Gregory Crane
Professor of Classical Studies and Winnick Family Chair of Technology and Entrepreneurship
Tufts University
The session will report on long-term work that aims to integrate as many different categories of data as possible about cultural spaces. While the focus is Greco-Roman culture, the methods are much more general. Where the initial challenge lay in creating materials, the availability of Creative Commons and other open licenses and openly licensed materials has fostered the emergence of a vigorous ecosystem of open data research and research publications. Efforts increasingly concentrate on the challenges of working with data from this growing network of interacting projects. Publication classes include: linguistic annotations; named entity classification and linking with associated visualizations (such as dynamically generated maps); analysis of metrical form; word and phrase level alignments between source texts and translations; links between textual and linguistic datasets and regions of interest from manuscripts and other text-bearing objects; natural language annotations that can address particular strings in particular versions of a canonical work. Challenges include managing individual and group credits on openly licensed, machine-actionable publications as new projects upload and modify prior work. In creating a prototype focused on Homeric Epic alone, researchers wished to draw upon data from more than 15 projects and were integrating data based on content that they had published. This approach is a new and much more decentralized form of intellectual production that blends human and automatically produced content and provides opportunities for students and members of the public to contribute to research. While the challenges are daunting, the decentralized approach has the potential to open up and invigorate academia, particularly the humanities. The researchers welcome feedback and opportunities for collaboration.
The project was funded most recently by the Mellon Foundation, Harvard University’s Center for Hellenic Studies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
https://sites.tufts.edu/perseusupdates/2024/01/16/towards-a-new-perseus-update/
https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/
https://scaife.perseus.org/
https://beyond-translation.perseus.org/reader/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0012.tlg001.perseus-grc2:1.1-1.7