iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by @philologistgrc.bsky.social

Alison Babeu @alicatlibrarian.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

The Perseus Digital Library has been hard at work on Minimum Viable Perseus (Perseus MVP). Designed as a static site and heavily inspired by the beloved but faltering P4 (and its awesome users), please check out our efforts here (sites.tufts.edu/perseusupdates) and try it out: beta.perseus.tufts.edu

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philologistgrc.bsky.social @philologistgrc.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

I wrote up a blog post on what it was possible to do because people are publishing open data in Digital Classics. I ended up creating a serviceable digital edition of Nonnus -- who would not have been on top of my list -- because of work that David Chamberlain did 1/

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philologistgrc.bsky.social @philologistgrc.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

@jtauber.com @lore.house A first pass at adding Beowulf to the Perseus Multitext Viewer. Syntactic links and literal translation added by Deep Seek for quick demo purposes.

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philologistgrc.bsky.social @philologistgrc.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

marvellous as treebanks are, they do not track language specific paradigms. Claude helped me fix issues in Morpheus and now I have been begun integrating paradigms with treebanks. Data issues abound but I love the pedagogy: here are common noun 1/

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Reposted by @philologistgrc.bsky.social

Alison Babeu @alicatlibrarian.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

While the onslaught of bots and LLMs taking down both P4 and the Scaife Viewer has been significant, it has not stopped the Perseus research team and it's many awesome collaborators from publishing both open data and new publications that I'd like to higlight (sites.tufts.edu/perseusupdat...)

sites.tufts.edu

Ongoing Outages and So Many Publications » Perseus Digital Library Updates

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philologistgrc.bsky.social @philologistgrc.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

We will have more to say about newer work on Perseus but the Scaife viewer now has dictionary integration and a few commentaries. If not swarmed, it can be a nice reading environment

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philologistgrc.bsky.social @philologistgrc.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

thanks to Tom Elliott, Charles Pletcher installed Anubis and Scaife is (for now at least) back up. We will need to do more but this gets us moving at least for now!

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philologistgrc.bsky.social @philologistgrc.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

while we continue to do battle with bot swarms (and hope to agreed on a more advanced strategy with Tufts), this paper appeared. Useful as the Perseus DL can be as a website, our bigger contribution is probably providing data for many other projects. This only begins the story.

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philologistgrc.bsky.social @philologistgrc.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Now Scaife is down. Ugh. it is difficult for an application at Tufts to use bot challenges. We are pushing to do something. This is our traffic as of Google Analytics.

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philologistgrc.bsky.social @philologistgrc.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

tinyurl.com/mrkx7z3j A short note on what the open data ecosystem of digital classics lets you do.

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philologistgrc.bsky.social @philologistgrc.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

Here is an interesting case where the LLM makes a mistake and where there is a nice teaching point, i.e., we can show the reader why the LLM had the linguistic data it needed to get the gender (she vs. he) right. This was Deepseek. I have not tested others.

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philologistgrc.bsky.social @philologistgrc.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

people have complained that the gods being in disguise to check your behavior is a Christian addition the Odyssey. That is not true - consider, for example, this passage from the Odyssey.

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philologistgrc.bsky.social @philologistgrc.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

First pass at supporting Classical Persian: selections of the Shahnameh from Pizzi 1883. work of @farnooshamsian finally starts to surface. tinyurl.com/5n8yfh9v

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philologistgrc.bsky.social @philologistgrc.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

Thanks to OAI Sol 5.6, we have a first version of the first vernacular translation, Segni, aligned to our other versions. It is not perfect but it is a start. 3 years ago, I would not even have tried to enter this. Amazing what we can do. tinyurl.com/3wetnhyf

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philologistgrc.bsky.social @philologistgrc.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

for those who have not studied Greek but want to deal with Homer: we have glosses and transliteration in the Homer Treebanks: glosses done with Qwen -- not as good as frontier models but we can run them at scale. tinyurl.com/59xcvjba

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philologistgrc.bsky.social @philologistgrc.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

A day after the one image that haunts me from Nolans @odysseymovie is Agamemnon -- surely designed to recall the Dark Night--appearing when the Greeks finally open the gates of Troy. Why does Nolan have Agamemnon echo the Dark Night? I will have to go back to the earlier movie.

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philologistgrc.bsky.social @philologistgrc.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

LLMs unleashed a new wave of development, with individuals now able to produce reading environments that reflect the features that they consider important. Take a look at Brandon Lucas' lyceum.quest, e.g., his glossed Homer with code github.com/lyceum-quest

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philologistgrc.bsky.social @philologistgrc.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

To complement the ballad Iliad of Newman that was released yesterday, we now have the 1911 Cotterill translation into English dactylic hexameter. tinyurl.com/bd7c2h6r

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philologistgrc.bsky.social @philologistgrc.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

on seeing the Odyssey: (1) I can't help it: "Its a very pretty movie, Mr. Nolan, but you mustn't call it Homer." (2) Could be a killer app to boost the study of Greek among a wider range of people speaking US English. Travis Scott as Homeric bard? Thank you!

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philologistgrc.bsky.social @philologistgrc.bsky.social · 19/07/2026

Low tech bilingual searching Homer: e.g., search for Greek μῆνις and see Greek/Eng at the sentence level: tinyurl.com/5fe4e6fw AT Murray archaic xlation (for now) but useful

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philologistgrc.bsky.social @philologistgrc.bsky.social · 19/07/2026

It took a couple of days but I have now the 1856 Newman Iliad in ballad meter - which provoked Arnold's attack. I had identify 500 places where Newman's English skips line numbers. Gemini did a solid first pass job combining half lines scrambled by OCR. gregorycrane.github.io/persverscomp/

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philologistgrc.bsky.social @philologistgrc.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

I encountered an unexpected move that I will definitely pair with the Odyssey when I next teach comparative epic. Love is the driver and it climaxes with the wrong returning husband against his enemies in a hall-like restaurant. And, of course, dancing and singing in Telugu.

