Digital Classics
As a field within the digital humanities, digital classics focuses on applying computational tools and techniques to research into the Greco-Roman world, and to the ancient world in general. In classical studies, there is now an international, decentralized community of digital classicists who study, apply, and practice these techniques in their research and teaching (Romanello & Bodard, 2016). Digital classics shares some techniques with the literary and text-based digital humanities. For instance, the Text Encoding Initiative, a computer- and human-readable markup standard for annotating texts that has spearheaded the development of text-based digital humanities, also has implications for texts in the classics, with the additional challenges of multilingual texts (Dee et al., 2016).
One of the major initiatives in the digital classics is the Perseus Digital Library, an online library that hosts a large, 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.
Evolving from the Perseus Digital Library, the Perseids Project provides an infrastructure to support scholars and students in the digital classics. Perseids provides text transcription, annotation, and large-scale analysis tools (Almas, 2017). The Perseids Platform consists of tools for interacting with ancient documents and for facilitating collaboration. It also contains treebanking collections.
Treebanks are syntactic sentence-by-sentence commentaries on texts, which can be subsequently visualized as graphs, or “trees”. In addition to treebanks, a variety of other applications can also be found. Several application programming interfaces, or APIs, are available for editing, such as a Greek-Latin demixer for distinguishing between the two languages in text generated from optical character recognition (OCR), Greek verb conjugator, a polytonic Greek keyboard, and a word cloud visualization tool. Tools are also available for analyzing morphology, or the study of words and components of words. Dictionaries and a repository of all programs and code are available.