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
If you are an accomplished performer, you should be able to begin performing Greek poetry and prose, with an understanding of every syllable of what you are reading, by the end of one semester. I base that on the preliminary results that my collaborator Farnoosh Shamsian observed after 30 hours of instructing Persian speaking students Homeric Greek. We desperately need passionate and compelling performances of Greek and other languages to bring these sources to life. We can use podcasts and YouTube videos to reach a global audience. We have compelling sources. We need performances in different voices by people from different backgrounds. Continue reading
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
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
I am writing to report that the Perseus Digital Library had the honor of receiving support for an NEH Digital Humanities Level 3 Project: “Beyond Translation — new possibilities for reading in a digital age.” While this is just one project with limited funding, it reflects a larger potential shift for the study of Ancient Greek and other languages. When I began my career as a graduate student, more than a generation ago, specialists in languages such as Ancient Greek could only direct full scholarship at other specialists. Now, however, we are in a position to frame our understanding of such languages in a form that makes sources immediately accessible to non-specialists. From my perspective, this reflects a fundamental shift in the audience and the realizable goals for those of us privileged to earn a living as specialists on earlier languages from the human record. Continue reading
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
ShareTweet Call for applications: Digital Editions in Practice, A Two-Day Workshop The Perseus Digital Library at Tufts University will host a two-day workshop that provides an overview of a sample, practical digital editions creation workflow. This will feature both an … Continue reading
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
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