An Example of The Digital Humanities in The Classics: The Perseus Digital Library
The Perseus Digital Library Project is a large digital library hosted at Tufts University that contains searchable humanities resources in Greco-Roman history, literature, and culture. The site is also mirrored (duplicated) by the Max Planck Society in Berlin, Germany. The project was initially planned in 1985, and the collection has been in development since 1987. One of the aims of the project is to transfer and apply the insights gained from its development to other humanities areas. A recent research focus area within the project is personalization, in which linguistic and cultural information are adapted to the needs and preferences of individual users. Personalization is performed by an automated system that compares a user’s search behaviour to other users to subsequently suggest actions that are of interest to that user. That is, the interface adapts to a user’s preferences. The Perseus Digital Library hosts a vast, browsable collection in such diverse areas as Greek and Roman art and archaeology artifacts, materials in Arabic and Germanic languages, primary and secondary sources in early-modern English literature, and Italian Renaissance poetry produced in Latin. The project also provides case studies in human-computer interaction and interfaces for the digital humanities (Rockwell et al., 2020).