BACHELOR OF FINE ARTS IN THEATRE @ FIX University: Greek and Roman Mythology @ FIX University Campus

Dear FIX,

Looking forward to our class in two weeks!

A few words as we get ready.

Getting Started on Readings:
For the first week of class, there will be NO assigned readings. For weeks 2-4 we will be reading the Odyssey, so if you'd like to get a jump on class, read that.

Updated List of Strongly Recommended Translations:
If you have already purchased copies from our earlier list, you're fine! Every year publishers change their inventories slightly, and this year a couple of our books are affected. Here is the current list of the "strongly recommended" translations for our class:

Greek Tragedies, Volume 1, ed. by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992)
Greek Tragedies, Volume 3, ed. by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992)
Hesiod, Theogony and Works and Days, M. L. West, trans. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988 or 2009)
Homeric Hymns, Sarah Ruden, trans. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2005)
Homer, The Odyssey, Robert Fagles, trans. (New York: Penguin, 1997 or 2006)
Virgil, The Aeneid, Robert Fitzgerald, trans. (New York: Vintage, 1990)
Ovid, Metamorphoses, David Raeburn, trans. (New York: Penguin, 2004)

Why These Translations?
Two reasons: they are a pleasure to read (not all are, and most of those freely available on the web aren't); and we'll be using the page / line number systems from these editions to refer to the texts in our class. It will be somewhere between a minor and a major annoyance not to have these, as page- and line-numbering vary from translation to translation. The best freely available translations are on the Perseus web site: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu

What's the best way to get my questions answered?
Once our course is up and running, you will find our discussion forums to be your best source of information. Crowd sourcing, it turns out, works pretty well; and if there are issues that come up for you, posting a note to the forums will be the quickest way to get your questions answered. This will almost always happen from others taking the class, since our teaching team of four can't begin to answer direct queries from a class of this size -- there are 50,000 of you out there! We'll be monitoring the forum as best we can to see what needs fixing.

See you in class!
We're about to read and talk about some pretty amazing stories. Just be patient with us as we work through how to do this best, and most of all please be sure to give the readings the time they deserve for you to get everything you can out of them. There are wonders waiting for you!

See you all soon,

Peter Struck

Greek and Roman Mythology Course Staff

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Welcome to Perseus 4.0, also known as the Perseus Hopper.
Read more on the Perseus version history.
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Announcements

