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.

The early-stage development of a collaborative transcription, translation, and editing platform for Latin and ancient Greek texts. With this project, undergraduate and graduate students would participate in the creation of digital editions for inclusion in the Perseus Digital Library.

The Department of Classics at Tufts University seeks level II funding to design and test an integrated platform on which students will collaboratively transcribe, edit, and translate Latin and Greek texts, creating vetted open source digital editions. This project, while giving students the opportunity to work with original untranslated documents, also contributes to the efforts of the scholarly community worldwide to meet the challenge of publishing large numbers of primary source documents online while preserving high editorial standards. The students' work will be vetted by experts, encoded in XML TEI following best practices in the Digital Humanities, and published online in the Tufts Digital Library and the Perseus Digital Library, which receives more than 700,000 visits a month. The integrated platform will be made available as open-source software and can be used as a model for editing and translating any source documents in any language and any Humanities field.

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.

Construction of a testbed of scholarly and cultural documents on the ancient world and the development of digital, open-source tools to enable researchers and librarians to utilize contextual materials available in text-based collections.

The Perseus Project and the Collections and Archives of Tufts University propose to develop infrastructure for finding references to particular people and places from classical antiquity in several ancient and modern languages in primary and secondary source collections. We will offer and publish open-source, stand alone services and Fedora repository disseminators for searching, browsing, and visualizing entities within the Tufts Digital Library. Under a creative commons license, we will publish knowledge sources such as: linguistic data to identify forms of the most common 60,000 proper classical names in seven languages; knowledge base of the 30,000 people and places most prominent in texts; indices associating c. 200,000 passages with particular entities and an association network of 500,000 tagged names for named entity identification systems; automatically generated index of classical people and places identified in a 1 billion-word testbed of both scholarly and general cultural documents.

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.

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.