ShareTweet I am writing to express my gratitude to the National Endowment for the Humanities for awarding us a new grant entitled “Perseus on the Web: Preparing for the Next Thirty Years.” We will receive just under $348,881 for this … Continue reading
This paper announces the creation of a version of the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey that links each line of each poem with those other lines in the Iliad and the Odyssey that share the most significant vocabulary. Each line has at least one parallel. The line with the most parallels (Od. 2.569) has 227 parallels but that is exceptional. The average line has 24.4 parallels. Forty-eight files, one for each book in the Iliad and Odyssey, are available on GitHub and I expect to add them to other repositories in the future. This paper describes how similarity is calculated. Continue reading
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
This second part focuses on the problem of visualizing what learners have and have not seen, what new vocabulary they have just encountered, and what new and future vocabulary is above or below some threshold separating common from uncommon words. The goal here is not to provide a finished design but to present a draft that can be developed further. The technology employed is relatively simple — the visualizations are implemented as Support Vector Graphics (SVG) objects. The next version will probably be in some dialect of Javascript but the figures below demonstrate one model by which to convey the more granular view of vocabulary. Continue reading
This paper is designed to be the first of two that explore the degree to which learners can track how much of the vocabulary as a whole in a target corpus they have encountered and to see the frequency in the rest of the corpus of each newly encountered vocabulary item. We focus here upon the Ancient Greek Iliad and the Odyssey, a corpus of just over 200,000 running words. Homeric Epic provides a useful starting point because a growing cluster of openly-licensed, digital resources for this corpus are available, including links from each form in the epic to a dictionary entry, the starting point for vocabulary analysis. Continue reading
This paper makes a simple, but significant, observation. Vocabulary keeps growing in any corpus — there is no final, fixed set of words. That phenomenon appears with any natural language corpus. Here I emphasize the significance for students of Homeric epic. The Homeric Iliad and Odyssey contain about 200,000 running words and we can see how the number of dictionary entries (e.g, anêr, ‘man’) and of inflected forms derived from dictionary entries (e.g, andros, ‘of a man,’ andri) increase slowly but continuously: 8,792 dictionaries appearing as 31,664 different account for the 200,581 running words that appears in the Perseus Dependency Treebanks of the two epics. Continue reading
Simply put, CTS URNs are unique identifiers that make it possible to retrieve a specific passage of text from a database. In this blog post we’ll take a closer look at how CTS URNs work, and why they are so important to building the digital Classics library of the future. Continue reading
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
“Deconstructing the Open Greek and Latin Project: The First Thousand Years of Greek”
An AIA-SCS Pre-Meeting Workshop, presented in coordination with the SCS
January 3, 2018, 9:00 to 5:00, Tufts University, Medford, MA
Interested in open access, the digital humanities, or conducting digital scholarship in your research and/or teaching? Aren’t sure what these topics have to do with classics or archaeology, or even how to get started? Then, please consider joining us next January 3 at the AIA-SCS pre-meeting workshop “Deconstructing the Open Greek and Latin Project”!
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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