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USA: http://www.perseus.org/
UK: http://perseus.csad.ox.ac.uk/
Germany: http://perseus.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/
The Perseus website was created by academics who seem incapable of communicating simply and directly. Their help-system is of little help. [tutorial/critique]
For some reason this full-text search returns far fewer results-- without it many more 'collections' seem to be available. [help-page]
The Perseus etext-structure is almost entirely unreadable: very short pages, clumsy navigation, opaque urls, and a shrunken fontsize. [example] [help-page] (If you need to read a many-page document there, and your connection is slow, try alternating between two simultaneous windows-- editing the pagenumbers yourself in the url-- so the next one can be loading as you read the other.)
The default configure-display settings add random blue word-links that you should turn off via the 'Configure display' link (at the top of every page). Set "Lookup Tool Links" to 'No'. ('Lookup Tool' is their jargon for search-engine.) These random links just deliver a search-engine query of the whole website, dumping great gobs of irrelevant hits.
Some texts do have very useful annotations, though, which you have to turn on via 'Configure display'. Try checking all the checkboxes for 'Cross references'-- but turn off 'Lemma mapping'. (A lemma is "A word or phrase treated in a glossary or similar listing" [def] so 'mapping' all the lemmas means lots more distracting markup making the text even harder to read.)
For Shakespearean texts, you may decide to uncheck 'Cross references in dictionaries' instead, because there's one dictionary there that defines almost every word.
The lefthand-column's link 'Plot [sites] in this document' is potentially fun: it tries to mark all the mentioned places on a handsome map. [eg for Hamlet] But because these are generated automatically, it often mistakes persons for places (like Ophelia, New Jersey).
Other lefthand links offer a mini table of contents, and basic reference-pages for the collection as a whole (its contents, and an overview if available). Other links quietly appear (or disappear) in this lefthand column, but they're usually worth checking out.
Navigation options are left- and right-arrows, a searchbox displaying the current location that you can reset (if you can correctly guess the numbering system), and the clickable blue bar that jumps to any point in the text (the red part is like a 'proportional' scrollbox).
Classical (Greek and Roman/Latin) (ids: 1999.01, 1999.04)
resources, browsing-list, history-overview
A more-usable interface for this overview, plus an index of Greek etexts: timeline
The Perseus Project grew out of a computerised database of ancient Greek texts, and offers the widest range of 'tools' for studying these. [tools]
Most interesting to me are the secondary sources (scholarly critical works and reference books).
They also offer images, if you're into that stuff. [browser] [intro]
special exhibits: Olympics (1996), Hercules (1997), Julius Caesar (1998), Latin anthology (2001)
English Renaissance
(id: 1999.03)
incl Shakespeare and Marlowe, with heavy-duty Shakespeare annotations
Victorian London (Bolles)
(id: 2000.01)
includes some Dickens and Defoe, with an emphasis on maps
others
American Civil War (2001.05) resources, overview
papyri (1999.05) resources, overview
American Memory: California (2000.02), Upper Midwest (2000.03), Chesapeake Bay (2001.01)
Archimedes (history of mechanics) (1999.06)
Tufts University History (2000.04)
Boyle notebooks (17thC chemist) (2001.07)
Beazley Archive (pottery)
about, staff, ex-staff, articles, articles
1979: Gregory Crane, BA from Harvard [pic&bio] [CV] [interview]
no-date: Crane annoyed by 10min walk between Harvard libraries, dreams of electronic access [cite]
1982: summer: Crane begins writing Unix text-retrieval system for 80Mb Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG); spends $35k on 660Mb hard drive [cite]
no-date: Crane tries hacking 'vi' for multilingual editing, ends up designing new software [cite]
1984: Crane switches to MacWrite instead of writing custom editor [cite]
1984: Crane prototypes Morpheus in C and LISP (for parsing Greek morphology)
1985: May: $6000 grant from Dean's fund
1985: Crane's PhD from Harvard in classical philology
1985: Jul: $150k in equipment from Xerox
1985: early planning of Perseus
1985: Sep: Isocrates Project (with Brown U, $25k in equipment)
1986: Goldfarb's SGML-standard recognised
1986: Jun: Annenberg/CPB grant for $15k
1986: summer: 'Harvard Classics Computing Project Retrieval Package' completed
1987: Jan: Crane takes over early version of Morpheus (2000 lines of C)
1987: Annenberg/CPB grant for $520k
1987: switch from Unix on workstations to HyperCard on Mac II's [cite]
1987: $30k in equipment from Apple
1987: Jul: Perseus Project formally begun
1987-1989: 'Prodicus' Greek parser ($63k grant from CLLI)
1988: another $30k in equipment from Apple, plus $48k for Perseus
1988: 'Pandora' (TLG for Mac, project led by Elli Mylonas: cite) $15k from Apple
1988: Morpheus 1.0 for parsing Greek morphology (10k lines of C)
1988: 09Mar: earliest reference on Google Groups, about CD-ROM projects [GooJa]
"Boston University and Harvard University are collaborating on the "Perseus Project," which is integrating more than 100 megabytes of text with 10,000 images that pertain to the history, political science, languages, art and philosophy of ancient and classical Greece."
