The Perseus Project is a
digital libraryA digital library is a library in which collections are stored in digital formats and accessible by computers. The digital content may be stored locally, or accessed remotely via computer networks...
project of
Tufts UniversityTufts University is a private research university in Medford/Somerville, near Boston, Massachusetts, USA. The university is home to the nation's oldest graduate school of international relations, The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy....
that assembles digital collections of
humanitiesThe humanities are academic disciplines which study the human condition, using methods that are primarily analytic, critical, or speculative, as distinguished from the mainly empirical approaches of the natural and social sciences....
resources. It is hosted by the Department of
ClassicsClassics is the branch of the Humanities comprising the languages, literature, philosophy, history, art, archaeology and other culture of the ancient Mediterranean World; especially Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome during Classical Antiquity...
. It suffers, unfortunately, from very frequent computer
hardwareA personal computer is made up of multiple physical components of computer hardware, upon which can be installed an operating system and a multitude of software to perform the operator's desired functions.-Typical PC hardware:...
problems, and because of this its resources are often unavailable. The project is
mirroredIn computing, a disk is an exact copy of a data set. On the Internet, a mirror site is an exact copy of another Internet site.Mirror sites are most commonly used to provide multiple sources of the same information, and are of particular value as a way of providing reliable access to large downloads...
by the
Max Planck SocietyThe Max-Planck-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften Eingetragener Verein is an independent non-profit association of German research institutes funded by the federal and state governments.The nearly 80 research institutes of the Max Planck Society conduct basic research in the interest...
in
BerlinBerlin is the capital city and one of sixteen states of Germany. With a population of 3.4 million within its city limits, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city and the eighth most populous urban area in the European Union...
and the
University of ChicagoThe University of Chicago is a private, coeducational research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by oil magnate and benefactor John D...
.
The project was founded in 1987 to collect and present materials for study of
ancient GreeceAncient Greece is the civilisation belonging to the period of Greek history lasting from the Greek Dark Ages ca. 1100 BC and the Dorian invasion, to 146 BC and the Roman conquest of Greece after the Battle of Corinth. It is generally considered to be the seminal culture which provided the...
. It has published two
CD-ROMCD-ROM is a pre-pressed compact disc that contains data accessible to, but not writable by, a computer for data storage and music playback, the 1985 “Yellow Book” standard developed by Sony and Philips adapted the format to hold any form of binary data. CD-ROMs are popularly used to...
s and established the Perseus Digital Library on the
World Wide WebThe World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. With a web browser, one can view Web pages that may contain text, images, videos, and other multimedia and navigate between them using hyperlinks...
in 1995. The project has expanded its original scope; current collections cover Greco-Roman classics, the
English RenaissanceThe English Renaissance was a cultural and artistic movement in England dating from the early 16th century to the early 17th century. It is associated with the pan-European Renaissance that many cultural historians believe originated in northern Italy in the 14th century...
, the papers of Edwin Bolles, and the history of Tufts University.
The editor-in-chief of the project is Gregory Crane, the Tufts Winnick Family Chair in Technology and Entrepreneurship. He has been editor-in-chief since the founding of the Perseus Project.
Ancient Greek works in Perseus are stored as
beta codeBeta Code is a method of representing, using only ASCII characters, characters and formatting found in ancient Greek texts . Its aim is to be not merely a romanization of the Greek alphabet, but to represent faithfully a wide variety of source texts -- including formatting as well as rare or...
, though they can be reformatted for display into a variety of transcription systems.
Copyright status
The Perseus Project supports open-source, and has published code on
SourceForgeSourceForge Enterprise Edition is a collaborative revision control and software development management system. It provides a front-end to a range of software development lifecycle services and integrates with a number of free software / open source software applications .While originally itself...
. All texts and materials believed to be in the public domain are available for free download in xml format on Perseus 4.0 . Perseus is an active member of the
Open Content AllianceThe Open Content Alliance is a consortium of organizations contributing to a permanent, publicly accessible archive of digitized texts. Its creation was announced in October 2005 by Yahoo!, the Internet Archive, the University of California, the University of Toronto and others...
and supporter of the
Internet ArchiveThe Internet Archive is a nonprofit organization dedicated to building and maintaining a free and openly accessible online digital library, including an archive of the World Wide Web....
.
Certain content, such as images and some texts, are restricted due to permissions agreements with the rights holders.
See also
- List of digital library projects
- Stoa Consortium
- Digital Classicist
The Digital Classicist is a project and community for those interested in the application of Humanities Computing to the field of Classics and to ancient world studies more generally. The project claims the twin aims of bringing together scholars and students with an interest in computing and the...
- Thesaurus Linguae Graecae
The Thesaurus Linguae Graecae is a research center at the University of California, Irvine. The TLG was founded in 1972 by Marianne McDonald with the goal to create a comprehensive digital collection of all surviving texts written in Greek from antiquity to...
Literature
- Ancient Greece from Prehistoric to Hellenistic Times by Thomas R. Martin, Yale University Press
Yale University Press is a book publisher founded in 1908 by George Parmly Day. It became an official department of Yale University in 1961, but remains financially and operationally autonomous....
, 1996. ISBN 0-300-06956-1. A text written by Prof Martin to accompany the Perseus Project online resources.