CyberGraeca

Our users: Usage of the perseus.uchicago.edu website has always been skewed to Chicago and friends of Perseus at Chicago even if some places seem to have discovered us on their own. This month for the first time, the world's largest concentration of classicists, Oxford University, for the first time has surpassed Chicago in usage. We'll see if they can keep it up:-) Or of course, Cambridge might decide to give us all a run for the top spot. Stanford, Princeton and Cornell follow at some distance currently.

New features:

Here are some URLs that will give you Greek words in order of decreasing frequency. In order, they are:

http://tinyurl.com/2df5ula

covering 80 percent of classical prose on Perseus (sans medicine and geometry), with 539 words. [You'll see that you don't actually get decent coverage with this]

http://tinyurl.com/2ebvsll
covers 85 percent with 899 words

and finally, 1552 words will give you 90 percent coverage:
http://tinyurl.com/27frnuo

It turns out that Lysias, according to this raw KNN measurement, is most like himself (:-)), followed by Andocides, Hyperides, Demosthenes, Isaeus, Aeschines..

PAIR for Source Document 137

Lysias [1930], SpeechesLysias with an English translation by W.R.M. Lamb, M.A..

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Parameters: Minimum Span: 4 Maximum Gap: 15
Banal Filter: Short Hit = 10 Banal Match = 2 Frequent Shingles Top = 1000 Additional Display Context = 300 characters.

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1. Polybius [1893], Histories.

Source Context: Εὐμολπίδαι ἐξηγοῦνται, οὓς οὐδείς πω κύριος ἐγένετο καθελεῖν οὐδὲ ἐτόλμησεν ἀντειπεῖν, οὐδὲ αὐτὸν τὸν θέντα ἴσασιν· ἡγεῖσθαι γὰρ ἂν αὐτοὺς οὕτως οὐ μόνον τοῖς ἀνθρώποις ἀλλὰ καὶ τοῖς θεοῖς διδόναι δίκην. Ἀνδοκίδης δὲ τοσοῦτον καταπεφρόνηκε τῶν θεῶν καὶ ὧν ἐκείνοις δεῖ τιμωρεῖν, ὥστε πρὶν μᾶλλον ἢ ἧττον [Link]
Target Context: ἀνέτρεψε δὲ καὶ τὰς εἰκόνας τῶν βασιλέων ἁπάσας. οὗτος μὲν οὖν εὐθέως κατὰ τὴν ἔνστασιν τοῦ πολέμου καὶ τὴν πρώτην πρᾶξιν οὐ μόνον τοῖς ἀνθρώποις, ἀλλὰ καὶ τοῖς θεοῖς πόλεμον ἐξενηνοχώς, ἐπανῄει. καὶ παραγενόμενος εἰς Αἰτωλίαν, οὐχ ὡς ἠσεβηκώς, ἀλλ’ ὡς ἀγαθὸς ἀνὴρ εἰς τὰ κοινὰ πράγματα γεγονώς, [Link]

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PAIR for Source Document 38

Demosthenes [1903], SpeechesDemosthenis.Orationes. ed. S. H. Butcher.

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Parameters: Minimum Span: 4 Maximum Gap: 15
Banal Filter: Short Hit = 10 Banal Match = 2 Frequent Shingles Top = 1000 Additional Display Context = 300 characters.

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1. Strabo [1877], Geographyed. A. Meineke, Geographica.

Source Context: φέρε δὴ καὶ τὰς τῶν λῃτουργιῶν μαρτυρίας ὧν λελῃτούργηκα ὑμῖν ἀναγνῶ. παρ’ ἃς παρανάγνωθι καὶ σύ μοι τὰς ῥήσεις ἃς ἐλυμαίνου, ἥκω νεκρῶν κευθμῶνα καὶ σκότου πύλας Eur. Hec. 1 καὶ κακαγγελεῖν μὲν ἴσθι μὴ θέλοντά με, Unknown καὶ κακὸν κακῶς σε [Link]
Target Context: δὲ φανεὶς ἀφείθη ὑπὸ Καίσαρος. ὡς δ’ ἐπανιόντα εἰς Ῥώμην ἠσπάζοντο καὶ ἐπυνθάνοντο οἱ πρῶτοι ἐντυγχάνοντες, τὸ Εὐριπίδου ἔφη ἥκω νεκρῶν κευθμῶνα καὶ σκότου πύλας λιπών. ὀλίγον δ’ ἐπιβιοὺς χρόνον ἐν συμπτώσει τῆς οἰκίας ἐν ᾗ ᾤκει διεφθάρη νύκτωρ γενομένῃ, Ξέναρχος δέ, οὗ [Link]

I only returned to St. Andrews once after that, and was a lousy snail-mail correspondent. Don't be like me!

In this presentation at the Digital Humanities 2009 Conference we discussed the nuts and bolts of our implementation of Greek morphology in a five-million word corpus, that of the Perseus Greek texts. Many disparate elements, and the efforts of many different people have come together in this project. Dik & Whaling (2008) describe how initial data was gathered from multiple sources; the current paper describes what went into the final product. Here's a picture from the poster session which I borrow from Flickr; you can see the giant poster for yourself (beware giant file!)
Full abstract for the presentation follows below; if you do not have a pdf reading plugin, follow this link.

We have launched morphological searching in Greek and Latin texts in our local load of the Perseus corpus. Richard Whaling and I presented the project for the American Library Association yesterday. Slides are here.

You can also look at our giant Digital Humanities poster.

Go directly to the good stuff: Perseus under PhiloLogic.

With the shadow of the author hovering over it:

Here is the abstract for a paper on text mining Greek drama, also presented at DH2008: Full abstract below.