying approach applies to source texts of all periods. CTS provides a framework within which we can cite particular words in particular versions of particular texts — whether a version is a papyrus, manuscript, or a critical edition, whether versions of that text derive from a single lost original (as is the case for many ancient Greek and Latin texts) or the text itself appears in many versions, each of which has comparable authority (as is the case for many medieval sources). Continue reading →

by Gregory Crane Posted on March 15, 2018
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Who is using Clarin or Dariah to work with historical languages?

ShareTweet Gregory Crane February 24, 2018 Who is using Clarin (https://www.clarin.eu/) and/or Dariah (https://www.dariah.eu/), and particularly the German subprojects https://www.clarin-d.net/de/ and https://de.dariah.eu/, to work with historical languages? If so, are you doing so as a funded member of Clarin or … Continue reading → Continue reading →

by Gregory Crane Posted on February 24, 2018
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Why we need user profiles and a new Perseus

Alison Babeu called my attention to a recent blog by a Princeton Classics undergrad that really captured a major challenge and opportunity for a new Perseus. Solveig Lucia Gold described her own reaction to the ups and downs of using the reading support that Perseus has offered for Greek and Latin for decades (and, indeed, since before many of our undergraduates were born, if we consider the CD ROM versions of Perseus). The situation will be even better — or worse — when we finally integrate treebanks and alignments between the source texts and the translations. Continue reading →

by Gregory Crane Posted on August 18, 2017
Posted in Features, Historical languages, Instruction, Suggestions, Technology | Tagged | Comments Off on Why we need user profiles and a new Perseus