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philologistgrc.bsky.social @philologistgrc.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

Putting off other duties a bit more, I added the Cowper c. 1790 Iliad and Odyssey. Now you can go from Chapman->Hobbes->Pope->Cowper->Bryant. gregorycrane.github.io/persverscomp

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philologistgrc.bsky.social @philologistgrc.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

with all the translations we are adding, we have enabled 7 columns for comparison: gregorycrane.github.io/persverscomp/

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philologistgrc.bsky.social @philologistgrc.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

In preparation for Nolan's Odyssey, we now have Chapman's Homer. You can use the treebank to compare Chapman, Hobbes, Pope, Bryant and other translations: gregorycrane.github.io/persverscomp/

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philologistgrc.bsky.social @philologistgrc.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

Just a reminder that people have been arguing about how to translate Homer for a long time. Matthew Arnold going at multiple translators and Francis Newman fighting back -- much to learn for those interested, even when we disagree.

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philologistgrc.bsky.social @philologistgrc.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

Hobbes' Homer translations are much underrated. You can see for yourself, compare the with the treebank and other translations. Long url in next tweet.

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philologistgrc.bsky.social @philologistgrc.bsky.social · 05/07/2026

Bentley reportedly said to Pope of his Iliad: its a very pretty poem but you must not call it Homer. You can now use a treebank and other translations to see for yourself how Pope relates to the Greek. gregorycrane.github.io/persverscomp...

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philologistgrc.bsky.social @philologistgrc.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

A surprisingly engaging read: M. Bossu's 17th century book in Epic poetry. Stumbled on it in researching our new Poetics edition and found myself nodding along as I read it. Could be a text book -- or core reading -- for a seminar on classical epic today.

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philologistgrc.bsky.social @philologistgrc.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

For those of you reading Homer (whether for Nolan or not), we have two new translations up, side by side with treebanks and metrical analysis for both poems: the underappreciated American Bryant translation and Butler, Nagy et co. gregorycrane.github.io/persverscomp/

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Reposted by @philologistgrc.bsky.social

Ronen Tamari @ronentk.me · 16/06/2026

How to create reading experiences that "go beyond information transmission and toward reader transformation.” Great paper by @blue-phia.bsky.social @lepidopterane.bsky.social @yijunliu.bsky.social Sarah Sterman @sh1m.bsky.social @maxkreminski.bsky.social arxiv.org/abs/2606.04308 >

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philologistgrc.bsky.social @philologistgrc.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

Congratulations to Sasha Spala for passing her Computer Science PhD Quals at Tufts and beginning a diss to explore integration of LLMs with Corpus/Computational Linguistics @sashaspala.bsky.social

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philologistgrc.bsky.social @philologistgrc.bsky.social · 06/06/2026

automatically watch maps for each chapter in Thucydides or Xen's Hellenica -- data thanks to topostext: gregorycrane.github.io/perseusmapvi...

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philologistgrc.bsky.social @philologistgrc.bsky.social · 06/06/2026

We are beginning to add treebank support for Aristotle Arabic. Lots of fine tuning to do but it is starting to appear: gregorycrane.github.io/persverscomp

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philologistgrc.bsky.social @philologistgrc.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

thanks to Riccardo Strobino we now have the Abu Bishr Matta Arabic source for the poetics aligned at the section level to the Greek as well as the Moerbeke's Latin -- and a Greek treebank.

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philologistgrc.bsky.social @philologistgrc.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

With treebanks integrated to this evolving Perseus6, I consulted the analysis of @francescom.bsky.social as I read Sophocles on the early morning beach. Thanks for @jtauber.com for the inline treebank viz concept. Evolving work: gregorycrane.github.io/persverscomp

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philologistgrc.bsky.social @philologistgrc.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

We have the mechanics for translation alignment starting to appear. Automatic alignments are disappointing for now but you can see how we can show aignments: tinyurl.com/3jwnudtb

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philologistgrc.bsky.social @philologistgrc.bsky.social · 31/05/2026

Today we added the Iliad treebank and metrical analysis: gregorycrane.github.io/persverscomp...

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philologistgrc.bsky.social @philologistgrc.bsky.social · 30/05/2026

Even as bots take down our Perseus sites, we are working on serverless versions. Here is one such effort that now has basic treebank support (and commentary). Lots of rough edges but progress. gregorycrane.github.io/persverscomp...

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philologistgrc.bsky.social @philologistgrc.bsky.social · 24/05/2026

We are testing new layouts to compare multiple versions of a work (and perhaps to be part of a new serverless Perseus). gregorycrane.github.io/persverscomp...

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philologistgrc.bsky.social @philologistgrc.bsky.social · 04/04/2026

Much to do but some progress on the Scaife Viewer: scaife.perseus.org/reader/urn:c... Obviously needs optimization in a variety of ways but dictionaries and commentaries are starting to appear.

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philologistgrc.bsky.social @philologistgrc.bsky.social · 02/04/2026

Peter Nadel has published an initial reader for the Tufts MA reading list. It extends Glaux treebanks with translations generated by Qwen. The application could be customized to any course or PhD reading list. greek-reading-lists.onrender.com

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philologistgrc.bsky.social @philologistgrc.bsky.social · 10/03/2026

Here is a report of some exploratory work transforming a traditional Greek textbook (Crosby and Schaeffer) into something truly digital. sites.tufts.edu/perseusupdat...

sites.tufts.edu

Towards corpus-based learning: exercises with Ancient Greek » Perseus Digital Library Updates

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