The Gold Ibex

Dear colleagues,

I’m Harry Schmidt, a Ph.D candidate in Classics at Princeton University. I’ve taken it as my personal mission to make the lives of my fellow philologists easier with all the digital age has to offer. This blog will offer my personal insights, diatribes, successes, failures, and pretty much every other inconsequential thought I have about the future direction of classics as a discipline.

Note that I said “easier.” I’m all for new research based on data mining and other advanced forms of text analysis but there are other bases I think I’ll be better at covering, namely:

• UI theory. I’m an expert in user interface design, and let’s face it, no philology-oriented software tools have interfaces you would want to bring home to your parents. The one looker in the whole crowd is Perseus, and even it has serious usability issues, which I’ll blog about at some future point.
• File format interoperability. We have built a veritable Tower of Babel out of all the different encodings for classical texts: TLG, all the different flavors of TEI, HTML, and plain text, just to name a few. I hope to publish a C library at some point in the future with facilities for grabbing data out of all of these in order to tone down the confusion. Libxml2 will be required.
• The Canon. Thus far the TLG is the only outfit that has even taken a stab at compiling a digital canon of classical texts, and with a couple of caveats they did a good job. By “digital canon” I mean a database or rather namespace that maps each ancient author and ancient work we know about or have a copy of to a single unique identifier. In the TLG canon, each author or pseudo-author gets a 4-digit ID and each work gets a 3-digit ID. This was alright in 1975 when the TLG database format was designed, but nowadays we need something a little more robust. I’ll write more in the future about the different issues at stake here.

Thus far I’ve made three contributions to the discipline. The first two, Lexidium and Lexiphanes, are dictionary applications for the iPhone. Now you can stop carrying around your massive L-S and LSJ for the most part and just take your phone with you. These two apps already have thousands of happy users who are glad they aren’t throwing their backs out anymore. The newest, Andromeda, is my vision of the future. For now it lets you browse and search the TLG-E and PHI 5 CD-ROMs, but soon you’ll be able to throw basically anything at it: Perseus’ downloadable texts, public-domain editions from Google Books, even the hand-transcribed stuff at LacusCurtius. One easy program for reading all of your digital classical texts. In the distant future Andromeda will also be available for the iPhone and iPad, sans TLG-E and PHI for licensing reasons.

I very much want to hear from you about the kinds of tools you think the computer should be able to provide that you don’t yet have, as well as gripes with the current tools.

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