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An expansion of the widely-used Perseus Digital Library to integrate reading tools that are designed to facilitate the study of ancient texts and the ability to conduct searches for relevant words and phrases.

Our goal in this Level III project is to promote a fundamental change in how human beings view translations and the cultures of which their original source text is a product. To support this larger goal we integrate into the emerging new version of Perseus new reading tools that we have developed as separate applications over the past decade: (1) the ability to produce, automatically and manually, word and phrase level alignments between source texts and translations and to see these alignments while reading; (2) the ability to view the full morphological and syntactic analysis of each word in a text; (3) new forms of searching and browsing based on this new data (e.g., find all English words used to translate a word or to view all subject/verb, adjective/noun combinations); (4) both large scale work (alignment of 50 million words of English to Greek and Latin) as well as focused projects (e.g., a bilingual edition of Homer).

The Perseus Project, led by Professor Gregory Crane of Tufts University, has been a worldwide leader in providing online access to Classical Greek sources. Perseus is currently collaborating with the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR) to develop applications and digital infrastructure for working with historical languages, especially Classical Greek, Latin, Arabic, and early Italian. An important aspect of the collaboration between Perseus and CNR is to develop projects that integrate translations from Classical Greek into Classical Arabic, from the great translation movement that took place in Baghdad from 800 to 1000 CE. The proposed work on digital infrastructure will enhance learning and research and allow students to make more substantive contributions than was possible in a print culture. The current need is to further the collaboration by bringing four American scholars to Tufts University to meet with a visiting scholar from CNR and to have a software developer available to assist the process. The ultimate goal of this work is to lay the foundation for an interdisciplinary humanities curriculum incorporating Classical Greek, Latin, and Arabic in research and teaching through digital means.

This project supports the creation of a framework to produce "dynamic variorum" editions of classics texts that enable the reader to automatically link not only to variant editions but also to relevant citations, quotations, people, and places that are found in a digital library of more than one million primary and secondary source texts. The project team includes members from Tufts University, the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Imperial College, London, and Mount Allison University.

Building upon collaborations between computer scientists and classicists across three countries, we propose to build a framework that combines emerging technologies and large collections to provide for every surviving Greek and Latin author scalable, sustainable information that can exceed the breadth of traditional bibliographic databases for an entire field and the depth of traditional variorum editions for individual authors and works. We can furthermore identify patterns in the changing reception of and scholarship about Greco-Roman antiquity with greater power and flexibility than was feasible with traditional methods. The work proposed here will demonstrate and analyze the significance of these new methods. Our hypothesis, based on years of development with smaller collections, is that we can now see a wholly new generation of services that better address the most traditional goals of scholarship, are customizable to the needs of far broader audiences, and are much more practical to maintain over time.

Consultation with staff from the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center to investigate the development of dynamic lexica for Latin and ancient Greek.

The Perseus Project recently received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities to investigate the automatic construction of "dynamic lexica" for historical languages (specifically Latin and Greek) as the output of automatic processes based on both supervised and unsupervised learning techniques. We are seeking NEH/NERSC supercomputing support and training for two reasons: 1.) to let us significantly reduce our training time for two known automatic processes already under development (automatic parsing and parallel text alignment), in order to allow us to be more agile in our future development and optimization; and 2.) to let us begin experimenting with approaches not available to us without the use of such resources (such as a hybrid approach to word sense disambiguation involving labeled sense induction and clustering). In this we hope not only to improve upon our existing methods but also to investigate the possibility for innovative new work as well.

Creation of a digital collection of fragmentary writings of Greek historians and development of a virtual research environment for Greco-Roman antiquity using grid technologies that would be broadly applicable to other humanities disciplines.

[A grid is a computing architecture that coordinates large numbers of computers and data to act as a single large computer. It enables individuals or institutions grouped as virtual organizations to dynamically share computational resources.] Philogrid, a collaboration of the Perseus Digital Library (DL) at Tufts University in the United States and the Internet Centre at Imperial College London in the United Kingdom, proposes to create an expandable, grid-enabled, Web service-driven virtual research environment for Greco-Roman antiquity based initially upon open source texts and services from the Perseus DL. First, we will add to the Perseus DL the writings of Greek historians that exist only in fragmentary form. This task goes beyond simple data entry: we will create the first major digital collection of fragmentary authors designed from the start to interact with multiple source editions. Second, we will create a repository of philological data about the Greco-Roman world seeded with twenty years' worth of Perseus materials. The objects that we create will not only include books but every labeled object within each logical document. Third, we will convert the workflow that has evolved over the past ten years to process textual materials in Perseus into a grid-enabled workflow based on Web services that can be applied to and customized for many collections. Although this project will concentrate on the classics collections in the Perseus DL, the new workflows will also process non-classical Perseus content, and will thus from the start demonstrate their generality. The development process will follow a strategy already successfully employed in e-Science projects at the Imperial College Internet Centre. It will consist of conversion of the Perseus workflow and tools into a Web service environment, in which the Perseus workflow is analyzed into steps, each of which is published as a Web service with a configurable API. A workflow mirroring the Perseus workflow will then be composed and fine-tuned using model data from Perseus and sample data from the digitization within the current scope of this project. The results of this project would be freely accessible on the Web.

TO SUPPORT a two-year project to develop enhancements to the pedagogical resources of the Perseus Digital Library of Greek and Roman Culture in conjunction with sponsorship of summer workshops for teachers.

To support a faculty development project at a consortium of southern colleges and universities to familiarize faculty members with electronic resources for the study of classical civilization.

No project description available