Gregory Crane, Tufts University
The State of Digital Classics in 2024
In 1822, August Boeckh used the term cognitio, “lived understanding,” to define philology.[1] Following in this tradition, much work in Digital Classics focuses upon making it possible for an increasingly broad audience to engage with primary sources and to make substantive contributions to our understanding(s) of the past. Approaches such as translation alignment (Ugarit, Alpheios, Ducat),[2] linguistic annotation (Perseus, Perseids, Pedalion, Proiel, Didakta),[3] automatic generation of maps (Pleiades, Pelagios, ToposText)[4], and annotation of metric structure with aligned performance (Hypotactic) all serve to enhance the ability of human readers. Digital Classics in this sense addresses a series of challenges.
First, this Digital Classics can flourish as machine learning becomes increasingly powerful. AI-driven systems such as ChatGPT may well replace some forms of scholarly publication but, if our goal is to advance the lived experience of human readers, automated systems can only serve as tools.
Second, this Digital Classics fundamentally changes the relationship of audiences with source texts, allowing students at all levels to engage directly with sources in languages that they have not yet studied. Established faculty in departments of Classics may be comfortable with Greek and Latin; no one will be proficient in every language that they may wish to cover.
Third, in expanding our linguistic reach, this Digital Classics helps us also to expand the field beyond Greco-Roman culture. In countries such as the US, Classics must include cultures from around the world (Christensen 2022), not only Ancient China (Sturgeon 2021), India, the ancient cultures of the Middle East and of Egypt (Elwert et al. 2017), but also the cultures of pre-colonial sub-saharan Africa and of the indigenous peoples in the Western Hemisphere (Alvarado, Barriente, Bigelow 2021, de la Iglesia et al. 2023).
Fourth, this Digital Classics addresses the fact that few US undergraduates who wish to study the Greco-Roman world itself have the time to master Greek or Latin, much less both. In spring 2021, Princeton provoked controversy when it made the study of Ancient Greek and Latin optional for its Classics majors[5]. This Digital Classics opens up the languages to every student and challenges us to rethink how we approach teaching the languages.
Fifth, this Digital Classics has embedded ancient languages in core natural language processing environments such as Stanza and SpaCy. In learning how to apply the Universal Dependency framework to Greek and Latin, for example, students learn also how to work with corpora in other ancient languages such as Akkadian, Classical Chinese, and Coptic, but they also can go beyond machine translation to explore the language of sources in many modern languages beyond English, French, German and Italian.
Sixth, this Digital Classics has already built a new academic culture that is more decentralized, collaborative, open, and impactful than the traditional focus on articles and monographs. This new academic culture enables us to transform the role that the human record plays in society as a whole.
Seventh, this Digital Classics does not yet play a role in any major US PhD program
[1] Boeckh, August. “Oratio Nataliciis Friderici Guilelmi III. Celebrandis d. m. m. Aug. a. Mdcccxxii. Habita.” Gesammelte Kleine Schriften, Teubner, 1858, pp. 100–110
[2] For more on the topic of translation alignment, please see Palladino et al 2021 and 2023.
[3] For more on linguistic annotation and digital classics, please see Almas and Beaulieu 2016, Gorman 2020.
[4] Fuller discussion of this topic and tools can be found in Kahn et al. 2021; Vitale et al. 2021, and Barker et al. 2016.
[5] Wood, Graeme. “Princeton Dumbs Down Classics.” The Atlantic, 9 June 2021, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/06/princeton-greek-latin-requirement/619136/