July 11, 2012We would like to call attention to a thoughtful blog post on the Latin Word Study Tool in Perseus and why it is important to improve it. The post names a number of key challenges and, more importantly, argues forcefully that answering those challenges in the morphological analysis is of pedagogical value.
The big challenge is that machines are not perfect and won't be, even if they grow cleverer (as indeed they can) in their ability to morphologically analyze Latin. The best solution is probably to aggregate effort from many people. The big question is whether the problem is important enough and people care enough to build a system to manage corrections from many named sources.
You can see work in this direction in the March 20 posting below. There we show work adapting the distributed editing environment developed for the papyrologists to the needs of Classicists working with literary texts as well. Editing morphological data is similar in principle, though a bit different in practice. While we do not have a simple morphology system, users could use the Greek and Latin Treebank editing environment and only edit the morphology. That might be a useful starting point. The real question is whether the morphology is worth the attention by itself when you could also annotate the syntax - but there are very qualified people (such as Helma Dik) who believe just that.
Our question to the community is this: How many contributors would there be? In particular, we would love for classes to 'adopt a passage,' correcting all the morphology and basic issues as a contribution to knowledge. Of course, all the data that we produce is released under a Creative Commons License.
April 25, 2012We have addressed some performance issues with the site and fixed a crash in the vocabulary tool. Although some performance problems may persist, we hope that the overall experience is improved. As always, feedback is welcome. Feel free to send detailed error reports to the webmaster.
April 10, 2012Perseus has rolled out stable, linkable URIs for Smith's "Dictionary of Greek and Roman biography and mythology." URIs for people entities from the Smith biography adhere to the following syntax: http://data.perseus.org/people/smith:<name>-<number>, and include support for Content-Type negotiation based on the HTTP Accept header. Currently supported Content-Types are text/html, directing you to the corresponding page in the Perseus HTML display, and text/xml, producing the TEI XML for the dictionary entry. An example URI ishttp://data.perseus.org/people/smith:alexander-3. Matteo Romanello has produced a sample linked data application using these URIs athttps://github.com/mromanello/SameAs-game.
March 20, 2012Perseus announces plans to decentralize the curation, annotation, and general editing of the TEI XML texts that it hosts. Ultimately this will include every textual object in Perseus, allowing individuals to modify (where rights allow), and to create new, dictionary and encyclopedia entries, translations, commmentaries, introductions, as well as machine actionable annotations such as identifications of people and places and the morpho-syntactic analyses in the Greek and Latin Treebanks. Please see the demos of the prototype interface for such basic tasks as editing and reviewing existing source texts and creating new translations. Our goal is to integrate this work with existing learning management systems, evolving e-portfolios, institutional repositories and new instruments of digital publication. We hope to be able to begin beta testing the environment soon.
January 3, 2012Tufts University invites applications to "Working with Text in a Digital Age", a three-week NEH Institute for Advanced Technology in the Digital Humanities (July 23-August 10, 2012) that combines traditional topics such as TEI Markup with training in methods from Information Retrieval, Visualization, and Corpus and Computational Linguistics. Faculty, graduate students, and library professionals are encouraged to apply. Applicants should submit proposals by February 15, 2012. Participant proposals must include CVs and statements of purpose (no more than 1,000 words) describing how they will be able to use participation in the Institute to advance their subsequent careers. Participants must be committed to collaborative work and to publication of results from this Institute under a Creative Commons license. Participants should identify source materials with which they propose to work during the Institute and which must be in the public domain or available under a suitable license. In an ideal case, source materials would include both texts for intensive analysis and annotation and one or more larger corpora to be mined and analyzed more broadly. Statements of purpose must describe initial goals for the Institute. For more information or to submit applications, please contact lisa dot cerrato at tufts dot edu.
We particularly encourage participants who are committed to developing research agendas that integrate contributions and research by undergraduates, that expand the global presence of the Humanities, and that, in general, broaden access to and participation in the Humanities. Preference will be given to participants who are best prepared not only to apply new technologies but to do so as a means to transform their teaching and research and the relationship of their work to society beyond academia.
November 9, 2011Announcing "Working with text in a digital age", an NEH Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities. Co-directors: Monica Berti and Gregory Crane, Tufts University; Anke Lüdeling, Humboldt University.
July 23-August 11, 2012 Tufts University, Medford MA
This institute will provide participants with three weeks in which (1) to develop hands on experience with TEI-XML, (2) to apply methods from information retrieval, text visualization, and corpus and computational linguistics to the analysis of textual and linguistic sources in the humanities, (3) to rethink not only their own research agendas but also new relationships between their work and non-specialists.
A call for applications will follow shortly.
November 7, 2011Perseus is pleased to announce collaboration with the Pelagios and Pleiades projects. Please refer to the blog post for details.
We have also recently addressed errors in the sort order of the Greco-Roman collection list and fixed a number of typographical errors, broken abbreviations and text links.
