You might like to check out Larry Swain's question on Late Antiquity websites.

My suggestions included:

http://www.attalus.org/info/sources.html, http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/home.html

Both are mainly translations, but do include some bilingual texts, particularly the Thayer site.

You might also find the following sites useful:

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/

http://perseus.uchicago.edu/

Hope they're a help.

Kathy Toohey

Hi Jim

Digital Classics is an ambiguous term for me... If you mean, digital versions of The Classics - as in `Harold Bloom & the Western canon' - or `Great Books of the Western World' then - I'm not actually sure. And therefore: Kathy's answer sounds good.

- If you mean `digital works that are classics', it's stuff like, Joseph Squier's `Life with Father', the game `Myst', and hypertext fiction.

And see Henry Jenkins, Christy Dena, and the like.

But, I think you mean, the former, not the latter...?

Cheers

JT

In this context, "Classics" refers to the academic discipline that focuses upon the study of the ancient civilizations of Greece and Rome, and includes literary, historical, and archaeological data. Everything from the plays of Sophokles and Homer to multiivariant spatial modeling. I will be attempting to introduce students to the ways in which informatics and computing applications and media can be (and are) brought to bear upon the study of these civilizations and the ways in which those studies can be communicated in electronic format.

I'm looking for anyone 'out there' who has attempted such a class in order to bounce ideas off of each other and share tricks/tools found along the way.

Kathleen - thanks for the links. Perseus has been long in my sights - I actually found a 3.5 floppy and manual for Perseus 1.0 in my office the other day. Wow.

Glad to help, Jim. I understand what you're looking for, though it's not my field. I could actually benefit from a language refresher in Latin and Greek myself. Taking them up late at Uni, I find that many years on it is the grammar that has stayed with me, rather than the vocabulary. Which has been helpful when I've been working with Old French texts.

You might find the following site useful as well:

http://www.uah.edu/student_life/organizations/SAL/index.html

The Society for Ancient Languages site. It seems concentrated on Latin, but has works from Cicero, Caesar, Horace, Vergil and others with Texts by chapter, translations and translation notes that you might be able to extract something useful from. And they might also be able to provide you with links to other sites of use.

Kathy

Hi,

For an overview of the state of the art in computational linguistics for Latin in particular, you may want to check out my forthcoming book with Brill (http://www.brill.com/methods-latin-computational-linguistics); my other publications are also listed on my profile on RG.

Good luck with your research!

Barbara

Hey Jim,

A couple things came to mind that you might be interested in. Good luck with your class.

http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~jasonur/pdf/JUr_ArchRecord_may06.pdf

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/asp/en/intro.shtml

http://phys.org/news/2013-03-cas-archaeologists-tool.html

http://www.graeworks.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/abm_and_antonine_itineraries.pdf

Alex

Hello, Orbis, from Stanford U. is great: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World

http://orbis.stanford.edu/

Note a reading, but fun for getting familiar with the computer and ancient geography.

Hi Jim, the following may be outside what you're looking for, but your students may still find it helpful as a supplement to your course. It's the introduction to a UK Open University course on rearing Classical Greek, particularly for giving your students a feel for the sounds of the language and just familiarising themselves with the alphabet.

http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/greek/#

Naomi - Orbis is...interesting. They did well on a number of elements, but I have issues with a number of shortcuts taken on the terrestrial mapping, among other things. Good on long-distance, poor on local or down-the-line constructs. Anything that takes 5 seconds to generate a path from London to Jerusalem is going to be cutting some corners. Still, good for the students to see, certainly, from a number of standpoints.

The Perseus website contains as little or as much as a beginning class can handle. While syllabi for courses are good to hand out the first day, you might shoot for less than actually appears on your syllabus, depending on the ability of your class. Stick to short works-- the Greek tragedies (works like "Iphigeneia in Aulis" and "Antigone" amaze undergraduates), and AEsop's fables are also good--. What you don't achieve in breadth, you can in depth.

Digital classics can be vague indeed: you can take very different approaches.

I am a ex-student from classics reconverted in computational linguistics. I drifted to the study of rhetorical devices in NLP inspired from greek classical rhetorics. I had to give a talk to a group of pure classics and rhetoricians on my own topic. It is not easy to make computational stuff sound accessible to a large audience... but it is definitely possible! And it is a cool challenge!

See these slides where we explain how to detect automatically a classical rhetorical figure, the chiasmus:

http://stp.lingfil.uu.se/~marie/LiteraeLinguae.pdf

(Slide adapted from this paper: http://stp.lingfil.uu.se/~marie/CLFL2015.pdf)

Some papers that I like on this topic if your students have a slight background in computational linguistics:

http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/dasmith/bendersky-quotes-2012.pdf

http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hearst/papers/naacl_short_paper_2016.pdf

thanks, Marie!

Indeed, with 'digital classics', one can go in a myriad of ways.  As I developed the course, I took into account my own expertise/interests, while at the same time thinking about the skills of the typical undergraduate classics student. Part of the goal was to introduce to people normally adverse to using a computer outside of word processing the concept of data and means of disseminating information in non-traditional means. I've attached the eventual syllabus and assignments of the course we did in 2013. By no means an end-point, this course will be offered again, certainly with slightly different angles.

One of the things we took away from the class was the wide array of skills that students brought to class. There was a wide range of computational literacy expressed, which made things a bit challenging. When we offer it again, we'll pay closer attention to how and to whom we advertise and recommend for the class.