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.
Flipping a Coin: Building a Numismatic Database with Undergraduate Researchers, by Julie Langford
By Ellen Bauerle | August 1, 2014
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.
It was a good idea, an exciting new methodology. What I failed to realize is the quantity of data I had to consider in analyzing provincial and imperial coinage. My philologically focused graduate school training had not prepared me for this—in order to analyze the relationships in any systematic way I would need to keep an impossibly large body of data in my head.