Category Archives: Essays

New ways to read Greek and Persian epic and to explore diverse cultures

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

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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

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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

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Essays on Digital Classics and Digital Humanities

ShareTweet Gregory Crane Professor of Classics and Winnick Family Chair of Technology and Entrepreneurship Tufts University Alexander von Humboldt Professor of Digital Humanities Open Access Officer University of Leipzig Comments to gcrane2008@gmail.com This link points a list and short summary … Continue reading

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“Privashing” vs. publishing — in search of an accurate term for a problematic academic tradition

This is a short piece reflecting on the need to distinguish publication that actually maximizes the degree to which we make academic work public from the traditional practice of handing control over to commercial, often for-profit, companies that make money by restricting publication. Continue reading

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Revision to “The Big Humanities, National Identity and the Digital Humanities in Germany”

ShareTweet I have integrated a number of comments and clarifications from my colleagues in Dariah-DE and TextGrid in revising “The Big Humanities, National Identity and the Digital Humanities in Germany” — a good deal more has gone into making Dariah-DE … Continue reading

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The Work of Classical Studies in a Digital Age

Who is the audience for the work that we professional researchers conduct on Greco-Roman culture? Frequently heard remarks, observed practices and published survey results indicate most of us still assume that only specialists and revenue-generating students really matter. If the public outside of academia does not have access to up-to-date data about the Greco-Roman world, whose problem is it? Continue reading

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