Workshop on Electronic Texts: Proceedings, 9-10 June 1992

by Library of Congress

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SESSION II. SHOW AND TELL

Jacqueline HESS, director, National Demonstration Laboratory, served as moderator of the "show-and-tell" session. She noted that a question-and-answer period would follow each presentation.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ MYLONAS * Overview and content of Perseus * Perseus' primary materials exist in a system-independent, archival form * A concession * Textual aspects of Perseus * Tools to use with the Greek text * Prepared indices and full-text searches in Perseus * English-Greek word search leads to close study of words and concepts * Navigating Perseus by tracing down indices * Using the iconography to perform research * +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Elli MYLONAS, managing editor, Perseus Project, Harvard University, first gave an overview of Perseus, a large, collaborative effort based at Harvard University but with contributors and collaborators located at numerous universities and colleges in the United States (e.g., Bowdoin, Maryland, Pomona, Chicago, Virginia). Funded primarily by the Annenberg/CPB Project, with additional funding from Apple, Harvard, and the Packard Humanities Institute, among others, Perseus is a multimedia, hypertextual database for teaching and research on classical Greek civilization, which was released in February 1992 in version 1.0 and distributed by Yale University Press.

Consisting entirely of primary materials, Perseus includes ancient Greek texts and translations of those texts; catalog entries—that is, museum catalog entries, not library catalog entries—on vases, sites, coins, sculpture, and archaeological objects; maps; and a dictionary, among other sources. The number of objects and the objects for which catalog entries exist are accompanied by thousands of color images, which constitute a major feature of the database. Perseus contains approximately 30 megabytes of text, an amount that will double in subsequent versions. In addition to these primary materials, the Perseus Project has been building tools for using them, making access and navigation easier, the goal being to build part of the electronic environment discussed earlier in the morning in which students or scholars can work with their sources.

The demonstration of Perseus will show only a fraction of the real work that has gone into it, because the project had to face the dilemma of what to enter when putting something into machine-readable form: should one aim for very high quality or make concessions in order to get the material in? Since Perseus decided to opt for very high quality, all of its primary materials exist in a system-independent—insofar as it is possible to be system-independent—archival form. Deciding what that archival form would be and attaining it required much work and thought. For example, all the texts are marked up in SGML, which will be made compatible with the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) when they are issued.

Drawings are postscript files, not meeting international standards, but at least designed to go across platforms. Images, or rather the real archival forms, consist of the best available slides, which are being digitized. Much of the catalog material exists in database form—a form that the average user could use, manipulate, and display on a personal computer, but only at great cost. Thus, this is where the concession comes in: All of this rich, well-marked-up information is stripped of much of its content; the images are converted into bit-maps and the text into small formatted chunks. All this information can then be imported into HyperCard and run on a mid-range Macintosh, which is what Perseus users have. This fact has made it possible for Perseus to attain wide use fairly rapidly. Without those archival forms the HyperCard version being demonstrated could not be made easily, and the project could not have the potential to move to other forms and machines and software as they appear, none of which information is in Perseus on the CD.

Of the numerous multimedia aspects of Perseus, MYLONAS focused on the textual. Part of what makes Perseus such a pleasure to use, MYLONAS said, is this effort at seamless integration and the ability to move around both visual and textual material. Perseus also made the decision not to attempt to interpret its material any more than one interprets by selecting. But, MYLONAS emphasized, Perseus is not courseware: No syllabus exists. There is no effort to define how one teaches a topic using Perseus, although the project may eventually collect papers by people who have used it to teach. Rather, Perseus aims to provide primary material in a kind of electronic library, an electronic sandbox, so to say, in which students and scholars who are working on this material can explore by themselves. With that, MYLONAS demonstrated Perseus, beginning with the Perseus gateway, the first thing one sees upon opening Perseus—an effort in part to solve the contextualizing problem—which tells the user what the system contains.

MYLONAS demonstrated only a very small portion, beginning with primary texts and running off the CD-ROM. Having selected Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, which was viewable in Greek and English pretty much in the same segments together, MYLONAS demonstrated tools to use with the Greek text, something not possible with a book: looking up the dictionary entry form of an unfamiliar word in Greek after subjecting it to Perseus' morphological analysis for all the texts. After finding out about a word, a user may then decide to see if it is used anywhere else in Greek. Because vast amounts of indexing support all of the primary material, one can find out where else all forms of a particular Greek word appear— often not a trivial matter because Greek is highly inflected. Further, since the story of Prometheus has to do with the origins of sacrifice, a user may wish to study and explore sacrifice in Greek literature; by typing sacrifice into a small window, a user goes to the English-Greek word list—something one cannot do without the computer (Perseus has indexed the definitions of its dictionary)—the string sacrifice appears in the definitions of these sixty-five words. One may then find out where any of those words is used in the work(s) of a particular author. The English definitions are not lemmatized.