Bridget Almas

Student researchers, citizen scholars and the trillion word library

The surviving corpora of Greek and Latin are relatively compact but the shift from books and written objects to digitized texts has already challenged students of these languages to move away from books as organizing metaphors and to ask, instead, what do you do with a billion, or even a trillion, words? We need a new culture of intellectual production in which student researchers and citizen scholars play a central role. And we need as a consequence to reorganize the education that we provide in the humanities, stressing participatory learning, and supporting a virtuous cycle where students contribute data as they learn and learn in order to contribute knowledge. We report on five strategies that we have implemented to further this virtuous cycle: (1) reading environments by which learners can work with languages that they have not studied, (2) feedback for those who choose to internalize knowledge about a particular language, (3) methods whereby those with knowledge of different languages can collaborate to develop interpretations and to produce new annotations, (4) dynamic reading lists that allow learners to assess and to document what they have mastered, and (5) general e-portfolios in which learners can track what they have accomplished and document what they have contributed and learned to the public or to particular groups.

Developing a New Integrated Editing Platform for Source Documents in Classics

The Department of Classics at Tufts University and the Perseus Project have jointly designed and tested an integrated platform (the Perseids Platform) on which students and scholars can 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 platform integrates the Son of SUDA Online software, originally developed to edit papyrological texts, and the Collections, Indexes, and Texts, with Extensions architecture, originally developed by the Center for Hellenic Studies of Harvard University to support the Homer Multitext Project. The present article discusses our scholarly and pedagogical objectives in developing the platform, the technical challenges we faced in the course of our work, and the results we obtained. .................................................................................................................................................................................

Perseids collaborative platform for annotating text re-uses of fragmentary authors

The goal of this document is to present a fragmentary texts demo built under Perseids, a collaborative platform being developed by the Perseus Project that leverages and extends pre-existing open-source tools and services to support editing and annotating TEI XML documents in Classics: http://sites.tufts.edu/perseids/ [1]. The aim of this use case is to build a shared environment for multi-level annotations of text re-uses of ancient lost works: http://perseids.org/sites/berti_demo/index.html.