THE WAY IN WHICH TEXT IS represented on a computer affects the kinds of uses to which it can be put by its creator and by subsequent users. The electronic document model currently in use is impoverished and restrictive. The authors argue that text is best represented as an ordered hierarchy of content object (OHCO), because that is what text really is. This model conforms with emerging standards such as SGML and contains within it advantages for the writer, publisher, and researcher. The authors then describe how the hierarchical model can allow future use and reuse of the document as a database, hypertext, or network.
The Perseus Project is compiling a hypertextual database of textual and visual materials for the study of classical Greek civilization. This article discusses how the anticipated needs of Perseus users, combined with the current and potential capabilities of information technology, have influenced the selection, organization, and presentation of primary materials in the Perseus system.The study of classical literature, archaeology, and civilization has been a hypertextual activity from its very beginnings in antiquity. It focuses on the analysis of a large quantity of information, of varied types, which is approached in distinct ways by several different disciplines and applied to different purposes. This includes ancient texts, ancient and modern commentaries and criticism on these texts, descriptions of archaeological sites and objects and scholarly work concerning them, ancient and modern historical writings, as well as a large body of reference and other secondary materials necessary to organize and understand all the above. These sources are already interlinked in complex ways, since each is used to illuminate the understanding of others. Furthermore, since these materials are broadly useful in fields other than classics and archaeology-for example, law, philosophy, anthropology, political theory, and occasionally medicine-their network of interconnections is cast even wider. However, these connections are not always accessible to students or even scholars, since the material is in classical Greek and refers to a culture distant in time and very different from our own. Layers of reference and context are necessary to make such studies possible.Early computer applications in the domain of classics tended to focus on special projects like lexical and metrical analyses or concordances and often culminated as a published book. The advent of electronic technology allowed classicists to improve on one portion of what they had already been doing in the pastcollecting and cataloging information.
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