An interface to classical Greek civilization

Abstract

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.

The roles of digital libraries in teaching and learning

“…The Perseus hypermedia corpus (2.0) includes about 200 plays, books, poems, and text fragments in Greek and in English translation; almost 25,000 24-bit color images of vases, sculpture, coins, and sites; maps; site plans; and a variety of search, navigation, and display tools [6,20]. Hundreds of colleges and scores of high schools are currently using Perseus to support instruction in Greek language, ancient history, Greek literature, religion, archaeology, and art history.…”

An interpretive and situated approach to an evaluation of Perseus digital libraries

“…The Perseus program is more fully described in other writings (Crane, 1992, 1998, 2000; Marchionini & Crane, 1994; Marchionini, 2000; Mylonas, 1992; Mylonas & Heath, 1990; Rydberg‐Cox, Chavez, Smith, Mahoney, & Crane, 2000; Smith, Crane, & Rydberg‐Cox, 2000), but salient aspects related to the study will be summarized in the program description below. The Perseus Project is an ambitious, highly visible hypermedia research project that is creating a large‐scale, heterogeneous corpus of material, textual and visual, pertaining to archaic and classical Greece, the early Roman Empire, and early modern Europe.…”

Evaluating hypermedia and learning

“…The designers of Perseus decided to emphasize implicit links to make it possible for the user to browse the database flexibly and broadly [Mylonas 1992;Mylonas and Heath 1990]. Perseus is not designed to present arguments and thus to compete with printed texts or polished presentations.…”