Downloads

You can download Andromeda Preview Release 1 from one of the following locations:

What is Andromeda?

Whether you’re a classical philologist, an undergraduate with a hankering for Vergil, or an engineer who just got an εξαίφνης πόθος for Euripides, Andromeda simplifies your life. It reads databases of classical texts and does things with them. For now that means it helps you read, search, reference, and assemble comparanda. And it is really easy.

Andromeda's Main Window.

But Andromeda is more than just a reading aid; it’s a platform for digital philology. Once it’s ready, any programmer will be able to add tools to Andromeda’s repertoire. Think automatic metrical scansion, data mining, lexicography, even preparation of critical editions.

Existing material can be brought to the party too. Editors, translators, and commentators will be able to publish their work directly to Andromeda, for free or a fee. If you happen to be sitting on a cache of machine-readable classical texts, this is your payday. (Hint, hint, publishers.)

For now, Andromeda supports two different databases:

  • the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae version E CD-ROM (TLG-E)
  • the PHI Latin version 5 CD-ROM (PHI 5)

You can write to the Packard Humanities Institute and obtain a free CD-ROM copy of their excellent Latin text database. Support for the Perseus text format is in the works, and when the Thousand Years of Greek comes to fruition Andromeda will work with that as well.

What’s it cost?

For the moment, Andromeda is freeware. That means you can download, use, and share it as much as you like. But please donate to the cause! Harry is a hungry graduate student.

If you donate… Harry can get a shiny new…
$5 beer
$10 lunch
$25 Loeb edition of Aeschylus
$100 ergonomic keyboard
$30,000 year off grad school to develop Andromeda

I’m a developer. When will the SDK/API be available?

Depending on user enthusiasm, as early as the end of March.

I’m a publisher. I’m thinking about sales through Andromeda.

Imagine an easy iTunes-like interface to your database of classical editions/translations/commentaries, with users paying either a la carte for individual texts or a flat monthly subscription fee for the whole shebang. Now imagine a layer of digital rights management (DRM) protecting your content from freeloaders. All you have to do is provide the rights, I’ll do the rest. Suddenly your bottom line is looking a lot rosier, and it doesn’t cannibalize your paper book sales. Contact me for details.

What doesn’t Andromeda do?

Right now Andromeda doesn’t have a full-corpus search engine (though it’s in the works). It does have a nifty lemmatic text search, though. For the moment, when you need real search power you should use Diogenes instead.

Who are you again?

My name is Harry Schmidt. I’m a Ph.D candidate in Classics at Princeton University. I’m told that I’m writing a dissertation on genre theory in Greek lyric poetry. I brought you Lexidium and Lexiphanes, the Greek and Latin dictionary apps for the iPhone.

If you have a job I might like in digital humanities, contact me for my CV. I’m fluent in C, Objective-C, and Perl, I’m alright with Java and Web 2.0 technology, and at age 18 I wrote the control software for a GPS receiver in 8051 assembly language.