Apple is going to great lengths to make sure the iPad is a text-driven device. They’ve resurrected Core Text and CFAttributedString, two API components from Mac OS X that were missing and presumed dead in the iPhone OS. There’s a new standard UI widget called a “popover” that developers can use to display optional information on command (like parses and short definitions, hint hint). The new “split view,” which you’ve probably seen if you’ve looked at the Mail application demo, allows you to both view and drill down on information at the same time.

Apple has a long way to go if they want their digital typography to look anything like the printed article, but given their commitment to typography on the desktop with systems like AATS I have no doubt we’ll have pretty Greek and Latin text on the iPad before the end of the year.

Share on Facebook

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.

Share on Facebook

Share on Facebook

• On 64-bit machines, opening a Latin text in a browser window may cause Andromeda to crash. To fix this for now, go to the Finder, pull up the Info window for Andromeda (command-I), and check the box marked “open in 32-bit mode.”
• Dragging texts to a corpus in the sidebar may not work
• Some art is missing from the Setup window

These bugs do not affect users running 10.5 Leopard.

There is one bug that affects users on both 10.5 and 10.6:

• Greek text entry in the Lemma search mode may produce strange results for words with initial vowels

A fix is in the works, stay tuned.

Share on Facebook

And you can start using Andromeda for Latin text! Kudos to the Packard Humanities Institute for their generosity and encouragement of free academic inquiry.

Share on Facebook

Aeneid Book 1 tabbed next to Servius' commentary.

Follow the links above to learn more.

Share on Facebook