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: Using Dependency Syntax Treebanking in the Classroom and in Research
By Robert Gorman | February 27, 2017
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.