Blog: What Classicists Can Do with Video Games
By David Fredrick | December 26, 2017
Ongoing discussions in academic circles about the value and purpose of 3-D immersive technologies have lately been sharpened by the emergence of consumer-ready VR and inexpensive game engines, especially Unity. One side of that discussion asserts that, in an academic context, these technologies are primarily valuable to the extent that they advance serious scientific and data visualization research. Others maintain that game design and “play” more broadly are equally important, and can transform how we teach many subjects. One approach does not exclude the other, of course, but my own experience has convinced me of the exciting potential of the latter, play-based, mode. For classicists, interdisciplinary as we are, the 3-D interactive future of research and teaching beyond textbooks holds important opportunities, especially if we take an active, collaborative role in shaping that future.
Blog: A Transitional Latin Reading Environment
By Emma Vanderpool | November 20, 2017
The pitfalls facing intermediate Latin students as they move from a basic knowledge of forms and the simplified Latin of textbooks to actually reading Latin are well-known. It’s not just the artful word order or sophisticated grammar of classical texts. As Kenneth Kitchell emphasized in a well-known article (Kitchell 2000), the geographical and cultural knowledge required can baffle even the student well trained in verb forms, case usage, and syntax. Then there is the well-known tendency of students themselves to ignore low-hanging fruit, to spurn the solicitously extended helping hand in the form of commentaries on their Latin texts, notes specifically designed to help them surmount these difficulties. What can be done?
Amphora: Flipping a Coin—Building a Numismatic Database with Undergraduate Researchers
By Julie Langford | October 2, 2017
This article was originally published in Amphora 11.1. It has been edited slightly to adhere to current SCS blog conventions.
That sinking feeling when you realize you’ve completely underestimated the scope of a project? I’m far more familiar with it than I’d like to admit. It was what I felt when I began analyzing the data I gathered in the library and vaults of the American Numismatic Society on provincial coinage minted under the Severan dynasty. I’d received a grant from my home institution to place the images and legends on provincial coinage in conversation with that of imperial coinage. I thought by doing so, I could bring to life the negotiations of ideology between local concerns and imperial propaganda.
Blog: Virtual Reality Pompeii
By Rhodora Vennarucci | August 28, 2017
Blog: Approaching Classical Persian
By Gregory Crane | August 7, 2017
The English academic term Classics has conventionally designated the study of Ancient Greek and Classical Latin. The department from which I received both of my academic degrees makes the point explicit: its official name is “the Department of the Classics.” The department focuses upon Greek and Latin and the addition of the definite article asserts that these are the only Classical languages.
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.
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.
Blog: Kalkhas the Humanist
By Gregory Crane | March 27, 2017
There are many definitions for the Digital Humanities—some wonder whether it is, in fact, a distinct field at all. My mind tends to operate at a pragmatic level and I have a very simple way of thinking about the question: in the Digital Humanities we think about what contributions we as humanists can make to a world where an increasing, if not a predominant, amount of human thought circulates through digital media: texts, sounds and images on our smartphones, video-conferencing and texting instead of simple voice communication, digital libraries of texts that support new forms of reading, new forms of representing human ideas and experience—everything is changing and nothing will be the same. And yet the big questions remain the same. [pullquote]The big question is not what we think about the Digital Humanities but what we think about the Humanities in a digital age.[/pullquote] Why do we study the Humanities at all?
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: Mapping and Teaching the Classical World
By Sarah Bond | January 16, 2017
In Roman Gaul, a large map of the known world stood on display at the school of rhetoric at Augustodunum (modern Autun). Around 300 C.E., when the school had fallen into disrepair, a man named Eumenius made a pitch to the Roman governor to allow him to rebuild the structure with his own money. He put particular emphasis on the importance of the map:
"In [the school’s] porticoes let the young men see and examine daily every land and all the seas and whatever cities, peoples, nations, our most invincible rulers either restore by affection or conquer by valor or restrain by fear. [They can] learn more clearly with their eyes what they comprehend less readily by their ears…" (Eum. Pan. Lat. XI.20, trans. Talbert).