Tools for Students in the Perseus Digital Library

Transcription

1 Tools for Students in the Perseus Digital Library Anne Mahoney Perseus Project, Tufts University Anne Mahoney ABSTRACT The texts, maps, timelines, and other tools of the Perseus Digital Library can help students learn not only the classical languages but also something about classical culture. All of the tools work together, and references to other relevant information are offered automatically along with each page of text. This article introduces the digital library to Latin and Greek teachers. KEYWORDS Digital Libraries, Hypertext, Foreign Language Curriculum Standards INTRODUCTION The Perseus Digital Library ( is a growing library centered on Ancient Greek and Roman materials. 1 It includes over 100 Greek texts, over 50 Latin texts, English translations, grammars, dictionaries, an atlas, over 15,000 pictures of Greek and Roman art, and nearly 10,000 photos of places in Greece, Italy, and the rest of the classical world. It is easy for new users to get lost in all this material. This article presents a guided tour of the site from the perspective of a Latin or Greek teacher, explaining how Perseus resources can help students learn not only the languages but also something of the culture of these two civilizations. The tour will begin with texts and move on to the historical, geographical, and visual resources in the digital library. READING LATIN AND GREEK TEXTS The sentence Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres. Gaul, as a whole, is divided into three parts. is of course very commonly known. But where is Gaul? When was Caesar fighting there? And how do we construe partes? 2001 CALICO Journal Volume 18 Number 2 269

2 Tools for Students in the Perseus Digital Library Space, time, and language are fundamental organizing principles for the study of any culture. To intermediate level Latin students reading Caesar s Gallic War for the first time, language may appear the most important, but such students also need to know about chronology, geography, political background, and Caesar s place in literary history. The assigned textbook or commentary will answer some of their questions, but only the ones its author could anticipate. In the Perseus Digital Library, on the other hand, Caesar s Gallic War is automatically linked to commentaries, other texts, pictures, maps, and grammatical assistance. Curious students starting from an assigned passage can follow links to explore much of Latin literature and Roman history. No text in Perseus is isolated. Whenever one text quotes another, Perseus forms a link from the quoting text to the quoted text. For example, when Allen and Greenough s New Latin Grammar (1931) cites Caesar to show how a construction works, the reference to Caesar is a live link to the text of the Gallic War (see Figure 1). Figure 1 Allen and Greenough s New Latin Grammar citing Caesar 270 CALICO Journal

3 Anne Mahoney Anyone with some experience using the Web would expect these references to appear as links. In Perseus, however, these links are bidirectional: not only is there a link from the grammar to Caesar, but there is a link from Caesar back to the grammar as well (see Figure 2). Figure 2 Link back from Caesar to the grammar The Gallic War hears itself being quoted by the other book and responds by showing a link. Students reading Caesar are thus automatically alerted to relevant material elsewhere in the digital library. As the library grows, more and more of these cross-citation links are formed and each text a starting point for exploring the entire library. Reference works, including grammars and encyclopedias like the Princeton Encyclopedia of Classical Sites, are particularly fertile generators of connecting links, as are scholarly commentaries which frequently list parallel passages when they comment on an interesting feature in a text. Our hypothetical intermediate Latin students starting out with Caesar are offered help with the grammar and sense of the text at hand but are also tempted by references to the rest of Greek and Roman literature. Volume 18 Number 2 271

4 Tools for Students in the Perseus Digital Library Experienced readers are used to making connections among texts based on a wide knowledge of similar literature. Students who have not yet read a great deal of Latin or Greek can use these bidirectional links to begin to build a mental picture of classical literature. The connections created by citations in reference works, commentaries, and other texts model the way sophisticated readers experience a classical text. Students can observe and practice this style of reading on their own, transferring their experience of other hypertexts to this field. 2 The Perseus program also includes tools to help students more directly with the language. One of the most sophisticated computer programs in the Perseus system is Morpheus, the morphological analysis tool for Greek and Latin (see Crane, 1991). Every Greek and Latin word is linked to a morphological analysis (see Figure 3). Figure 3 Analysis of animadvertit The analysis pop-up window gives the dictionary form of the word, possible identifications of the form, a short definition, and frequency information. For example, animadvertit in Figure 3 is a form of animadverto, either third person singular present indicative active or third person singular perfect indicative active. The short definition is enough to remind a reader of the meaning of a familiar word. Because it is not an adequate definition for an unfamiliar word, or a word with more than one meaning, the window called the Word Study Tool also offers a link to the full definition in Lewis and Short s (1979) Latin Dictionary, one of the standard unabridged dictionaries of Latin. 3 Morphological analysis is not always enough; sometimes readers need help figuring out why a verb is indicative or a noun is ablative. For this reason, the technical terms in the morphological analyses are linked to 272 CALICO Journal

