An outline for the first stage of a Roman Perseus

Please send comments to: gcrane@emerald.tufts.edu

Audience:

Our primary audience would be students of Latin in High School and College, as well as students enrolled in courses studying ancient history, art, or other courses that deal with Rome.

We would begin by concentrating on the first century BC. Our goal would be to provide materials by which students could contextualize first century BC history and authors (with an emphasis on Cicero, Catullus, Vergil, Horace, and Ovid).

Media:

Ideally, all new materials would be available both on the World Wide Web and on CD ROM. In some cases, it may not be possible to obtain permissions to reproduce materials in both media, but our goal is to make as much material available in as many ways and to as many people as possible. All new Perseus editions after Perseus 2.0 will run under both Windows and the Macintosh.

Final Product:

A Roman Perseus will be a massive and long term project, of which this constitutes an initial phase. We propose to concentrate on providing materials that supplement normal books and existing software tools. Our plan is to create a framework that contains representative categories of as many materials as possible. The final product would include:

* Guided Tours Illustrating aspects of the Roman World

We will provide interactive tours that introduce users to the art, history, literature, architecture, daily life of the 1st century BC Roman world. Once a sufficient database of texts, maps and images is available, very attractive and useful tours can be developed in the space of several months.

* An Atlas of the Roman World:

-- initial data entry of ca. 2000 toponyms (taken from printed sources) to expand Perseus site database to include important sites of the entire Roman world.

-- field work using GPS technology to "ground-truth" published geographic data, to georeference small-scale (high-resolution) site plans and digital elevation models, and to experiment with geo-referencing field photography to support "virtual tours" and "fly-throughs" of important sites.

-- development of geographic data sets derived from the Digital Chart of the World (digital elevation models; coastlines, rivers, topography), and from Landsat Thematic Mapper data (now available for ca. $400 / scene, TM is the premier large-scale sensor for global coverage of land-use/land-cover data).

* A wealth of images on Roman Art and Archaeology:

This will take up the majority of our resources. The evolution of digital cameras allows us now to avoid film altogether (which used to cost us up to $40,000 a year) and with it the tedious digitization phase (which cost $1-$2 per image). The cost of image collection will thus largely consist of Maria's salary and travel expenses.

The resulting image database will be designed to support "virtual tours" of sites. Site photography will be georeferenced, and Global Positioning Software will be used to collect site photography and coordinates simultaneously.

* Essays and course materials:

We will solicit essays on fundamental topics of Roman History and Literature. These must be written to be accessible to a wide audience, but authors will be encouraged to write in a "layered" fashion, providing general overviews but also making available more detailed discussions which will satisfy the curious or advanced student. All materials submitted will be subject to review. Reviewers of substantial contributions (e.g. book length) will receive an honorarium.

My inclination is not to pay honoraria to authors up front (this has not worked well in the past), but to set aside a share of revenues for royalties. Above all, contributions to this database must be scrupulously peer reviewed so that they can ultimately become standard parts of their publication records and thus contribute to tenure and promotion. Working with recently tenured faculty who are interested in the Web will give us initial contributors who are able to take a "risk," but the situation is moving so rapidly that I think that we may well find junior faculty at many institutions soon will be in a position to contribute to a Roman Perseus without harm to their careers.

* A core of Latin texts, including English translations.

This would be equivalent to a thick anthology (c. 1,000 pages printed), but would not attempt, at this stage, to be exhaustive. For now we would assume that those doing research would have their own PHI Latin CD ROMs.

* A Latin Lexicon.

Lewis and Short is in the public domain and could be entered without complications. Raw data entry would be less than $50,000. Experience with the on-line LSJ 9 suggests that we could make the dictionary entries quite readable and accessible even to high school students.

* Perseus Style "Philological Tools" for both the Perseus Latin Texts and other on-line Latin texts:

Entering L&S would also allow us to build up a large morphological database on which we could build a powerful search engine which scholars and students alike could use. Students could, as in the Greek Perseus, go from inflected form to morphological analysis to lexicon. They could also search for words by dictionary entry (rather than by string). At the same time, we would develop these tools to work with the PHI Latin CD ROM. Thus anyone, whether a professor or a student writing a term paper, working with this more advanced resource could use the Perseus CD to help them explore the much larger text database and perform research.