Philological Search Tools

Sunoikisis Digital Classics: Fall 2021

Session 1: Philological Search Tools

Thursday Oct 7, 17:15–18:45 CEST

Convenors: Gabriel Bodard (U of London), Peter Heslin (Durham), Alek Keersmaekers (KU Leuven), James Tauber (Eldarion)

Youtube link: https://youtu.be/To7dBLjFV4M

Slides: Online presentation; download PDF

Session outline

In this session we will present a few tools and platforms available for searching and researching ancient Greek and Latin texts that are available online. These include simple online readers, search interfaces, open source tools, and linguistic research platforms. We shall then offer slightly more in-depth introductions to the Scaife Viewer, Trismegistos Words and Diogenes v.4 platforms, and propose an exercise for students to practice with and assess these tools.

Seminar readings

• Anna Krohn & Gregory Crane. 2014. "Technology and Greek in the Translation Course." In Classical Association Annual Conference, Nottingham, England. University of Nottingham. Available: http://hdl.handle.net/10427/002047
• Lucia Vannini. 2018. "Review of Papyri.info". RIDE 9 (2018). Available: https://doi.org/10.18716/ride.a.9.4

Further reading

• Theodore F. Brunner. 1993. “Classics and the Computer: The History of a Relationship.” In Accessing Antiquity, ed. Jon Solomon, 10-33. Tucson: U. Arizona Press.
• Gregory Crane. 2004. "Classics and the Computer: An End of the History." In A Companion to Digital Humanities, eds. Schreibman, Siemens, Unsworth, 46-55. Oxford: Blackwell. Available: http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/
• Stephen Andrew Sansom. 2019. "Review: Perseus Digital Library Scaife Viewer." Society for Classical Studies, Mar 1, 2019. Available: https://classicalstudies.org/scs-blog/stephen-andrew-sansom/review-perseus-digital-library-scaife-viewer

Other resources

• Scaife Viewer
• Trismegistos Words
• Diogenes v.4
• Perseus Search
• Papyri.info Search
• EAGLE search
• Logeion
• InsAph search

Exercise

1. Choose at least two or three of the search tools demonstrated or discussed in this session, and use them to explore a text or aspect of Greek and Latin language that you are familiar with or that interests you.
2. You could also explore a text in a language that you do not know well (have a translation handy for reference) and see what you can learn about the individual words, parts of speech, forms, structure, etc.
3. Think about the sorts of questions you might want to ask of your text or language.
4. What search and browse features are offered by the different tools? How do they compare with one another? What can you do with these tools that you cannot do with Google? (And vice versa?)