5 Anne Mahoney overviews of Greek and Latin syntax written especially for Perseus. These overview texts give the most important uses of the various tenses, moods, and cases in each language with examples taken from standard school authors (Caesar, Cicero, Catullus, and Virgil for Latin; Thucydides, Xenophon, Demosthenes, Homer, and others for Greek). Links to standard grammars allow students to get more details or to find more obscure constructions that are not treated in the overviews. The Word Study window also includes frequency information. It can be useful to know whether a word is very common, worth adding to one s active vocabulary, or rather rare, not likely to come up again. We find that Caesar uses animadverto proportionately more often than the other Latin authors in Perseus. Although he uses the word on average only 32 times, that is, 6.24 out of every 10,000 words, the 213 occurrences of the word in the Perseus Latin corpus as a whole represent only 1.21 out of 10,000. This difference makes the word moderately common in Caesar but relatively uncommon over all. The link for Frequency in other authors allows readers to determine exactly which of the authors represented in Perseus use a word. For animadverto, we find that the prose writers Caesar, Cicero, and Vitruvius use the word often, but poets almost never use it (see Figure 4). Volume 18 Number 2 273

6 Tools for Students in the Perseus Digital Library Figure 4 Frequency Table A good dictionary will, of course, specify whether a word is primarily poetic or prosaic, at least according to the lexicographer s analysis, but these frequency counts enable students to make their own judgements rather than simply accepting what they are told by the scholars who wrote the dictionaries. The frequency information, short definitions, dictionary links, and syntax links make this little pop-up window the central wordstudy tool in Perseus. 4 The Latin corpus in Perseus includes most of the authors commonly read in American schools and all the works on the current Advanced Placement syllabus. 5 The Roman Perseus program, under development since 1996, continues to grow; more Latin texts and commentaries are added every few months. 6 During the last few months of 2000 and the beginning of 2001, we expect to increase coverage of the end of the Roman Republic with texts like Caesar s Civil War. We are also adding commentaries on 274 CALICO Journal

7 Anne Mahoney Cicero and those of other Latin authors as well as more images of Roman art and Roman sites. READING IN ENGLISH Students reading parts of the Gallic War in Latin may want (or be assigned) to read the entire text in English, and they may also want to read other related works: poems by Catullus or letters by Cicero that mention Caesar, battle scenes in Herodotus or Livy, and memoirs or commentaries by Xenophon. The Perseus program contains English translations for almost all of its classical texts. (Sometimes, the original language version is edited and published before the translation.) Many of these translations are important works of poetry or scholarship in their own right, and many of them contain useful footnotes and introductions serving to link the translated text into the rest of the digital library. Translations are matched page for page with the original texts, making it easy to move back and forth between the English section and its corresponding section in Latin or Greek. Words in Latin and Greek texts are linked to morphological analyses, and many words in English texts are linked to the Lookup Tool. The Lookup Tool is the main searching facility for everything in Perseus, not just the texts. 7 Links to this tool act like the glossary at the back of a printed book, with the difference that readers can see at once whether a particular term is glossed or not. The Lookup Tool is such a basic part of using the digital library that a search box appears on every Perseus screen. The Lookup Tool provides a list of references categorized by type of object: coins, sculptures, vases, images, sites that can be plotted in the Perseus Atlas, and of course texts. A search for Caesar, for example, results in a list of 13 coins, an entry in the Perseus Encyclopedia, three entries in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Classical Sites, a sculpture, two literary works, and 93 images (see Figure 5). Volume 18 Number 2 275

8 Tools for Students in the Perseus Digital Library Figure 5 Caesar in the Lookup Tool Students can see and read about coins issued by Caesar, or they can read Shakespeare s play Julius Caesar, all from the same search results display. Links from texts to the Lookup Tool remind readers that there is more to Greek and Roman culture (and more to the digital library) than just texts. HISTORY AND GEOGRAPHY We have not yet answered our hypothetical student s questions: where is Gaul, and when was Caesar there? To answer questions about space, we use the Perseus Atlas. 8 Each English text that refers to any place in the ancient world also offers links to dynamically generated maps of the sites named in the current page or in the entire text (see Figure 6). 276 CALICO Journal

