Author Archives: Gregory Crane

Bad News for Latin in the US, worse for Greek

According to statistics published by the Modern Language Association in February 2015, between fall 2009 and fall 2013, enrollments in Ancient Greek and Latin at US postsecondary institutions suffered their worst decline since 1968, the earliest year for which the MLA offers such statistics. The number of enrollments in Greek and Latin declined from 52,484 to 40,109, a drop of 24%. This precipitous and rapid decline may reflect the lingering aftershocks of the financial crisis of 2008, which certainly raised student anxiety levels and may have driven students away from intellectually idealistic activities such as the study of Ancient Greek and Latin. Continue reading →

by Gregory Crane Posted on May 19, 2015
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Getting to open data for Classical Greek and Latin: breaking old habits and undoing the damage — a call for comment!

This blog post addresses two barriers that prevent students of historical languages such as Classical Greek and Latin from shifting to a fully open intellectual ecosystem: (1) the practice of giving control of scholarly work to commercial entities that then use their monopoly rights to generate revenue and (2) the legacy rights over critical editions that scholars have already handed over to commercial entities. Continue reading →

by Gregory Crane Posted on March 4, 2015
Posted in Essays, Suggestions | Tagged , | Comments Off on Getting to open data for Classical Greek and Latin: breaking old habits and undoing the damage — a call for comment!

A Tenure Track Job in the US, Anti-Islamification Demonstrations in Germany, and the Redefinition of Classics

It would be hard to imagine a humanities field that is more challenging or more cut off from the often perceived realities of educating students to survive in a competitive world. It is hard enough for many to justify investing the time that it takes to master Ancient Greek or Latin — languages in which you will negotiate no contracts and by which you will not immediately advance the technological competitiveness of your nation. When you add the need to understand Classical Arabic as well as Greek and/or Latin, you find yourself in a very learned — and very very small — community. How can we justify investing a precious tenure track position in such a field of research? Continue reading →

by Gregory Crane Posted on January 20, 2015
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Perseus Open Publication Series

The Perseus Digital Library at Tufts University and the Open Philology Project at the University of Leipzig announce plans for the Perseus Open Publication Series (POPS), a new venue for open access and open data publications in any format and in any language that the Perseus Digital Library can support. Continue reading →

by Gregory Crane Posted on October 2, 2014
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Opening up Classics and the Humanities: Computation, the Homer Multitext Project and Citizen Science

Increasingly powerful computational methods are important for humanists not simply because they make it possible to ask new research questions but especially because computation makes it both possible — and arguably essential — to transform the relationship between humanities research and society, opening up a range of possibilities for student contributions and citizen science. To illustrate this point, this paper looks at the transformative work conducted by the Homer Multitext Project. Continue reading →

by Gregory Crane Posted on September 29, 2014
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The Digital Loeb Classical Library — a view from Europe

The Digital Loeb Classical Library has gone live and many students of Greek and Latin are testing it. “The Digital Loeb Classical Library — a view from Europe” considers some of the issues that the new DLCL raises. Continue reading →

by Gregory Crane Posted on September 22, 2014
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The Digital Loeb Classical Library, Open Scholarship, and a Global Society

ShareTweet This piece was first published in February 2014 as an open Google doc on the Digital Loeb Classical Library, Open Scholarship, and a Global Society. Another piece is in preparation and will appear on the blog for the Open … Continue reading →

by Gregory Crane Posted on September 20, 2014
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Digital Classicist Seminar New England, Spring 2015

We are pleased to announce the Call for Papers for the third series of the Digital Classicist New England. This initiative, inspired by and connected to London’s Digital Classicist Work in Progress Seminar, is organized in association with the Perseus Digital Library at Tufts University. It will run during the spring term of the academic year 2014/15. Continue reading →

by Gregory Crane Posted on September 1, 2014
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New courses on Digital Philology at the University of Leipzig

The Humboldt Chair of Digital Humanities at the University of Leipzig is developing a sequence of English-language courses on digital philology that will begin in the Wintersemester and Sommersemester of the 2013/2014 academic year. Continue reading →

by Gregory Crane Posted on July 17, 2013
Posted in Course(s), Digital Humanities | Tagged | Comments Off on New courses on Digital Philology at the University of Leipzig