Perseus Project (CD-ROM)
dun...@rti.rti.org
I read about it in "Hypermedia and the Study of Ancient Culture",
Gregory Crane, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, July 1991.
It covers from roughly the 8th century, BC to the death of Alexander,
and includes source texts in Greek and translation, essays, maps, video,
stills, and archaeological materials.
How about the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae CD-ROM, which the above
article says has 300MB of Greek literature, supposedly all the
surviving literary texts?
On a slightly peripheral note, has anyone done any character
recognition work on ancient scripts? There are, after all,
a lot more texts around than just literary works, such as the
newly found letters at Vindolanda. I suspect that any text
difficult for a person to read would be more difficult for
a machine, but some tuning might be possible for works by the
same scribe, much as voice recognition systems can be trained
for particular users.
Steve Duncan
rti.rti.org
Scott Horne
<
<How about the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae CD-ROM, which the above
<article says has 300MB of Greek literature, supposedly all the
<surviving literary texts?
I've used it on an Ibycus computer. It's quite impressive. We have it
here in our classics library.
--Scott
--
Scott Horne ...!{harvard,cmcl2,decvax}!yale!horne
ho...@cs.Yale.edu SnailMail: Box 7196 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520
203 436-1848 Residence: Rm 1848 Silliman College, New Haven, CT
Hong2jun1 bu2 pa4 yuan3 zheng1 nan2, wan4 shui3 qian1 shan1 zhi3 deng3xian2.
Diana Hulsey
>Has anyone used the CD-ROM that came out of the Perseus Project?
>I read about it in "Hypermedia and the Study of Ancient Culture",
>Gregory Crane, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, July 1991.
>It covers from roughly the 8th century, BC to the death of Alexander,
>and includes source texts in Greek and translation, essays, maps, video,
>stills, and archaeological materials.
I have not looked at Perseus too closely, but my impression is that
Perseus may be of serious use for classical scholars at some point, but right
now it seems to be restricted to use for simple and fun didactic purposes, in
the context of a highschool or lower-level undergraduate course. It would make
a good "field trip" for a high school class.
An example of its inapplicability as a reference or catalogue, a vase depicting
Dionysus and a satyr had the "offending" parts of the satyr expurgated.
>How about the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae CD-ROM, which the above
>article says has 300MB of Greek literature, supposedly all the
>surviving literary texts?
The preface to the 1986 volume of the TLG Canon summarizes TLG's history.
It was in the late 1800's that classicists started trying to compile
comprehensive thesauri of the Greek and Latin languages. They started with
Latin and soon gave up.
In 1972, there was a Thesauri Linguae Graecae conference at UC-Irvine
(" a conclave of American, Canadian, and European classicists") which
redefined the original goals, and determined that they would need a
more flexible final product, which 20th century technology would afford them.
They decided to compile a database of extant text, rather than a lexicon format.
This exists as a data bank, which I know nothing about except the CD-ROM
version which is how I assume it is primarily available.
Maybe those who have made use of the Ibycus computer could comment on
that.
I have used Pandora on Macintosh, not only for word searches (it does simple
and complex searches) but also simply to work with a section of text without
having to type the whole thing in. It has pretty much all of the extant
Greek text.
The Packard Humanities Institute is also working on getting Latin literature
onto CD ROM, but I don't think all of Latin literature is available yet.
>
>On a slightly peripheral note, has anyone done any character
>recognition work on ancient scripts? There are, after all,
>a lot more texts around than just literary works, such as the
>newly found letters at Vindolanda. I suspect that any text
>difficult for a person to read would be more difficult for
>a machine, but some tuning might be possible for works by the
>same scribe, much as voice recognition systems can be trained
>for particular users.
I don't know if any of this is being done, it strikes me that this might not
accomplish more than a human eye would. Now, if they could scan through things
like old scrolls that fall apart at the touch, or mummy cartonnage, to find
what the hidden parts of the papyrus said, that would be particularly useful.
-Diana Hulsey
UT-Austin Dept. of Classics