The ancient world via tech: some thoughts

- 4 minutes read - 679 words

N.B. This is an old post from the previous iteration of this site. I’ve tweaked a few things here and there in the entry, but they are mostly unchanged. My previous website was more of a jobs site, so a lot of the entries are Classics-centric, and that won’t necessarily be the case going forward.

Hello, everyone. It’s been a long while since I last wrote a post, and this is the first post on the new server. I migrated from Squarespace to DreamHost, which has been a great move, and changed the platform to WordPress. Definitely better. I am still working on tweaks and improvements to the interface, so bear with me. I wanted to get a few of my thoughts down about my interests in technology and the ancient world, and the intersections of the two.

In any case, welcome. In the spirit of the ancients, who often loved innovation, especially mechanical and techn(ic|ologic)al, I think that we can really leverage technology to understand the ancient world better. One big example: The lovely program Diogenes, which allows one to parse TLG and PHI text databases, was a huge boon to my research during both M.A. and Ph.D. degrees. There are all sorts of other innovations on the Internet, including text parsers, dictionary projects like Logeion (my new favorite Greek/Latin dictionary interface), and many more.

I must confess I am a little behind on the intersection of Classics and tech, since I am not working in the field any more. I need to do a little research on what is out there. I normally wouldn’t recommend paid apps, for example, but SPQR is an excellent app. The app has a built-in, searchable version of Lewis & Short, along with a generous selection of Latin texts by classical and (some) later authors. I only wish I knew how to program for Android, because I would love to work on a similar app for ancient Greek with the LSJ lexicon (apparently the SPQR people offer a paid version of that sort of thing here). Honestly, though, I just wish the Logeion app were for Android instead of just iOS.

Update: Android has lovely versions of Lewis & Short’s Latin Dictionary and A Greek-English Lexicon available to view in the app Aard2, available on F-Droid. Check it out!

I mention tech and the ancient world because I am currently re-teaching myself programming, namely C programming. In another life, I would have gotten a B.S. in Computer and Information Science, maybe beyond, and sought a career in computer programming. Yet that was nearly 20 years ago; that dream died in around 2001. I still do a lot with computers for fun; I’ve been running Linux (Xubuntu) exclusively on my personal computers since 2007. Linux got me through both the M.A. and Ph.D., and I even wrote my dissertation in LaTeX, so that was cool.

In any case, I would love to find a way to hone my programming skills and use them for the benefit of Classics somehow. My friend Daniel Libatique (Holy Cross) has done a lot with tech lately, mostly working in Python, as far as I know, which is very impressive. I’d like to do some similar things once I build up my programming skills. I toyed with the idea of writing a beta code to Unicode converter just for a fun challenge, but I need to study up some more before I can tackle such a project.

I think the field of digital humanities is really fascinating, and we are able to do so many things that just weren’t possible before. Either they weren’t possible before, or they led to blindness or other debilitating issues (e.g., people squinting at papyri all day to transcribe them, when now we can use digital imaging and magnification, &c.). I want to see us use these tools for good, the betterment of humanity, and the vast and wide promulgation of knowledge.

Anyway, more on this at another point, but I just wanted to get down some thoughts. curate ut valeatis, amici amicaeque!