Help with Latin texts: Introduction to scansion

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. 

Help with Research: Using Tesserae for intertextuality, part 4

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.

Help with Ancient Texts: Perseus 5.0 Viewer Overview

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!).

Help with Research: Using Tesserae for intertextuality, Part 3

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.

Help with Research: Perseus under PhiloLogic and Logeion

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.

Perseus under PhiloLogic Part 1: Overview

In my last post I talked a little about mirror sites and the different Perseus Project mirrors. In this post, I’d like to take a closer look at one of these mirror sites: the Chicago Mirror, AKA Perseus under PhiloLogic.

Just as Perseus at Tufts is built on the Hopper, Perseus at Chicago is built on PhiloLogic. PhiloLogic, like the Hopper, is open-source and you can download and run the source code locally if that’s your cup of tea.

App Review: SPQR (Romans Go Home)

Today I’m going to do something a little unusual for the Library of Antiquity. I’m going to review a Latin app called SPQR Latin Dictionary and Reader from romansgohome.com. The website has a lot of screenshots of the app in action plus a lot of information on the app’s different features, so I won’t cover everything the app can do today. Instead I’ll do a brief overview of the main features, and then share what I think are the best and most useful parts of the app.

Help with Greek Texts: Logeion

Most classicists are familiar with the Perseus and TLG toolkits. But these aren’t the only digital resources available! In this week’s guest post, we cover another free dictionary aid for both classical languages. This one is related to Perseus, but uses a different interface. We definitely learned something from this post, and we hope our readers do, too! 

Help with Advanced Languages: Mastering your Dictionary

We’ve had a few posts on how important your dictionary skills are to your language success, and we’ve even told you some of our favorite Latin and Greek dictionaries. But there’s another trick to mastering the dictionary, and that is to figure out its abbreviation system. Abbreviations provide important information, especially about verbs, but that information is provided in a sort of secret code. It’s not consistent between dictionaries, and sometimes not even within the same dictionary, but it’s worth learning some of the most common abbreviations. Yes, every dictionary will give them to you at the front — but do you really want a dictionary for your dictionary? I didn’t think so.

Tips and Tricks for Upper Level Languages 4: Odds and Ends

In this series on surviving upper level language courses, we’ve covered expectations, dictionaries, and how to use Perseus.  Today we’ll take a look at what to do when your languages need some work and take a tour through the various resources that will help you bring them up to speed.