Beyond Translation: New Possibilities for Reading in a Digital Age

FAIN: HAA-266462-19

Tufts University (Somerville, MA 02144-2401)
Gregory R. Crane (Project Director: January 2019 to present)

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).

Associated Products

Preliminary Description of the next generation Scaife Viewer (Blog Post)
Title: Preliminary Description of the next generation Scaife Viewer
Author: Gregory Crane
Abstract: The following screenshots and links point to new features for the Scaife Digital Library. This reflects completed work funded by the Mellon Foundation (in collaboration with Johns Hopkins) and on-going work funded by the NEH. Thanks to James Tauber and Jake Wegner of Eldarion for leading the development.
Date: 11/17/2020
Primary URL: http://https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dAGDTejMOXpmaE76Rvm5p_8bcqTewFu6ai_WNq8SU0Q/edit#heading=h.tfp3ke13qlm8

Beyond Translation: engaging with foreignlanguages in a digital library (Article)
Title: Beyond Translation: engaging with foreignlanguages in a digital library
Author: Gregory Crane et al.
Abstract: Digital libraries can enable their patrons to go beyond modern language translations and to engage directly with sources in more languages than any individual could study, much less master. Translations should be viewed not so much as an end but as an entry point into the sources that they represent. In the case of highly studied sources, one or more experts can curate the network of annotations that support such reading. A digital library should, however, automatically create a serviceable first version of such a multilingual edition. Such a service is possible but benefits (if it does not require) a new generation of increasingly well-designed machine-readable translations, lexica, grammars, and encyclopedias. This paper reports on exploratory work that uses the Homeric epics to explore this wider topic and on the more general application of the results.
Year: 2021
Format: Journal
Publisher: International Journal of Digital Libraries (submitted)

Thoughts on Classical Studies in the 21st Century United States (Blog Post)
Title: Thoughts on Classical Studies in the 21st Century United States
Author: Gregory Crane
Abstract: Abstract: This paper consists of three complementary parts. The first section describes three instances where very technical scholarship on Greek literature overlaps with, and draws attention to, particularly dramatic historical contexts. This section describes an aspect of Greco-Roman studies that is both too demanding and too narrow — too demanding because it assumes that anglophone researchers work with scholarship in languages such as French, German, and Italian, but too narrow because it does not engage with scholarship that is not in a major European language. The second section talks about the general need for Classics and Classical Studies in a country such as the United States to extend beyond Greece and Rome. This section builds on work that I have published in the past distinguishing Greco-Roman from Classical Studies. The third section describes a more concerted attempt to expand beyond North Africa and to include sources from Sub-Saharan Africa. I report on developing for a spring 2021 course on Epic Poetry a 10,000-line Mandinka/English corpus of stories produced by West African Griots. I will also briefly discuss the use of Classical Arabic to explore locally produced sources about West African history and culture. As a first step, the fall 2021 course on Classical historians at Tufts University will center not only on sources such as Herodotus, Thucydides, Livy and Tacitus but on two histories that focus on the Songhay Empire: the Tarikh al-Fattâsh, begun c. 1593 by Mahmud Kati, and the Tarikh as-Sudân, composed by al-Sadi (c. 1594–1655). This class will expand the role of Classical Arabic in Classical Studies at Tufts.
Date: 09/10/2021
Primary URL: https://classical-inquiries.chs.harvard.edu/thoughts-on-classical-studies-in-the-21st-century-united-states/#_ftn5
Primary URL Description: This is an essay series supported by Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies.
Blog Title: Thoughts on Classical Studies in the 21st Century United States
Website: Center for Hellenic Studies: Classical Inquiries

Beyond Translation (Web Resource)
Title: Beyond Translation
Author: Gregory Crane
Author: James Tauber
Author: Jake Wegner
Abstract: This site exposes beta level work -- work that is not quite finished but can be made available to a wider audience -- from the project. It focuses on issues of the front end.
Year: 2021
Primary URL: https://beyond-translation.perseus.org/

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