9 Anne Mahoney Figure 6 Sites in the Gallic War The Atlas opens in a separate browser window to facilitate matching text and geography. On the map, sites mentioned more than 20 times in the text are plotted in a darker color so they stand out. Other features, like modern political boundaries or lakes and rivers, can be added to the display. The Atlas page also offers a link to the Lookup Tool for each site plotted on the map, which allows readers to move from the location of an ancient place, to a site description, and to photographs of the site as it looks today. Two kinds of tools help answer the when questions. One way students gain a sense of chronology is by reading history. In addition to ancient historians Livy, Thucydides, Herodotus, Josephus Perseus includes a version of Martin s overview of Greek history which summarizes the history of Greece from the Stone Age to the death of Alexander the Great. Like every other text in Perseus, the historical overview has links to other texts and to the Lookup Tool. (The Perseus program does not yet have a corresponding overview of Roman history.) The program also presents chronology visually. When texts (in English) mention specific dates, Perseus offers a link to the Timeline Tool which charts those dates (see Figure 7). Volume 18 Number 2 277

10 Tools for Students in the Perseus Digital Library Figure 7 Dates in the Gallic War Although there are not many dates in the text of the Gallic War, it is immediately clear from the few dates which do occur that the war took place in the 50s BCE. The horizontal axis of the display represents time, earlier years to the left and later years to the right. The axis may be marked in centuries or decades, depending on the scale. The vertical axis represents position in the text, with the beginning of the text at the top of the page and the end at the bottom. When the timeline shows dates in a single text, each horizontal band represents a book, chapter, or other major division. When the timeline shows the dates of a collection of texts, each band represents one text. Within the chart, red dots represent the occurrence of dates in the text, and yellow bars represent date ranges such as the fifth century, the 63rd Olympiad, or Caesar s lifetime. These dots and bars are links back to the point in the text at which the date is mentioned. At the top of the chart, green and red bars represent the total number of references to dates in each time period: green for the larger divisions of the time axis (decades in the example shown in figure 7), red for the smaller ones (years). Texts with more dates produce a more complex timeline display. In Cicero s letters, for example, we find dates ranging from 540 BCE to 133 CE some in Cicero s text, some in the headers of the letters, and some in notes added by the translator. By default, the Timeline Tool shows the 278 CALICO Journal

11 Anne Mahoney center of the range of dates but allows readers to zoom in and out and scroll backwards and forwards (see Figure 8). Figure 8 Dates in Cicero s Letters It is clear from the aggregate bars at the top of the display that most of the dates in Cicero s letters are in the first century BCE, in particular in the decades from 70 to 40 BC, precisely the period of Cicero s active public life. The Timeline Tool makes Cicero s lifespan and the period of the Gallic campaigns visible, just as the Atlas makes the extent of Caesar s and Cicero s world visible. Maps and timelines are not the only visual resources in the Perseus Digital Library. The archaeological and art historical component of the library provides another kind of background information. Thousands of photographs help answer students questions about how the classical world looked. Detailed discussion of these resources would exceed the limits of this article. CONCLUSION How, then, is Perseus useful in the Latin or Greek classroom? The American Council for the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) Standards for Foreign Language Learning and the American Classical League/Ameri- Volume 18 Number 2 279

12 Tools for Students in the Perseus Digital Library can Philological Assocation Standards for Classical Language Learning specify the 5 Cs: communication, cultures, connections, comparisons, and communities (see ACTFL, 1996; Phillips, 1999; Abbott, et al., 1998). The resources of an integrated digital library like Perseus facilitate students work with the second and third of the Cs (cultural study and interdisciplinary connections). Multimedia can bring disciplines together, says Lamb (1992) in a discussion of academic multimedia projects, including an earlier version of Perseus. Lamb finds that multimedia hypertexts engage students interest and, when well used, can promote active learning. Laurillard (1993) observes that in a digital library like Perseus, students have access to primary sources (textual and nontextual) with which they can verify or challenge conclusions they find in textbooks or encyclopedias. Laurillard states that There is nothing revolutionary about these activities for the academic, but easy access to original data creates the possibility that students may also do them. And that is [original emphasis] revolutionary. The Perseus Digital Library is a large and varied collection. Interconnections among texts, images, maps, and timelines make it possible to start almost anywhere and explore all of classical antiquity. The most important interconnections language help, references to and from other texts, keywords, Atlas plots, and timelines are automatically offered along with each page of text. More detailed information is a link or two away, available on demand. Intermediate to advanced language students and students in beginning and intermediate history and civilization classes will find the resources of the site particularly helpful for organizing and integrating their knowledge of the ancient world. NOTES 1 Other collections within Perseus include Renaissance English texts (Marlowe and Shakespeare), the Bolles Collection on the History of London, and Archimedes: Sources for the History of Mechanics. This article, however, focuses on the Greek and especially the Roman materials. While Perseus is cited frequently in discussions of technology in the Greek or Latin classroom (as in several of the essays in LaFleur, 1998), many of those references pre-date the publication of the Roman collection, and many of them focus on the older Perseus CD-ROMs rather than the Web version. 2 See also Crane (1998) on how Perseus affects the way we and our students read classical texts, with particular emphasis on the use of on-line dictionaries. 280 CALICO Journal

