A Visit to the Stoa

The Perseus Project actively supports the efforts of the newly established Stoa Consortium to promote the availability of scholarly materials to wide public audiences. Perseus staffers are collaborating with the Stoa on a number of new electronic publications, as follows:

Demos: Classical Athenian Democracy
Demos is a collection of projects dealing with the various institutions of Classical Athenian Democracy. The principal author is Chris Blackwell of Furman University; Amy Smith of Perseus, Michael Arnush of Skidmore, and Thomas Martin of Holy Cross will also be contributing. The plan for Demos is to start by developing a core set of concise descriptions for all the elements of Athenian democracy, so that various kinds of narratives may then be written with reference to those modules. Some essays may be directed at more general public audiences, some may investigate narrower scholarly controversies, but in every case readers will have immediate hypertextual access to foundational descriptions as well as primary texts and images (mostly available from Perseus). The topic of Athenian Democracy has an enormous potential "cross-over" appeal beyond classics itself, and this project hopes to address that interest. A more detailed outline of the Demos project is available on the project page.

Metis
Another Stoa project that interacts pervasively with Perseus materials is Bruce Hartzler's Metis, which is a series of QuickTime® VR movies for an impressive list of Greek archaeological sites. These QTVR movies include hot spots linked to Perseus site plans. Metis provides viewers with a richly informative experience, and indeed the project was recently acknowledged in the Chronicle of Higher Education and the Scout Report. Metis may be found here.

Suda On Line
The Suda On Line is yet another Stoa Consortium project that makes heavy use of Perseus. People who are translating the interesting parts of that 10th century Byzantine encyclopedia may view the Greek text on-line as they work; individual words are linked to the Perseus morphological and lexical tools.

Olynthus and Data Guidelines
Assistant Editor for Electronic Publications at Perseus, Rob Chavez has put a great deal of time over the last year into programming the cgi scripts for Nick Cahill's on-line publication of the excavations at Olynthus. We hope to announce a publicly accessible site for that project soon.

Rob Chavez and Visual Collections Curator at Perseus, Maria Daniels have begun a series of guidelines meant to promote data format standards as well as regular procedures for contributing data to the Perseus Project and other projects in the Stoa Consortium. The newly completed guidelines address the recording of hand-held GPS waypoints, making QTVR panoramas, and digital photography. These new sets of guidelines are now available on the Stoa site

Register of Ancient Geographic Entities
The Perseus Project is also a contributor to the Stoa Consortium's Register of Ancient Geographic Entities (RAGE). RAGE acts as clearinghouse for associating geographic features in a wide variety of Internet projects by providing a users with a way to identify complementary material from multiple sources. RAGE is a work in progress; currently eight projects have contributed to the RAGE database. In time, RAGE will be available from the Stoa web site. For more information about RAGE please visit this page.

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document placed on-line 6/21/99, LMC