Elli MYLONAS The Perseus Project: Interactive Sources and
Studies in Classical Greece
The Perseus Project (5) has just released Perseus 1.0, the first publicly
available version of its hypertextual database of multimedia materials on
classical Greece. Perseus is designed to be used by a wide audience,
comprised of readers at the student and scholar levels. As such, it must
be able to locate information using different strategies, and it must
contain enough detail to serve the different needs of its users. In
addition, it must be delivered so that it is affordable to its target
audience. [These problems and the solutions we chose are described in
Mylonas, "An Interface to Classical Greek Civilization," JASIS 43:2,
March 1992.]
In order to achieve its objective, the project staff decided to make a
conscious separation between selecting and converting textual, database,
and image data on the one hand, and putting it into a delivery system on
the other. That way, it is possible to create the electronic data
without thinking about the restrictions of the delivery system. We have
made a great effort to choose system-independent formats for our data,
and to put as much thought and work as possible into structuring it so
that the translation from paper to electronic form will enhance the value
of the data. [A discussion of these solutions as of two years ago is in
Elli Mylonas, Gregory Crane, Kenneth Morrell, and D. Neel Smith, "The
Perseus Project: Data in the Electronic Age," in Accessing Antiquity:
The Computerization of Classical Databases, J. Solomon and T. Worthen
(eds.), University of Arizona Press, in press.]
Much of the work on Perseus is focused on collecting and converting the
data on which the project is based. At the same time, it is necessary to
provide means of access to the information, in order to make it usable,
and them to investigate how it is used. As we learn more about what
students and scholars from different backgrounds do with Perseus, we can
adjust our data collection, and also modify the system to accommodate
them. In creating a delivery system for general use, we have tried to
avoid favoring any one type of use by allowing multiple forms of access
to and navigation through the system.
The way text is handled exemplifies some of these principles. All text
in Perseus is tagged using SGML, following the guidelines of the Text
Encoding Initiative (TEI). This markup is used to index the text, and
process it so that it can be imported into HyperCard. No SGML markup
remains in the text that reaches the user, because currently it would be
too expensive to create a system that acts on SGML in real time.
However, the regularity provided by SGML is essential for verifying the
content of the texts, and greatly speeds all the processing performed on
them. The fact that the texts exist in SGML ensures that they will be
relatively easy to port to different hardware and software, and so will
outlast the current delivery platform. Finally, the SGML markup
incorporates existing canonical reference systems (chapter, verse, line,
etc.); indexing and navigation are based on these features. This ensures
that the same canonical reference will always resolve to the same point
within a text, and that all versions of our texts, regardless of delivery
platform (even paper printouts) will function the same way.
In order to provide tools for users, the text is processed by a
morphological analyzer, and the results are stored in a database.
Together with the index, the Greek-English Lexicon, and the index of all
the English words in the definitions of the lexicon, the morphological
analyses comprise a set of linguistic tools that allow users of all
levels to work with the textual information, and to accomplish different
tasks. For example, students who read no Greek may explore a concept as
it appears in Greek texts by using the English-Greek index, and then
looking up works in the texts and translations, or scholars may do
detailed morphological studies of word use by using the morphological
analyses of the texts. Because these tools were not designed for any one
use, the same tools and the same data can be used by both students and
scholars.
NOTES:
(5) Perseus is based at Harvard University, with collaborators at
several other universities. The project has been funded primarily
by the Annenberg/CPB Project, as well as by Harvard University,
Apple Computer, and others. It is published by Yale University
Press. Perseus runs on Macintosh computers, under the HyperCard
program.