ePhilology, eClassics, and a Cyberinfrastructure for Human Cultural Heritage

Classical studies provide a strategic space within which to develop a more general Cyberinfrastructure for the humanities. First, classical studies are inherently multilingual and must manage ancient languages such as classical Greek and Latin, at least four European languages (English, French, German and Italian) and Arabic (which has an important classical tradition -- a number of Greek texts only survive in Arabic translations). Second, we use the terms ePhilology and eClassics to emphasize that classicists have a tradition that balances the production of objectified information and ideas with a focus on discourse as an end in itself, and is thus well suited to bridge the gap between eScience and the humanities. Third, classicists have an ancient tradition of developing tools and infrastructure -- we have traditionally recognized scholarly contributions (such as editions and commentaries) that anticipate the knowledge bases on which digital intellectual life depends. Fourth, classicists have produced a community of researchers on both sides of the Atlantic who are engaged in building and exploiting the emergent digital infrastructure.

Gregory Crane is Professor of Classics at Tufts University. His interests are twofold. On the one hand, he has published on a wide range of ancient Greek authors (including articles on Greek drama and Hellenistic poetry and a book on the Odyssey ). Much of his recent energy has been devoted to Thucydides; his book The Blinded Eye: Thucydides and the New Written Word appeared from Rowman and Littlefield in 1996; his second Thucydides book ( The Ancient Simplicity: Thucydides and the Limits of Political Realism ) was published by the University of California Press in 1998. He is currently conducting preliminary research for a planned book on Cicero.

At the same time, he has a long-standing interest in the relationship between the humanities and rapidly developing digital technology. He began this side of his work as a graduate student at Harvard when the Classics Department purchased its first TLG authors on magnetic tape in the summer of 1982. He developed a Unix-based full text retrieval system for the TLG that was widely used in North America and Europe in the middle 1980s. He also helped establish a typesetting consortium to facilitate scholarly publishing. Since 1985 he has been engaged in planning and development of the Perseus Project, which he directs as the Editor-in-Chief. Besides supervising the Perseus Project as a whole, he has been primarily responsible for the development of the morphological analysis system which provides many of the links within the Perseus database.

He is currently directing a $2,700,000 grant from the Digital Library Initiative to study general problems of digital libraries in the humanities. Current work is refining the classical collections in Perseus and establishing testbeds in other humanistic areas, ranging from ancient Egypt to nineteenth century US history. Much of his personal scholarship since 1998 has gone into expanding the Greco-Roman materials in Perseus, designing collections on such topics as London, the history of Mechanics, and the American Civil War. Each of these collections provides new insights into the implications of such new electronic tools on learning. He is particularly interested in the extent to which broadcast media such as the World Wide Web not only enhance the work of professional researchers and students in formal degree programs but create new audiences outside academia for cultural materials. His current research focuses on "computational humanities" and how this new field can help to democratize information without compromising intellectual rigor.

http://perseus.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/About/grc.html