perseus.uchicago.eduWelcome to Perseus under PhiloLogic

PERSEUS DIGITAL LIBRARY AT TUFTS SCAIFE VIEWER ARTFL PROJECT CLASSICS AT CHICAGO , 2018 edition logeion greek latin commentaries monographs LSJ Lewis & Short Slater Woodhouse Perseus Project Texts Loaded under PhiloLogic Final season for PhiloLogic 3, Summer 2018 News and updates . It's been a while since we released an official update, but here it is, thanks to indefatigable wrangling (of C, perl, apache and many other arcana) this summer by Walt Shandruk. The intervening years have seen significant work especially on the side of the Greek texts, and some enhancements to the functionality of PhiloLogic for ... philologists. I'd like to thank all those who have written to us over the years to report typos and other errors; or simply to report a server outage. We are glad you keep coming back for more. If the Perseus mothership at Tufts represents a well-outfitted library carrel, with texts, commentaries, dictionaries and other resources all within your reach on the same page, then the organization of this site may come as a surprise. Rather than reading-with-apparatus, we aim to offer exploration of the texts through a panoply of corpus queries. Because many texts have been parsed by hand, and the rest of them with the computer, you can search in ways that you don't see in too many other places: For instance, search for present imperatives in Plato, or the particle μέν only in lines spoken by Ismene. Looking for forms of βροτός at the end of the sentence? We are here to serve them up. For experienced and post-beginner readers, we also recommend tools that will by now be familiar, I hope: the Keyword in Context view, and the Collocation tool. We are grateful for all problem reports and user suggestions; keep them (and your donations:-)) coming. To keep abreast of developments, consider following us on Twitter: @LogeionGkLat. Work that awaits: we really want to incorporate more texts, which are steadily becoming available from the Perseus Digital Library. More importantly, we need to adapt the new generation of PhiloLogic, PhiloLogic4 , to the needs of classicists (think: navigation that is not by page number in an edition; lemma searches; ...), so that we no longer depend on fifteen-year-old technology. Stay tuned. Background: where do those texts come from? The texts we make available on this site are practically all used by permission from the Perseus Project at Tufts University, the foremost Digital Library for the classical world, if not for the Humanities in general. In its collection of Greek and Roman materials, readers will find many of the canonical texts read today. The Greek collection approaches 8 million words and the Latin collection currently has 5.5 million. In addition, many English language dictionaries, other reference works, translations, and commentaries are included, so that anyone with an internet connection has access to the equivalent of a respectable College Classics library. The Greek and Latin texts are richly encoded for content rather than form (e.g., not page breaks, initials, and indents, but speaker information, metrical information, and milestones). The Perseus site is further enriched by intricate linking mechanisms among texts (resulting in more than 30 million links). For licensing information, details on editors and translators, etc., click on the XML Header links that show up in the bibliographical details of the texts. For consulting the reference works, we now recommend going straight to Logeion on the web or in an app; we do still offer a searchable LSJ, Lewis & Short, and Slater; and we have put in a link to Woodhouse's English-Greek Dictionary. What did you do to the texts? or: Where is the mirror? You will here find a selection of the text at the Tufts site, but the mechanism for browsing and searching them is a different one. It is PhiloLogic , a system that was especially developed for large textual databases by the ARTFL project at the University of Chicago. While the original Perseus site is an excellent tool for linear reading, by putting all kinds of resources on the same page while a user reads a passage, we were interested in leveraging the rich encoding for searching the texts, and for other tasks that are less about reading and more about research: corpus linguistics, above all. We are grateful that the Perseus Project makes its texts available to third parties, and continue to live in hope that other not-for-profit institutions devoted to (Greek) text curation will enhance their search and analysis offerings, or follow the example of Perseus, and decide to make their data available for advanced analysis with other systems than their own. Please get in touch, or download your own copy of PhiloLogic, which is open-source. Why doesn't your site give me Cicero to read when I type in Cicero in the search box? It is important to understand that a PhiloLogic search form is not like a Google search box. The main search box is for words that occur in the text, so that by typing 'Gallia est' you will find the opening sentence of the Gallic Wars, but entering 'Julius Caesar' will in the first instance lead you to texts of Catullus and Cicero. Starting from our homepage, click on the link to the full search form, where you can use the Author and Title fields or type in a standard citation at the top (based on the Oxford Classical Dictionary). If your citation is not what the server expects, you'll get a full listing of all the texts, which will show you the abbreviation we use. Why aren't you more like Google? PhiloLogic is designed to leverage the rich structural encoding that Perseus texts offer, and therefore to know the difference between types of content: words in the texts, versus the so-called metadata: authors, titles, and much more. It is also designed to allow for precise answers to specific questions, rather than ballpark estimates of the 'are you feeling lucky' type. If you search for the word 'amicitia' in texts, or for the name 'Pseudolus', we don't want you to find instances from titles, or speaker indications -- unless you specify that that's the kind of information: titles that include amicitia, words spoken by Pseudolus, that you want. We believe that both approaches have their advantages but that more precise searching is something that classicists tend to want. In sum, before entering anything in a search field, ask yourself what kind of search this is: a word search or a search for metadata. If your search is for metadata, find the fitting field elsewhere on the search form. Tip: By clicking on the buttons next to the search fields, you will always get a listing of your options. Why are my results different when I search that other Greek corpus? Several important distinctions: Most importantly, that corpus is probably much much larger than the selection offered here, and the texts are often of more recent vintage. On the other hand, the texts may not have been disambiguated, so that guesses about frequency may always be at the high end and include lemmata that do not in fact occur in the texts or do not occur with the frequency asserted. We would like to see the functionality of searching by part-of-speech, or by specified attribute (such as speaker), and better leveraging of parsing in everybody's corpus, but we are in no position to know what goes on behind closed doors. More questions? Happy to chat, of course. How do I use this site? Where did all the search forms go? One type of reaction we heard a lot about the original Perseus under PhiloLogic site was that the search forms were rather intimidating to the novice. Now that we've been around for well over a decade, and with good alternatives out there for reading texts, such as the beautiful new Scaife Viewer , we are going back to our roots, you might say. If you are looking for the primary texts and translations, click Greek or Latin at the top of this page. Reference works can be found in Logeion; grammars among the mon...