13 Anne Mahoney 3 Similarly, in Greek, morphological analyses are linked to definitions in Liddell, Scott, Jones, and McKenzie s A Greek-English Lexicon. For Greek, Perseus also offers the shorter Intermediate Lexicon, but readers generally prefer the full entries in the larger dictionary. Crane (1998) offers some explanations for this phenomenon. Rydberg-Cox (in press a) explains how the short definitions are automatically extracted from the full dictionary entries. 4 See Rydberg-Cox (2000 b) for details on frequency analyses, collocations, and other word-study tools within Perseus. 5 The Advanced Placement curriculum for Latin may be viewed at the College Board s web. Available: 6 Original funding for Roman Perseus came from the National Endowment for the Humanities; Perseus is grateful for their support. The development of the Roman collection within Perseus is well described in Crane (2000). 7 The Lookup Tool and other implicit and explicit search tools in Perseus are described in detail in Mahoney (2000). 8 The best-published description of the Perseus Atlas to date is Chavez (2000). REFERENCES Abbott, M. G., Davis, S., & Gascoyne, R. C. (1998). National standards and curriculum guidelines. In R. A. LaFleur (Ed.), Latin for the 21st century: From concept to classroom (pp ). Glenview, IL: Scott Foresman Addison Wesley. American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. (1996). Standards for foreign language learning: Preparing for the 21 st century. Yonkers, NY: National Standards in Foreign Language Education Project. On-line document available: Albright, M. J., & Graf, D. L. (Eds.). (1992). Teaching in the information age: The role of educational technology (New Directions for Teaching and Learning No. 51). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Chavez, R. F. (2000). Using GIS in an integrated digital library. In Proceedings of the 5 th annual ACM digital library conference. San Antonio, TX. Crane, G. (1991). Generating and parsing Classical Greek. Literary and Linguistic Computing, 6, Crane, G. (1998). New technologies for reading: The lexicon and the digital Library. Classical World, 91, Crane, G. (2000). Extending a digital library: Beginning a Roman Perseus. New England Classical Journal, 27 (3), Greenough, J. B., Kittredge, G. L., Howard, A. A., & D Ooge, B. L. (Eds.). (1931). Allen and Greenough s New Latin Grammar. Boston: Ginn. LaFleur, R. A. (Ed.). (1998). Latin for the 21st century: From concept to classroom. Glenview, IL: Scott Foresman Addison Wesley. Volume 18 Number 2 281

14 Tools for Students in the Perseus Digital Library Lamb, A. (1992). Multimedia and the teaching-learning process in higher education. In M. J. Albright & D. L. Graf (Eds.), Teaching in the information age: The role of educational technology (New Directions for Teaching and Learning No. 51) (pp ). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Laurillard, D. (1993). Rethinking university teaching: A framework for the effective use of educational technology. London: Routledge. Lewis, C. T., & Short, C. S. (1979). Latin dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Liddell, H. G., Scott, R., Jones, H. S., & McKenzie, R. (1940). A Greek-English lexicon (9 th ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mahoney, A. (2000). Explicit and implicit searching in the Perseus digital library. In Eleventh ACM conference on hypertext and hypermedia, preconference workshop [On-line]. Available: Martin, T. R. (1996). Ancient Greece from prehistoric to Hellenistic times. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Phillips, J. K. (Ed.). (1999). Foreign language standards: Linking research, theories, and practices. Lincolnwood, IL: National Textbook Company. Rydberg-Cox, J. A. (in press a). Mining data from the electronic Greek lexicon. Classical Journal. Rydberg-Cox, J. A. (in press b). Word co-occurrence and lexical acquisition in Ancient Greek texts. Literary and Linguistic Computing. Stillwell, R., MacDonald, W. L., & McAlister, M. H. (Eds.). (1976). The Princeton encyclopedia of classical sites. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. AUTHOR S BIODATA Anne Mahoney holds a Ph.D. in classics from Boston University. She is a programmer for the Perseus Project, where she works on the text processing system, standards and tools for text markup, and editing Greek and Latin texts. She also teaches classics at Tufts University. AUTHOR S ADDRESS Anne Mahoney Perseus Project Eaton 124 Tufts University Medford, MA amahoney@perseus.tufts.edu 282 CALICO Journal