Vanessa Gorman (University of Nebraska)
After spending 35 years fostering my own understanding of the Greek language, I want to pass on my skills and experience to the next generation. Yet the methods commonly used today to teach Latin and Greek differ little from those of a century and more ago: you must memorize vocabulary and paradigms for a year before you can read anything resembling original texts. Rejecting that model as antiquated and exclusionary, I have reimagined a beginning Greek language course using 21st century tools. As a result, I have been able to cover the beginning material in one-third of the normal time allotted (3 credits instead of 10), and the students have entered 2nd year classes confidently. They possess a real understanding of how languages function, which is an eminently transferable cognitive skill, as memorization of forms is not. This kind of accessibility for all students is crucial for the continued existence of the disciplines within classical studies.
The reason I was able to create my Greek course is that countless scholars have collaborated in developing open access digital tools and repositories. In my case, I am heavily reliant on three such tools. The Perseus Project offers texts, translations, morphological analyses, dictionary links, and commentaries. The Arethusa tool within the Perseids platform allows users to make syntactic trees of individual sentences, included material that is not from ancient texts, a fact that allows me to simplify and customize complex sentences for the beginning student. Alpheios is a free web browser add-on that provides morphologies as well as links to dictionaries, paradigms, and the syntactic trees that I have created. Using these tools, students are able to see the structures and participate in sophisticated, collaborative discussions of verb valency and syntactic nuance from the very beginning of their studies. This method also offers unprecedented opportunities for undergraduate students to take part in meaningful original research, as part of on-going efforts to create, for example, up-to-date valency dictionaries, refining definitions and usages from the big lexica using the digital methods of corpus linguistics.
As a classicist without significant computer skills, I have been hindered as I try to use modern methods in teaching and research, because there is no consistent and reliable infrastructure available for humanists to access big data in innovative ways. I have had to rely on other people to write codes for me, in order to perform nearly every stage of the class set-up. The simple fact is that the number of forward-looking humanists is self-selecting right now, limited to those who are willing to add years of training on top of what they have spent learning their particular specialty, in order to also become proficient in coding and data manipulation. The university system in this country has a built-in disincentive for established scholars to learn new skills, since the lack of productivity during a lengthy period of retooling is positively detrimental to their career advancement and remuneration.
Libraries have the opportunity to play a crucial role in mediating the disconnect between scholars and digital platforms and data. We need interfaces that “translate” code into meaningful, actionable information. For example, I am working to develop a wizard tool that will create an idiot-proof interface for humanists teaching ancient languages. With such a tool, instructors in high school and college could easily employ existing databases and customize courses to their individual needs. If institutions step up to become the stewards of open access data, the librarians would become the curators of ever-expanding data collections and would facilitate the collaborative approach that digital humanities demand.