Recent Work in Digital Classics

Snakes and serpents play prominent roles in mythology, religion, and art and are important subjects in cultural and cross-cultural (comparative) studies (Charlesworth 2010; Morgan 2008; Mundkur 1983). While a substantial body of literature is dedicated to the symbolism of the serpent in antiquity, it has tended to focus on literary sources while largely avoiding a comprehensive and systematic look at the iconographic material (Batto 1992; Fontenrose 1959; Joines 1974; Ogden 2013a, 2013b; Wilson 2001).

Greek and Latin have long suffered from being deemed “dead languages”. Enrollments have declined at many universities, and some students say that they do not think Latin and Greek apply to their own lives. The traditional methods of learning these languages can often have limited opportunities for student engagement. Many well-known textbooks (e.g., Wheelock’s Latin) tend to emphasize memorizing vocabulary and grammar.

In his influential article “Vergil’s Georgics and the Art of Reference” (HSCP 90 (1986): 171–198), Richard F. Thomas outlines the concept of the “technical reference,” which includes referring to another text by means of a shared “metrical or rhythmical anomaly” (p. 179). His example of this phenomenon, however, is not merely technical: it also includes the more regular variety of allusion/reference, i.e. shared vocabulary (in this case the Ennian nox intempesta).

We present a join-many task language model (Godwin et al. 2016; Sgaard and Goldberg 2016; Hashimoto et al. 2016), tailored to the literary character of Ancient Greek, its rich morphology and complex syntactic structures. In this way we can formalize the intuitive stylistic and syntactic differences across authors and genres, and potentially map the transmission history of specific texts.

The New Alexandria project is an open-source project by the Center for Hellenic Studies that combines commentaries, editions, and textual traditions into a multidimensionaltool for scholars and readers alike. In this talk, we will discuss New Alexandria’s technical architecture and its benefits for those studying, editing, and commenting on ancient texts. Specifically, we will use the example of building a commentary and a text with apparatus criticus to demonstrate the capabilities of New Alexandria for scholars of ancient works.