1988: 17Nov: presentation by Elli Mylonas at SGML conference in Boston [cite]
no-date: Crane on SGML: "There are a lot of problems when you're dealing with a very rigid Backus-Naur format language, which is what that is, and you don't have overlapping of hierarchies. In fact, you basically shoehorn the world into a weird Aristotelian universe gone mad. On the other hand, there are a lot of strengths to this. You can encode things you couldn't encode otherwise." [cite]
1989: $2M from Annenberg/CPB
1989: $15k from Apple for interface-design, another $10k for Pandora
1990: $10k from Harvard
1991: $10k from Apple for study; $68k from NEA for photography
1992: $35k from NSF to plan ancient-science database
1992: Perseus 1.0: Interactive Sources and Studies on Ancient Greek Culture ($125 for videodisc plus Mac-only CD-ROM) [credits] [documentation] (satyrs emasculated? cite)
1992: Oct: a little OED-bashing [GooJa]
1992: Nov: early posting about digital maps [GooJa]
1993: $200k from Getty for sculpture database
1994: $250k from NEH for Greek lexicographic database
1994: $450k from NSF for ancient-science database
1994: first trained computer-person [cite]
1994: late summer: earliest Web presence [cite]
1995: 19Feb: Jorn Barger starts nosing around [heh]
1995: 01Mar? first citation of url "www.tufts.edu/department/perseus" [GooJa]
1995: 01Jun: url has changed to "www.perseus.tufts.edu" [GooJa]
1995: $215k from NEH
1996: [news timeline]
1996: 20Jan: homepage redesigned [old]
1996: Jan: switch from Java to Tcl for platform-independent programming? [GooJa]
1996: 04Mar: Martin's hyperlinked overview-ebook [etext]
1996: $50k from Mellon for lexicography
1996: Perseus 2.0 (still Mac only)
1996: July: website gets 3000 hits in one day [cite]
1996: grant from Tufts for Marlowe (first Renaissance texts) [site]
1996: Crane article "Building a Digital Library: The Perseus Project as a Case Study in the Humanities" Proceedings of the 1st ACM International Conference on Digital Libraries
1996: 09Aug: Perseus Tk downloadable
1996: 10Oct: first web interface for Lookup Tool
1996: 09Dec: Papyri collection
1997: 02Jan: [Wayback] [homepage] [text-only]
1997: $240k from Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education
1997: $300k from NEH allows expansion into Roman history; $30k from NSF; $20k from Berger for SGML workshop
1997: 07Jul: Hercules 'exhibit'
1997: 10Jul: first Marlowe texts
1997: 28Oct: first Latin texts
1998: Jan: Crane article: "The Perseus Project and Beyond: How Building a Digital Library Challenges the Humanities and Technology." [etext]
1998: 30Jan: new News page [to 2002]
1998: 06Feb: Julius Caesar site [site]
1998: $27k from MLA for Shakespeare
1998: Crane article: "New Technologies for Reading: The Lexicon and the Digital Library" Classical World
1998: 12Jun: atlas debuts [annc]
1998: 15Jul: NEH-NSF proposal [etext] received $180k? [cite]
1998: Aug: Crane's book "Thucydides and the Ancient Simplicity" [etext]
1998-1999: winter: first 'quarterly' newsletter [multipage]
1999: Crane article: "Review of Lexicographica Graeca." American Journal of Philology
1999: $41k from Berger for Bolles; $280k from Planck for 'Archimedes' (digital library on the history of mechanics)
1999: $2.75M from DLI
1999: spring: 2nd 'quarterly' newsletter features London, Renaissance, and Archimedes [multipage]
1999: 11May: revised version of Lookup Tool
1999: 30Oct: image browser debuts
1999-2000: winter: 3rd and final 'quarterly' newsletter [multipage]
2000: $100k more from Planck
2000: website gets up to 300k hits on peak days [cite]
2000: platform-independent Perseus 2.0, $350 [order] ($150 for 'concise' edition) [documentation]
"Platform-independent Perseus is written in Tcl/Tk, which is a Java-like language that we found preferable, because it had better primitives for dealing with text windows. Java had pretty lousy widgets at the time and maybe would be much better now, but Tcl was a nice language. It's compilable, it's free, and it runs on everything." [cite]
2000: Jan: "Hell and Hypertext Hath No Limits: Electronic Texts and the Crises in Criticism" Hilary J. Binda [etext]
2000: 17Mar: atlas re-debuts?; text-formatting redesigned (atlas, xrefs, navigation, configuration) [annc]
2000: 19Apr: Maria Daniels "Is Bigger Better? Web Delivery of High-Resolution Images from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston" [etext]
2000: 02May: members-only mailinglist at eGroups [info]
2000: May: "Explicit and Implicit Searching in the Perseus Digital Library" by Anne Mahoney [etext]
2000: Jun: "New Technology and New Roles: The Need for Corpus Editors" Crane and Rydberg-Cox [abstract&pdf]
