Hi followers,
This week’s blog post was eaten by a hiccup in WordPress. Because it needs to be written from scratch, there will be no post this week. Sorry for the inconvenience!
We’re going to take this opportunity to start our summer hiatus a little earlier than usual. We’ll be back after Labor Day with more on scansion, coding, and more! In the meantime, check out the materials from our panel on public scholarship at the Classical Association of Canada annual meeting.
Final exams and paper grading are upon us. At this busy time, we know that you want distractions — but maybe not really long distractions. So here are our best tips for powering through the end of the semester as painlessly as possible! Continue reading
Musisque deoque is an Italian project developed in 2005 that aims to be a comprehensive repository of Latin works of poetry “from its origins to the Italian Renaissance.” In addition to the full text, the project also offers a critical apparatus for much of the material, as well as metrical analyses and advanced search options. In this guest post, I will take you on a tour of some of the main features.
Although we now approach ancient texts primarily through the written word, they were originally meant for performance. Poetry in particular was probably chanted or sung, as we know from the use of words relating to music in the opening lines of poems and poetic collections. Nowhere is this performance context more clear than in the use of meter in ancient poetry. Although the untrained viewer can’t see this meter in an ancient text (unlike, for example, the musical notation on modern sheet music), once you know how to scan well, you can quickly begin to recite texts as they were meant to be heard.
The nice thing about scansion is that it’s in many ways easier than other tasks beginning language students have to perform. In this first post, I’ll introduce the two major Latin meters: dactylic hexameter and pentameter. Continue reading
In our previous posts, we’ve talked about what intertextuality means, how computers can help you locate it, the differences between intertextuality and discourse analysis, how Tesserae can help you with the latter in particular, and how to limit the number of results you get in a Tesserae search. In this post, we finish going through the advanced features and talk about Tesserae’s most innovative search type: sound analysis. Continue reading
Here at the Library of Antiquity we’re pretty excited about the launch of Perseus 5.0, the Scaife Viewer. This is the first major overhaul of the Perseus platform since the launch of the Perseus 4.0 Hopper in May of 2005. The Scaife Viewer is a whole new Perseus experience. The new reader, named after Ross Scaife, a pioneer and avid proponent of opens-ource, community-based projects, is intended to be a community-driven, customizable interface based off of the CTS URN data model (see below). In this post, we’ll go over using the reader in general and follow up with some additional posts about the various features (and will even cover my own attempts to contribute to the project!).
In our last Tesserae post, I promised an explanation of Tesserae’s advanced features. These are mostly aimed at limiting the number of hits an individual search will come up with, which is useful because all potential matches need to be checked. It’s much easier to check 100 matches than to check 600 or even 1600! But I also want to highlight two advanced features that really advance the way that we can computationally analyze Latin: by using similarity metrics for sound effects and by connecting words that are semantically similar. In this post, I will discuss the second of these; my last (but not the last!) Tesserae post will discuss sound effects. Continue reading
In my last post, I introduced you to the Perseus Project mirror hosted by the University of Chicago, commonly known as Perseus under PhiloLogic. While my last post covered in general the great text-searching features in the Chicago mirror, in this post, I’m going to go into detail on how to use the Logeion search option.
In honor of the Ides of March, we thought we’d take a tour back through our old posts and highlight a few of our favorites! Continue reading
This year the Ides of March bring good news with the launch of Perseus 5.0!
The Library of Antiquity 