LOC Workshop on Etexts, Library of Congress [books to read in a lifetime TXT] 📗

Prometheus Bound, which was viewable in Greek and English pretty much in the same segments together, MYLONAS demonstrated tools to use with the Greek text, something not possible with a book: looking up the dictionary entry form of an unfamiliar word in Greek after subjecting it to Perseus’ morphological analysis for all the texts. After finding out about a word, a user may then decide to see if it is used anywhere else in Greek. Because vast amounts of indexing support all of the primary material, one can find out where else all forms of a particular Greek word appear— often not a trivial matter because Greek is highly inflected. Further, since the story of Prometheus has to do with the origins of sacrifice, a user may wish to study and explore sacrifice in Greek literature; by typing sacrifice into a small window, a user goes to the English-Greek word list—something one cannot do without the computer (Perseus has indexed the definitions of its dictionary)—the string sacrifice appears in the definitions of these sixty-five words. One may then find out where any of those words is used in the work(s) of a particular author. The English definitions are not lemmatized.

All of the indices driving this kind of usage were originally devised for speed, MYLONAS observed; in other words, all that kind of information— all forms of all words, where they exist, the dictionary form they belong to—were collected into databases, which will expedite searching. Then it was discovered that one can do things searching in these databases that could not be done searching in the full texts. Thus, although there are full-text searches in Perseus, much of the work is done behind the scenes, using prepared indices. Re the indexing that is done behind the scenes, MYLONAS pointed out that without the SGML forms of the text, it could not be done effectively. Much of this indexing is based on the structures that are made explicit by the SGML tagging.

It was found that one of the things many of Perseus’ non-Greek-reading users do is start from the dictionary and then move into the close study of words and concepts via this kind of English-Greek word search, by which means they might select a concept. This exercise has been assigned to students in core courses at Harvard—to study a concept by looking for the English word in the dictionary, finding the Greek words, and then finding the words in the Greek but, of course, reading across in the English. That tells them a great deal about what a translation means as well.

Should one also wish to see images that have to do with sacrifice, that person would go to the object key word search, which allows one to perform a similar kind of index retrieval on the database of archaeological objects. Without words, pictures are useless; Perseus has not reached the point where it can do much with images that are not cataloged. Thus, although it is possible in Perseus with text and images to navigate by knowing where one wants to end up—for example, a red-figure vase from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts—one can perform this kind of navigation very easily by tracing down indices. MYLONAS illustrated several generic scenes of sacrifice on vases. The features demonstrated derived from Perseus 1.0; version 2.0 will implement even better means of retrieval.

MYLONAS closed by looking at one of the pictures and noting again that one can do a great deal of research using the iconography as well as the texts. For instance, students in a core course at Harvard this year were highly interested in Greek concepts of foreigners and representations of non-Greeks. So they performed a great deal of research, both with texts (e.g., Herodotus) and with iconography on vases and coins, on how the Greeks portrayed non-Greeks. At the same time, art historians who study iconography were also interested, and were able to use this material.

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DISCUSSION Indexing and searchability of all English words in Perseus Several features of Perseus 1.0 Several levels of customization possible Perseus used for general education Perseus’ effects on education Contextual information in Perseus Main challenge and emphasis of Perseus

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Several points emerged in the discussion that followed MYLONAS’s presentation.

Although MYLONAS had not demonstrated Perseus’ ability to cross-search documents, she confirmed that all English words in Perseus are indexed and can be searched. So, for example, sacrifice could have been searched in all texts, the historical essay, and all the catalogue entries with their descriptions—in short, in all of Perseus.

Boolean logic is not in Perseus 1.0 but will be added to the next version, although an effort is being made not to restrict Perseus to a database in which one just performs searching, Boolean or otherwise. It is possible to move laterally through the documents by selecting a word one is interested in and selecting an area of information one is interested in and trying to look that word up in that area.

Since Perseus was developed in HyperCard, several levels of customization are possible. Simple authoring tools exist that allow one to create annotated paths through the information, which are useful for note-taking and for guided tours for teaching purposes and for expository writing. With a little more ingenuity it is possible to begin to add or substitute material in Perseus.

Perseus has not been used so much for classics education as for general education, where it seemed to have an impact on the students in the core course at Harvard (a general required course that students must take in certain areas). Students were able to use primary material much more.

The Perseus Project has an evaluation team at the University of Maryland that has been documenting Perseus’ effects on education. Perseus is very popular, and anecdotal evidence indicates that it is having an effect at places other than Harvard, for example, test sites at Ball State University, Drury College, and numerous small places where opportunities to use vast amounts of primary data may not exist. One documented effect is that archaeological, anthropological, and philological research is being done by the same person instead of by three different people.