2000: Jun: "Extending a Digital Library: Beginning a Roman Perseus" Gregory Crane [etext]
2000: "From Greece to Rome: Building a Roman Perseus" Gregory Crane [etext]
2000: Jul: Crane article in DLIB "Designing Documents to Enhance the Performance of Digital Libraries: Time, Space, People and a Digital Library on London" [etext]
2000: 18Aug: "Management of XML documents in an integrated digital library." By David Smith, Anne Mahoney, and Jeffrey A. Rydberg-Cox [abstract] [pdf]
2000: 24Sep: articles in Ariadne by Rydberg-Cox et al "Knowledge Management in the Perseus Digital Library" [etext] and by Martin Mueller "Electronic Homer" [etext]
2000: 16Oct: "The Symbiosis Between Content and Technology in the Perseus Digital Library" by Gregory Crane, Brian Fuchs, Amy C. Smith and Clifford E. Wulfman [etext]
2000: 24Oct: Tufts History Collection debuts
2000: Nov: new homepage features maps and timelines [cite]
2000: 17Nov: announcement of Bolles, Renaissance, and American Memory [annc]
2000: Dec: Anne Mahoney "Creating an Infrastructure for Scholarly Publication On Line" [multipage]
2000: 15Dec: Mahoney, Rydberg-Cox, Smith, and Wulfman "Generalizing the Perseus XML Document Manager" [etext]
2001: $450k from NSF and DFG for 'Archimedes'
2001: 23Jan: new server is dual-processor Dell [annc]
2001: spring: Crane et al "Drudgery and Deep Thought: Designing Digital Libraries for the Humanities" [abstract&pdf] pdf2
2001: Jun: "Document Quality Indicators and Corpus Editions" Rydberg-Cox, Mahoney, and Crane [abstract&pdf]
2001: Jun: "Building a Hypertextual Digital Library in the Humanities: A Case Study on London" Crane, Smith, Wulfman [abstract&pdf]
2001: 24Aug: revised Lookup Tool [annc]
2001: Sep: Smith & Crane "Disambiguating Geographic Names in a Historical Digital Library" [abstract&pdf]
2001: Oct: "London Calling: GIS, VR, and the Victorian Period" Chavez and Milbank [abstract&pdf]
2002: $75k from NSF; $500k from NSF and EU
2002: 10Jan: Boyle collection
2002: 25Mar: VR collection
2002: 26Mar: atlases upgraded
2002: Jul: Smith "Detecting events with date and place information in unstructured text" pdf
2002: Jul: Smith et al "Integrating harvesting into digital library content" pdf
As of April 2002, the London maps seem to be entirely separate from the world maps, and none are well documented.
Help pages:
http://www.perseus.org/Help/perseusatlasfaq.html (general)
http://www.perseus.org/Help/mapfaq.html (world)
http://www.perseus.org/Help/londonmapfaq.html (London)
http://www.perseus.org/Help/atlashelp.html (tutorial)
URLs for etext-pages often look like this (from Hamlet):
www.perseus.org/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.03.0031 &query=scene%3D%232&layout=&loc=1.1.1
A lot of this can be safely trimmed away:
/cgi-bin/ptext? /cgi-bin/ptext? doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.03.0031 doc=1999.03.0031 &query=scene%3D%232 &query=scene%3D%232 &layout= &loc=1.1.1
Here, '1999.03' is the id-number for the English Renaissance collection, and '0031' means that this version of Hamlet was the 31st document added to that collection. 'Perseus%3Atext%3A' translates to 'Perseus:text:' [conversion table] but it seems unnecessary.
'scene%3D%232' translates to 'scene#=2' which is enough to specify the desired webpage (without 'layout' or 'loc'). Even better, you can say:
http://www.perseus.org/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=1999.03.0031&loc=1.2.1
because the 'loc' with no 'query' goes to the specified loc-page (act one, scene two, line one).
It's fun to hack atlas-urls to customise maps: [basics]
The homepage has six levels of tables!?!
The background is set to white, but the text-color is not set (tut, tut).
The fontsize is set to "-1" (grrr!).
The blue navigation-bar is a 575-by-8 imagemap with up to 115 different hotspots, and can take as much as 16kbytes.
The lefthand links for 'Plot sites' and 'Plot dates' cause new eindows to open.
They were early adopters of SGML, and still store their documents in that format, behind the scenes. This is supposed to allow things to be 'easily' 'automated'-- but who wants to experience art thru the distorting lens of automated markup? (If they really cared for the art, they'd choose to handcraft each page.)
Crane on SGML:
"There are a lot of problems when you're dealing with a very rigid Backus-Naur format language, which is what that is, and you don't have overlapping of hierarchies. In fact, you basically shoehorn the world into a weird Aristotelian universe gone mad. On the other hand, there are a lot of strengths to this. You can encode things you couldn't encode otherwise." [cite]
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