OVERVIEW

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Perseus is supported primarily by a grant from the Annenberg/CPB Project, as well as by Apple Computer and the National Endowment for the Arts, an independent federal agency, the Packard Humanities Institute, Xerox Corporation, Boston University, Bowdoin College, and Harvard University. The project is a nonprofit enterprise centered at the Department of the Classics, Harvard University.

See full authors information for Perseus 1.0

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GENERAL INFORMATION

The Perseus Project is an ongoing experiment in the domain of ancient Greek culture. Although Perseus is intended to enhance the study of Greek culture, it also raises issues germane to other cultures. Its creators have designed Perseus as a model whose successes can be emulated and, perhaps more important, whose unsuccessful ventures can be avoided.

Over time, the texts, maps, photographs, and essays that are being included in Perseus would doubtless materialize without a massive project--after all, scholars will develop these tools for their own use. But Perseus can collect these materials and build a useable database quickly. This project pushes one particular field a very long way so that scholars from other fields may plan with hindsight how to integrate electronic tools into their own work.

At the most general level, the primary hypothesis behind Perseus is simple: technology limits the questions that separate individuals can ask. In Europe, more people could, and did, study the Bible after printing made the publication of Bibles far cheaper than any manuscript copy could ever be, but printing did more than proliferate copies of the Vulgate. The Perseus database emulates not so much the Gutenberg Bible as William Tyndale's translation of the Bible into English. Our goal is not just to help the guardians of knowledge perform their work more effectively but also to inspire others to ask questions or pursue lines of reasoning that would otherwise be inaccessible to them. Roughly put, our objectives fall into two categories. First, researchers of ancient Greek culture, at whatever level, should be able to ask different kinds of questions. Second, others will, we hope, be able to explore the culture of ancient Greece, confronting primary materials firsthand, asking questions and making up their minds using available evidence.

The categories of information about ancient Greece are many and the kinds of questions people can pursue even more numerous, but the mechanics of most inquiries have much in common. Any historical account, literary analysis, archaeological reconstruction, or document is based on evidence. Readers examining an argument must first consider the evidence adduced and then determine how much they agree with the interpretation of this evidence. Perseus is designed to help readers confront specific pieces of evidence that others have cited and then find other evidence that has not been cited.

LIMITS AND STRENGTHS OF PERSEUS 1.0

Perseus 1.0 is the first of three major editions of Perseus; Perseus 2.0 and 3.0 will appear in subsequent annual releases. Perseus 1.0 is thus only the initial step in a larger process, and its contents and capabilities are limited. Our first goal has been to develop a structure that allows readers to move as easily as possible from one kind of information to another. The development of an easy-to-use but flexible interface is challenging. Two test disks have preceded the release of Perseus 1.0, and enormous strides have been made in streamlining the form and structure of Perseus, but considerable work remains. We shall continue to refine, and to add new features to, the interface in subsequent editions.

Perseus focuses above all on primary materials, and we have tried to make the primary evidence for ancient Greek culture as accessible as possible. Where a traditional work has space mainly for its conclusions, Perseus is designed to make the evidence for such conclusions available for scrutiny. Perseus 1.0 contains roughly one-third of the texts planned for Perseus 3.0 and does not yet include the works of such major authors as Euripides and Aristophanes. Of fifteen thousand slides collected by the project so far, only about five thousand are published on this disc. Such major categories of art as sculpture are only spottily represented. We include more than one thousand images of 178 sites, but almost all are from mainland Greece.

In spite of the emphasis on primary materials, we have begun work on core essays designed to introduce the general reader to Greek culture. An overview of Greek history and society in Perseus covers the fifth century B.C., and is linked through specific statements to the rest of the database. The Historical Overview is the prototype for electronic essays on many topics. Perseus includes an encyclopedia, although this remains at an early stage of development. For such topics as architecture and vase shapes the encyclopedia is fairly well developed, but an enormous amount of basic work remains. The Atlas recognizes eight hundred place names but must be expanded. An extensive timeline is being developed.

Perseus is not, and never will be, a compendium of all knowledge about ancient Greece, but it is already a tool that will allow students and scholars at different levels to perform tasks they could not do before. The Historical Overview provides an on-line introduction to fifth-century history and culture. Students can move from Delphi on a map of Greece to a site plan of the sanctuary. They can select viewpoints on the plan and see how the site looks to someone standing there today. Students of Greek art can study many objects more closely than would be possible in a printed textbook. Fifty or more individual views illustrate many of the Greek vases in Perseus, and for these objects the viewer can see clearly what lies on the ceramic surface of the pot: the smile may be distinguished from the grimace, the fine details of a sandal or a musical instrument may be enjoyed. Perseus 1.0 contains extensive coverage of the Parthenon sculptures and several hundred details illustrating the pediments from the temple of Aphaia on Aegina. The entire text of Pausanias' Guide to Greece is available in both Greek and English and allows the archaeologist or art historian to see how one ancient source describes the sites and monuments of Greece. The most important ancient reference work on Greek mythology, the so-called Library attributed to Apollodorus of Athens, is also in Perseus 1.0. Accompanied by Sir James Frazer's notes and index, this work allows readers to study the various forms that Greek myths took in antiquity. The references to texts within Perseus found in the Apollodorus notes serve as links, and readers can pursue many of the texts cited by Frazer.

