Digital Humanities Projects at the Center for Hellenic Studies

The Open Greek and Latin (OGL) project is the umbrella project for the development of corpus linguistic resources for the study of Classical Greek and Latin. The idea is to bring together in machine-actionable form all the Classical Greek and Latin texts from antiquity up to the present, to include both ancient and Neo-Latin and Neo-Greek texts, papyri, and inscriptions. More…

The intellectual goal of A Homer Commentary in Progress is simple and at the same time most ambitious: to apply to the formulaic system of Homeric poetry based on the research of Milman Parry and his student, Albert Lord, a special methodology of linguistics from the research of Antoine Meillet and his teacher, Ferdinand de Saussure. The methodology combines a rigorous study of Indo-European linguistics with two complementary perspectives on language as a system—perspectives that Saussure described as synchronic and diachronic. Our linguistic approach in analyzing both synchronically and diachronically the formulaic system of Homeric poetry provides an empirical foundation for the discoveries and discovery procedures assembled and organized in the Homer commentary. 

The Homer Multitext project, the first of its kind in Homeric studies, seeks to present the textual transmission of the Iliad and Odyssey in a historical framework. Such a framework is needed to account for the full reality of a complex medium of oral performance that underwent many changes over a long period of time. These changes, as reflected in the many texts of Homer, need to be understood in their many different historical contexts. The Homer Multitext provides ways to view these contexts both synchronically and diachronically.

The Athens Dialogues, a continuing collaboration with the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation, is an interdisciplinary program that explores the relationship between Greek culture and the modern world through. 

The inaugural conference series, held at the Onassis Cultural Centre in November 2010, focused on 6 themes (Identity and Difference, Stories and Histories, Word and Art, Democracy and Politeia, Science and Ethics, Quality of Life). It was organized by the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation in collaboration with eight world class academic institutions (the Institut de France, the Academia dei Lincei, the University of Oxford, Stanford University, the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, the Center for Hellenic Studies of Harvard and the Academy of Athens), with the participation of prominent scholars from all over the world. Today, the Athens Dialogues form part of a wider cultural initiative, comprised of three events each academic year that focus, from a variety of perspectives, on issues crucial for contemporary society. Selections from these are published in the interactive Athens Dialogues E-Journal.

A few years ago The Center for Hellenic Studies made the Greek text of the papyrus available online, as it was published in 2006, © Olschki, Firenze. Continuing our effort to improve the digital edition of the Derveni Papyrus, we developed a new form for the text under the framework of the CHS-iMouseion Project. This user-friendly teaching and research tool offers the option of masking or revealing the readings of the editors by simply clicking on the text (wherever the arrow appears). Furthermore, one can easily navigate from one column to another, either successively via the arrows or randomly via the sidebar menu. The iMouseion architecture provides as well the possibility of a multiversion Derveni Papyrus. Due to the existence of unplaced fragments, this exceptionally challenging document is still being reconstructed. New reconstructions can be displayed side by side, offering a simultaneous view of the different versions of each column. 

Similes are also an important but by no means obvious source of our impressions of Socrates, who is the speaker of most of the famous comparisons found in Plato. This compendium lists and analyzes over five hundred similes taken from the Platonic corpus of thirty-five Dialogues. From this survey emerges an interesting perspective of Plato’s portrait of Socrates: the ways Socrates describes himself and others as well as the opinions of various speakers about Socrates. Because some of the examples presented here may seem to be metaphors according to the traditional definition going back to Aristotle, the Introduction will discuss the definition of simile, the distinction between this figure and metaphor, and a new proposal to clarify the difference. As an aid to non-specialists all passages are cited in English (with significant Greek words added and transliterated in parentheses).