language processing

The Scaife Viewer of the Perseus Project pursues a simple goal: to provide a clear and enjoyable reading experience of the Greek and Latin texts and translations of the Perseus Digital Library. It is the first installment of Perseus 5.0 and eventually will replace Perseus’ current interface, Perseus Hopper, as the primary means for accessing the texts and translations of the Perseus library. In its goal to simplify access to Perseus’ repository of texts, the Scaife Viewer is a success. Its layout is uncluttered, its texts legible, its design refreshing. As a result, the Scaife Viewer is a welcome re-imagining of how users read Perseus texts.

Johan Winge’s macronizer tool is a very welcome and well-designed tool for automatic macronization of Latin texts. Appearing in the same year as Felipe Vogel’s macronizer, Winge’s macronizer tool has quickly become the best available, working equally well on multiple versions of Windows as well as MacOS X using Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. The interface is clean and easy to use. Text can be pasted or typed in (20,000 characters max.) and return times seem very quick; the whole of Catullus 64 required less than 10 seconds. There are some options to the output, such as scanning a text as dactylic or elegiac meter (which increases accuracy of the macronization), and v/u and i/j conversion. There is also a nice function to automatically copy all macronized text.