Last year the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG) published on CD-ROM the latest update to its ever-improving database of Greek texts. The chief feature of this update is the addition of thousands of new texts, primarily post-Classical; this has increased the size of the database from 458 to 650 megabytes in total. The Thesaurus Linguae Graecae® (TLG®) is a research program at the University of California, Irvine. Founded in 1972 the TLG has collected and digitized most literary texts written in Greek from Homer to the fall of Byzantium in AD 1453. Its goal is to create a comprehensive digital library of Greek literature from antiquity to the present era.
- Diogenes is a tool for searching and browsing the databases of ancient texts, primarily in Latin and Greek, that are published by the Thesaurus Diogenes - Browse /diogenes/3.1.6 at SourceForge.net.
- Diogenes, a free software package, incorporates the Perseus data and allows easy offline consultation of LSJ on Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux platforms. Marcion is another open source application that includes the Perseus LSJ. For mobile devices, both the Kindle E-Ink and the iPhone/iPod Touch feature data ported from Perseus.
If you study ancient Greek, you can be thankful in 2007. This fall, two of our discipline's most important scholarly instruments have gone through extraordinary metatmorphoses. First, Peter Heslin released version 3 of Diogenes (http://www.dur.ac.uk/p.j.heslin/Software/Diogenes/); then this month, the Perseus project (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper)
announced that source code and text data are being made available under open licenses.
Diogenes now directly integrates automated morphological analyses of ancient Greek from the Perseus project's morphological parser. The Perseus project's new open licenses guarantee that Peter Heslin will not be the last scholar to draw on the rich resources created at Perseus over the past two decades.
Perhaps these developments would be unremarkable in disciplines where contributions through collaborative work and critical assessment of evidence are valued more highly than career advancement. In the humanities, they stand out against a bleak landscape of subscription services and other forms of restrictions on access to scholarly work.
Taken together, Diogenes and Perseus illustrate the kind of cross-pollination that is possible when reuse of digital scholarly works is not outlawed. If enough classicists notice, we may have more good Thanksgivings ahead of us in the future.
reading the databases of Latin and Greek texts published on CD-Rom by
the Packard Humanities Institute and the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae.
http://www.dur.ac.uk/p.j.heslin/Software/Diogenes/
The major new feature in this version is that, thanks to the
generosity of the Perseus project, morphological data and dictionaries
for Latin (Lewis-Short) and Greek (LSJ) and are built-in. This means
that you can:
* Click on a word in the texts and get a morphological analysis and
the corresponding dictionary entry instantly, even if you are not
connected to the Internet.
* Click to analyze words in the dictionary entries themselves, or
click on the citation information of a passage cited in the
Diogenes Tlg Software Inc
dictionary to jump to the context of the passage in the Latin or
Greek database.
* Do morphologically intelligent searching, i.e. search for all of the
inflected forms of a given dictionary headword.
* Look up words in the dictionaries.
In addition, version 3 of Diogenes is newly based on the Firefox
browser and should be very easy to install, much more so than
previously. Easy-to-install packages are provided for Mac OS X,
Windows, and Linux. Installation just takes a couple of clicks.
Version 3.1 also includes a number of new features that had long been
requested:
* Unicode input (now the default).
* Saving user-defined subsets of the databases for repeated searching.
* Running marginal numeration when browsing through a text.
Diogenes Tlg Software Services
* Improved Unicode output.
* For network installations, individual user settings (via cookies).
Diogenes Tlg Software App
Diogenes Software
Peter Heslin (http://www.dur.ac.uk/p.j.heslin)