Please note that due to the recent increase in amount of available morphological data on Perseus, we have run into resource limitations updating our frequency tables, so frequency scores may currently be inaccurate for many of the lemmas. We are working to address this problem as quickly as possible.
September 23, 2011Perseus is pleased to announce the availability of the Thematic Index of Classics in JStor, an automatically generated index of themes in a collection of more than 130,000 research articles archived in JStor. This work was developed by David Mimno under the Cybereditions Project, an effort led by the Perseus Project at Tufts University and funded by the Mellon Foundation.
September 19, 2011Perseus wishes to announce the publication of the first digital edition of Lane's Arabic-English Lexicon - the major English lexicon for Classical Arabic, now available under in TEI XML under a Creative Commons License. Perseus has published a number of lexica and lexicographic resources, including Salmoné's Arabic English Lexicon, but Lane's monumental lexicon for Classical Arabic posed particular challenges because of its organization according to roots rather than dictionary words. The resulting complications affected not only the structure of an inherently complex document but the services by which readers can find relevant words. Harry Diakoff of The Alpheios Project, Ltd. created a working TEI XML edition of Lane and integrated it with the Alpheios reading environment tools.
Perseus also wants to highlight the release on Alpheios.net of key texts in Classical Arabic, including Book of Songs, Arabian Nights, Arabic Reading Lessons,The Autobiography Of The Constantinopolitan Story-Teller, Selection from the Annals of Tabari, Selections from Arabic geographical literature and Voyages D'Ibn Batutah. We wish to thank the Alpheios Project, Ltd. and Harry Diakoff, working with Bridget Almas and Zachary Himes (Tufts Class of 14).
September 12, 2011Perseus is pleased to have an opportunity to provide one venue for access to thePoeti d'Italia collection (http://www.poetiditalia.it) -- 3.5 million words of Latin poetry from the early modern period in Italy, produced under a Creative Commons license under the direction of Professor Paolo Mastandrea, at the University of Venice.
Thanks to a grant from the Google Digital Humanities program, Perseus is pleased to publish TEI XML digital editions of works by Achilles Tatius, Aeneas Tacticus,Asclepiodotus, Barnabas, Saint Basil, Bion of Phlossa, Chariton, Clement of Alexandria, Demetrius, Eusebius, John of Damascus, Julian the Emperor, Longinus,Longus, Marcus Aurelius, Moschos, Onasander, Parthenius, Procopius, Ptolemy andXenophon of Ephesus.
Support from the Mellon Foundation has allowed us to add TEI XML digital editions for works by Boethius, Claudian, Silius Italicus, Valerius Maximus and Cicero'sTimaeus and De Inventiones.
This release includes parses for 139,385 additional Greek forms and 100,328 additional Latin forms, resulting in 22% more Greek morphological analyses and 39% more Latin. The majority of the primary source texts in the Greco-Roman collection have also been updated as part of an ongoing effort to standardize the markup scheme. Most of the updates to the texts were structural, with only minor, if any, changes to the content. Please don't hesitate to report any problems you may see with any of the texts.
September 1, 2011:Perseus submitted a contribution to the Beta Sprint for the Digital Public Library of America. We offer technological examples such as the Perseus Digital Library itself, as well as the Proteus Book search system and the Alpheios reading environment. We would also like to point out the Mukurtu project provides a content management system in which indigenous communities can distinguish content that they can release under a Creative Commons open license from materials that are only appropriate for particular lineages or groups within their communities. The History Engine gives students the opportunity to learn history by doing the work â€” researching, writing, and publishing â€” of a historian. The result is an ever-growing collection of historical articles or "episodes" that paints a wide-ranging portrait of life in the United States throughout its history and that is available to scholars, teachers, and the general public in their online database.
July 9, 2011:Thanks to a grant from the Google Digital Humanities program, Perseus is pleased to publish TEI XML digital editions of Aelian, Cassius Dio, Callistratus,Philostratus, the Athenian, Philostratus Major and Philostratus Minor.
Support from the Mellon Foundation has allowed us to add TEI XML digital editions for Ausonius.
This release also includes fixes for various bugs including broken morphology links in the vocabulary lists and missing abbreviations for the newer works.
May 23, 2011:Thanks to a grant from the Google Digital Humanities program, Perseus is pleased to publish TEI XML digital editions of Dio Chrysostom and Dionysius.
Support from the Mellon Foundation has allowed us to add TEI XML digital editions for Jerome, Minucius Felix, and Tertullian.
This release also includes fixes for line number displays in recently released texts, typos in Elegy & Iambus, the citation scheme in Athenaeus and entity voting errors.
April 14, 2011:Thanks to a grant from the Google Digital Humanities program, Perseus is pleased to publish a TEI XML digital edition of Diodorus. Support for the Cybereditions project from the Mellon Foundation has allowed us to add as well TEI XML digital editions for Curtius, Horace, Cicero, Ovid, Sidonius, Prudentius and Seneca the Elder.
Thanks to support from the U.S. Department of Education and the Max Planck Society we have also been able to publish Edward William Lane's Arabic-English Lexicon.
March 14, 2011:Thanks to a grant from the Google Digital Humanities program, Perseus is pleased to publish a TEI XML digital edition of Arrian and to complete the TEI XML digital edition of Lucian, initially published in December. Support for the Cybereditions project from the Mellon Foundation and Tufts University has allowed us to add as well TEI XML digital editions for Florus, Persius, Statius, Apuleius, Columella,Martial, Tibullus and the Scriptores Historiae Augustae.
January 24, 2011:Thanks to a grant from the Google Digital Humanities program, the Perseus Digital Library is pleased to publish TEI XML digital editions for the Greek Poets Aratus Solensis, Colluthus, Nonnus of Panopolis, Callimachus, Lycophron, Oppian, Oppian of Apamea, Quintus Smyrnaeus and Tryphiodorus.