Blog: Digital Reading in Leipzig and Tehran—A Research Agenda
By Gregory Crane | June 5, 2017
Digital technology can support the emergence of a new kind of environment for reading, exploring, and thinking about classical texts—even those in unfamiliar languages. But realizing the ambitious goals for the new reading modalities, described in an earlier post, is a non-trivial task and requires research of various types.
Review: Attic Inscriptions Online
By Alan Sheppard | May 22, 2017
Attic Inscriptions Online (AIO) presents translations of Attic inscriptions alongside cross-references to Greek texts, images, and notes. The website is the creation of Stephen Lambert and is affiliated with the Europeana Eagle Project. As of March 2017, AIO contains over 1,000 inscriptions with the eventual aim to provide translations of the 20,000+ inscriptions originating from Athens and Attica. The majority of the translations are by Lambert himself, with the remaining texts translated by a team of collaborators.
Blog: Finding Your Voice through Podcasting
By Alison Innes | May 15, 2017
Podcast listening is more popular than ever. Data from the large Infinite Dial survey shows steady yearly growth in the share of adults over 12 who have listened to at least one podcast. In 2016, 36% reported having done so, for an estimated 96 million people nationwide. The time is therefore right for classicists to embrace this medium for public engagement.
While podcasting takes time and preparation and may have a steep learning curve, it is very rewarding. Research interests come alive in a new way when you create and share your ideas via podcasting. Listener responses will help you develop your ideas in new directions. [pullquote]Podcasting also breaks down academia’s walls, creating a wider audience and inviting the public to see what scholars do and why it matters.[/pullquote]
Blog: Unfamiliar Languages
By Gregory Crane | April 24, 2017
How do we support those who wish to push beyond what they can learn from the languages that they know? New developments in Digital Humanities offer some intriguing avenues for dealing with scholarly material in unfamiliar languages, even if present achievements only highlight more challenges. In the following visualization, David Mimno of Cornell and Thomas Koentges of Leipzig have identified recurring clusters of words in a collection of Greek Christian Church Fathers. The works of these men were produced over more than a thousand years and amount to more than 30 million words. I do not think many specialists in Christian Church history have read this entire corpus, and I do not believe that any human being has ever been able to read a collection this large critically—it is just too big.
Review: The Packard Humanities Institute (PHI)—Classical Latin Texts
By Matthew Loar | April 17, 2017
The online Packard Humanities Institute’s Classical Latin Texts (PHI) makes freely available material that was originally included on the PHI’s CD ROM 5.3, issued in 1991. It contains the vast majority of Latin literary texts written before 200 CE, as well as a handful of Latin texts from late antiquity. It therefore offers an alternative to two other free online resources: The Latin Library and the Perseus Project. The former has already been reviewed for this blog by Ted Gellar-Goad, and some of his criticisms of it apply equally to PHI.
Amphora: Using Low-Cost Hardware for 3-D Scanning at Kenchreai, Greece
By Sebastian Heath | March 20, 2017
This article was originally published in Amphora 12.1. It has been edited slightly to adhere to current SCS blog conventions. All links are active, however, some information such as pricing may have changed.
Blog: Using Dependency Syntax Treebanking in the Classroom and in Research
By Robert Gorman | February 27, 2017
How many times have you stood in a classroom, trying to figure out a way to diagram coherently a Latin or Greek sentence on the board in order to clarify a structure that is baffling your students? Why not do the same thing digitally, and even require the students to construct their own sentence trees to demonstrate their understanding of the problem? A few years ago, we learned about a program to do just that. Arethusa is a set of tools developed by the Alpheios Project, adopted by the Perseus Digital Library, and delivered by the Perseids editing platform.
Blog: Student Research and Digital Tools
By Marie-Claire Beaulieu | December 12, 2016
How can classicists best integrate students into the production of research? On the one hand, it usually takes many years of training to gain mastery of Latin and Greek; on the other, debates around the liberal arts in today’s academia are driving a renewal of teaching methods towards more practical approaches and transferable research skills.
A vibrant community of Classicists is working on these issues. There are now abundant digitized primary sources like manuscripts, inscriptions, and papyri, on which students can practice the basics while making small, though real, new scholarly contributions under expert guidance.
By carrying out syntactical analysis of Latin and Greek sentences in a process called treebanking, students can contribute new data that can be used to address various scholarly questions.