Perseus on the Web: Preparing for the Next Thirty Years

FAIN: PW-290565-23

Tufts University (Somerville, MA 02144-2401)
Gregory R. Crane (Project Director: July 2022 to present)

A project to expand data related to Greek and Latin sources that is part of the Perseus Digital Library, the largest online open-access reference collection of Greco-Roman culture and language.  

The Perseus Digital Library, best known for its coverage of Greco-Roman Culture, has been available on the Web since 1995 and, in the 2021/22 academic year served between 200,000 and 300,000 users a month. The work proposed here would complete a comprehensive overhaul of Perseus, replacing a Web presence that was first designed in 2003. The 3-year project proposed here allows us to integrate a range of new capabilities, most developed as part of NEH-funded projects (such as generation of Ancient Greek text from page images, quotation detection, automatic translation alignment), into a new Perseus that provides updated services to its established users while reaching out to new communities. Text reuse and citation detection would create links from source text to relevant Open Access scholarship, provide a venue for next-generation, born-digital publications, and stimulate more applications of Natural Language Processing to historical languages.