The contextual information in Perseus includes an overview essay, a fairly linear historical essay on the fifth century B.C. that provides links into the primary material (e.g., Herodotus, Thucydides, and Plutarch), via small gray underscoring (on the screen) of linked passages. These are handmade links into other material.

To different extents, most of the production work was done at Harvard, where the people and the equipment are located. Much of the collaborative activity involved data collection and structuring, because the main challenge and the emphasis of Perseus is the gathering of primary material, that is, building a useful environment for studying classical Greece, collecting data, and making it useful. Systems-building is definitely not the main concern. Thus, much of the work has involved writing essays, collecting information, rewriting it, and tagging it. That can be done off site. The creative link for the overview essay as well as for both systems and data was collaborative, and was forged via E-mail and paper mail with professors at Pomona and Bowdoin.

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CALALUCA PLD’s principal focus and contribution to scholarship Various questions preparatory to beginning the project Basis for project Basic rule in converting PLD Concerning the images in PLD Running PLD under a variety of retrieval softwares Encoding the database a hard-fought issue Various features demonstrated Importance of user documentation Limitations of the CD-ROM version *

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Eric CALALUCA, vice president, Chadwyck-Healey, Inc., demonstrated a software interpretation of the Patrologia Latina Database (PLD). PLD’s principal focus from the beginning of the project about three-and-a-half years ago was on converting Migne’s Latin series, and in the end, CALALUCA suggested, conversion of the text will be the major contribution to scholarship. CALALUCA stressed that, as possibly the only private publishing organization at the Workshop, Chadwyck-Healey had sought no federal funds or national foundation support before embarking upon the project, but instead had relied upon a great deal of homework and marketing to accomplish the task of conversion.

Ever since the possibilities of computer-searching have emerged, scholars in the field of late ancient and early medieval studies (philosophers, theologians, classicists, and those studying the history of natural law and the history of the legal development of Western civilization) have been longing for a fully searchable version of Western literature, for example, all the texts of Augustine and Bernard of Clairvaux and Boethius, not to mention all the secondary and tertiary authors.

Various questions arose, CALALUCA said. Should one convert Migne? Should the database be encoded? Is it necessary to do that? How should it be delivered? What about CD-ROM? Since this is a transitional medium, why even bother to create software to run on a CD-ROM? Since everybody knows people will be networking information, why go to the trouble—which is far greater with CD-ROM than with the production of magnetic data? Finally, how does one make the data available? Can many of the hurdles to using electronic information that some publishers have imposed upon databases be eliminated?

The PLD project was based on the principle that computer-searching of texts is most effective when it is done with a large database. Because PLD represented a collection that serves so many disciplines across so many periods, it was irresistible.

The basic rule in converting PLD was to do no harm, to avoid the sins of intrusion in such a database: no introduction of newer editions, no on-the-spot changes, no eradicating of all possible falsehoods from an edition. Thus, PLD is not the final act in electronic publishing for this discipline, but simply the beginning. The conversion of PLD has evoked numerous unanticipated questions: How will information be used? What about networking? Can the rights of a database be protected? Should one protect the rights of a database? How can it be made available?

Those converting PLD also tried to avoid the sins of omission, that is, excluding portions of the collections or whole sections. What about the images? PLD is full of images, some are extremely pious nineteenth-century representations of the Fathers, while others contain highly interesting elements. The goal was to cover all the text of Migne (including notes, in Greek and in Hebrew, the latter of which, in particular, causes problems in creating a search structure), all the indices, and even the images, which are being scanned in separately searchable files.

Several North American institutions that have placed acquisition requests for the PLD database have requested it in magnetic form without software, which means they are already running it without software, without anything demonstrated at the Workshop.

What cannot practically be done is go back and reconvert and re-encode data, a time-consuming and extremely costly enterprise. CALALUCA sees PLD as a database that can, and should, be run under a variety of retrieval softwares. This will permit the widest possible searches. Consequently, the need to produce a CD-ROM of PLD, as well as to develop software that could handle some 1.3 gigabyte of heavily encoded text, developed out of conversations with collection development and reference librarians who wanted software both compassionate enough for the pedestrian but also capable of incorporating the most detailed lexicographical studies that a user desires to conduct. In the end, the encoding and conversion of the data will prove the most enduring testament to the value of the project.

The encoding of the database was also a hard-fought issue: Did the database need to be encoded? Were there normative structures for encoding humanist texts? Should it be SGML? What about the TEI—will it last, will it prove useful? CALALUCA expressed some minor doubts as to whether a data bank can be fully TEI-conformant. Every effort can be