The textual tools are the most highly developed segment of Perseus, and users may wish to study the textual side to see the browsing capabilities being developed for art and archaeology. A system for parsing Greek morphology allows the student of Greek language to determine the words to which particular forms belong, as well as to perform intelligent searches for all forms of a word, simply by specifying the lemma. More important, this linguistic capability permits researchers who do not know Greek to explore normally inaccessible concepts embedded in the Greek texts. Such a tool cannot, of course, replace experience with the original language, but adventurous anthropologists and literary critics can begin to use Greek texts that have previously been of no value to them. In a very real sense, such a tool raises the absolute value of Greek texts for intellectual analysis by making it useful to new categories of people.

The cooperation of the Loeb Classical Library has made it feasible to incorporate en masse enormous bodies of translation in Perseus. In those cases where the Loeb texts stand in need of revision, we have commissioned new translations or modernized the Loeb text. Our translation of Pindar is new, and the translation of Sophocles is based on Jebb's edition, while we have used Smyth's translation as a starting point for Aeschylus. In the case of Homer, the Loeb Classical Library has already begun to modernize its text. Perseus 1.0 contains the original Loeb translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey, but later editions of Perseus will incorporate the revised Loeb editions.

The generous cooperation of museums throughout Europe and North America has made feasible the art history side of Perseus. Many institutions have opened their photo archives to us, in many cases waiving reproduction fees so that we could more fully represent their collections. Others have permitted photographers to shoot new pictures of objects in their collection, and these newly commissioned images permit Perseus to contain the best possible visual coverage of art objects. All plans within Perseus have been redrawn using the most up-to-date source materials, and each drawing is accompanied by full references. Site photography has been donated by individuals, specially shot by Perseus staff, or acquired from existing archives.

PERSEUS 2.0 AND 3.0

Subsequent editions of Perseus will include major new bodies of material. Perseus 3.0 will incorporate more than three million words of Greek, along with their corresponding translations--two-thirds of all the literary material preserved from Homer to the death of Alexander the Great, as well as relevant later works, such as selected lives of Plutarch, Pausanias, and portions of Diodorus. The five thousand images in Perseus 1.0 will swell to between fifteen and twenty thousand, providing extensive new coverage of art, sites, and monuments from throughout the Greek world. The Perseus Atlas will be a major focus of effort, as we make the current tool more comprehensive and flexible. New resources such as subject indexes and new software tools for browsing and exploring the data within Perseus are being developed and will help tie the disparate parts of Perseus together. The Historical Overview will be expanded to cover the Dark Ages through the fourth century, while additional essays on aspects of Greek culture will be included.

PERSEUS 4.0 AND BEYOND

Work through Perseus 3.0 will focus on assembling a basic database that covers the major topics of ancient Greek culture. Subsequent yearly editions of Perseus are planned. New releases will not include the massive additions of material that will accompany Perseus 2.0 and Perseus 3.0, but they will serve as an electronic medium within which those studying ancient Greece may publish their work. New editions of Perseus will include not only traditional articles, possibly published also in print form, but new forms of documents that cannot be distributed in print--for example, publications that include animation or motion video, museum catalogs with several thousand still images, dynamic three-dimensional reconstructions of sites or monuments, and parsers for Greek syntax and morphology. The space of storage media such as CD-ROM provides users with qualitative as well as quantitative flexibility. The Perseus Project welcomes both pedagogical and research materials. Our highest interest, however, will be for materials that advance the state of academic understanding while also inviting access by a general audience. The flexibility of the electronic medium makes it much more feasible to compose documents that can appeal to such a wide audience, and many of the tools within Perseus do, in fact, bridge the gap between general audience and specialist.

PERSEUS 1.0 AND FUTURE VERSIONS OF PERSEUS: SYSTEM ISSUES

Perseus currently runs under HyperCard on the Apple Macintosh, but it has been designed to become increasingly useful as future versions of HyperCard or entirely new systems appear. Perseus has been built to evolve well beyond the next several years, and we have wherever possible not tied ourselves to any technique or system that will become obsolete in the forseeable future. None of the underlying data, whether textual or visual, is restricted to HyperCard or any other single program.

The Perseus Project has not yet decided whether to move Perseus to some other system (such as Microsoft's Windows environment). We have to make Perseus do all the things that we want on one system before moving it to another. Response to Perseus 1.0 will help determine whether Perseus 3.0 appears on some system other than the Macintosh and if so, which.

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