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
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
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
A first stab at producing OCR-generated Greek and Latin for the complete Patrologia Graeca (PG) is now available on GitHub… This release provides raw textual data that will be of service to those with programming expertise and to developers with an interest in Ancient Greek and Latin. The Patrologia Graeca has as much as 50 million words of Ancient Greek produced over more than 1,000 years, along with an even larger amount of scholarship and accompanying translations in Latin. Continue reading
Developers Gernot Höflechner, Robert Lichtensteiner and Christof Sirk, in collaboration with the Perseus Digital Library at Tufts (via the Libraries and the Transformation of the Humanities and Perseids projects) and the University of Leipzig’s Open Philology Project, have released Arethusa, a framework for linguistic annotation and curation. Arethusa was inspired by and extends the goals of the Alpheios Project, to provide a highly configurable, language-independent, extensible infrastructure for close-reading, annotation, curation and exploration of open-access digitized texts. Continue reading
One goal of the Perseids Project is to engage humanities students in research and enable them to contribute to the open access resources on which the Perseus Digital Library is built. Tufts students in Professor Marie-Claire Beaulieu’s Fall 2013 Greek Mythology class completed commentaries on myths in selected texts and artifacts through the Perseids platform. Continue reading
ShareTweet Visiting research scholar at Perseus, Nick White has released a new version of Ancient Greek OCR, free software to accurately convert scans of printed Ancient Greek into unicode text and PDF files, which can be easily searched, copied, archived, and … Continue reading
Many different linguistic services and tools are dependent on lexical information as it is commonly found in Latin and Greek dictionaries. Most of these applications rely on their own implementation of dictionaries, stem databases etc. but there is no centralized open-access resource on which these services can draw for supporting data. The Perseus Digital Library is releasing its lexical data as an open linked data set, starting with Latin and to be followed by Greek, in the hopes that it may eventually become such a resource. Continue reading
The Perseus Digital Library is pleased to announce the 1.0 Release of the Perseus Catalog.
The Perseus Catalog is an attempt to provide systematic catalog access to at least one online edition of every major Greek and Latin author (both surviving and fragmentary) from antiquity to 600 CE. Continue reading