The Perseus Project is on a mission to make classical texts accessible to all.

For a scholar of ancient languages, Gregory Crane has blazed a very contemporary career path. Crane received his Ph.D. in classical philology at Harvard University before joining the university as an assistant professor. He has published books on Thucydides, widely regarded as one of the world’s first historians, and articles on Hellenistic Poetry. He’s also obsessed with algorithmic analysis and has spent decades building an online database that’s changing how we view the texts of the past, and, in the process, scholarship itself.

In the 1980s, when computer use was far from mainstream, particularly in academia, Crane created a Unix-based text-retrieval system for the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, also known as the Treasury of Greek Language. The TLG is a corpus—the linguistics term for a body of writing—that encompasses all of the classical Greek text we know exists, ranging roughly from the third century B.C.E. in Greece to Constantinople in 1453. “Ninety percent of everything that’s been written in the last 100 years was about 10 million words of [classical] text,” Crane says.

Since 1985, Crane has also been a part of the Perseus Project, first as co-director and now as editor-in-chief. The organization, which might sound like something a Bond villain would come up with for a missile that destroys the moon, is actually an open-source online library for those same classical texts. It’s stated mission is making “the full record for humanity as intellectually accessible as possible to every human being,” according to its website. Digital technology is making breaking down ancient languages that much easier—and that much more public. More.

See: Pacific Standard

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