John Adams in 1804 on his studies at Harvard 1751-1755:

Perhaps should not be surprising but I was surprised. In books printed in America through 1800, citations to: Cicero: 836 Virgil: 544 Homer: 297 Shakespeare: 208 Search example: artflsrv04.uchicago.edu/philologic4....

For any lovers of Aeschylus in Greek, we are looking for people to evaluate literal translations and glosses produced by Gemini 3. The data is here: github.com/gregorycrane...

Wrote a short piece arguing that higher ed must help steer AI. TLDR: If we outsource this to tech, we outsource our whole business. But rejectionism is basically stalling. If we want to survive, schools themselves must proactively shape AI for education & research. [1/6, unpaywalled at 5/6] +

As I look out at the grey November New England afternoon, I consider -- as I often do this time of year -- that I can appreciate, at least a bit, the opening of Moby Dick.

I'm just guessing but I would thinks there's a lot of people who voted for the Asshole that live in Blue States. wonder how there feeling ? #FOFA Trump don't care about #MAGAts #MAGA

someone commented on the Russell Parallel Latin-Greek grammar last weekend. I put up an initial version of it (along with Pharr's Homeric Greek): gregorycrane.github.io/xml-llm-show...

We have been working at Perseus on an initial release of a new browser for the Art and Archaeology collection. You can read more about it here (sites.tufts.edu/perseusupdat...)

At ACM Hypertext 2025, Sarah Abowitz (@lepidopterane.bsky.social) describes her observation & user studies for translation & aids for students learning Greek. Cognitive load of opening aids less preferred to opening in same window: hoverables do not overwhelm or disrupt the reading plan #ACMHT2025

I am thinking about Greek and Latin in colonial America and was struck to see this unsourced quotation from Greek (not just Latin) in Mather's Magnalia cites the Greek of Iliad 11.514. Surprised to see non-New Test Greek assumed so early, tbh

Rosy fingered now as in Homeric Greek

I am pleased to be able to share that NEH has funded a proposal to work on an edition of Aristotle's Poetics in Greek, Arabic and Latin.

Alyce and I sitting in the Anthony bourdain seat at Kubel’s in Barnegat Light

In the Harvard/Google million book collection, 10 most common authors with books listed as being 'grc' or 'lat': Note #3 ...

Results from David Smith's first scan for quotations of Greek and Latin texts in the Harvard/Google million book collection. * New Test -- rules by a wide margin * Ovid and Lucretius outdo Virgil (!) * Xenophon edges out the top Cicero Just a first and preliminary look!

David Smith just did a first pass analysis of Greek and Latin works in the Harvard/Google million book collection. Which of these NT works came out on top? which was least quoted? Acts - John - Luke - Mark - Matthew?

We have a paper about the backend to Perseus 6 that is as of today officially published: transformations.episciences.org/15841

Pharr's Vergil goes into the public domain (if I calculate correctly) on Jan 1, 2026. You can find it already at archive.org/details/verg... We are planning to digitize this. How much work should we put into correcting the glosses vs. using general short definitions?

Can anyone describe best practices for TEI encoding of textual notes with positional data? (e.g., β α above ἡμῖν εὑρεῖν; που above του)? Image from Campbell's Antigone edition

The Harvard Data Science Review just published our paper on Data Reuse: hdsr.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/m0dqvamt... The basic argument is that reuse of openly licensed data takes work but it can open up ancient languages such as Greek. Example: look at the Greek when arguing about Homer translations.

For those of you who want to see what we are doing on Perseus 6, I can point (as of today) to a preprint of a paper that will be coming out in Dariah's Transformations Journal. There will should be another publication coming online this month and I will post that also. zenodo.org/records/1516...

DOGE terminated our current NEH grant with which we were developing a next generation Perseus. Luckily, much of the work has been done. We should be able to get much, though not all, of the work that we had planned done. The backend is fairly solid and results should appear on the front end soon.

We had enormous pressure on the main Perseus server (perhaps a DOS attack). Tufts restarted and we are back online and will keep an eye on the situation.

In our weird new Perseus space, I chose a smaller office and only a subset of my books will be with me. What do I keep? Any text of or book on Gk/Lat authors. More general books -- left in another room. "Nobody writes single books on single authors," I used to hear. When pushed, that's all I keep.

Tufts Classics is moving into a renovated Eaton Hall and there are issues. One (not the biggest) is the room below: it looks like a 2019 dedicated videoconference room with just one monitor at the end of a table. I couldn't teach in this and I would never use this old approach. Can others defend it?

Thanks to @jtauber.com, Annette von Stockhausen and pta.bbaw.de/en/ we have not only 7 million more words of Greek in the Perseus backend but als 1+ million words of Syriac. We need to move this data to a public facing server but I am just too happy not to share this.

A lot has happened in DH at Tufts and the DH MA has become very exciting.

A stunning announcement from Giuseppe Celano: 40m tokens of Ancient Greek with multilayer annotation: github.com/OperaGraecaA...

The results of tagging the Greek and Latin texts of the Perseus Digital Library are now sharded across 23 github repos.

I wanted to promote the fabulous Tufts production of the Furies of Aeschylus: publuu.com/flip-book/17.... There are three more performances this coming weekend: tuftsdramadancetickets.universitytickets.com/w/event.aspx.... It was a joy to see this!

I know I've said this before, but some smart historian really needs to write a book about the DLI (Digital Library Initiative). It was a hugely influential grant program that launched not only Google, but, I'd argue, a lot of modern DH.

@jtauber.com is working on the word study tool for Perseus 6. My first though was we have to remove the second accent (a route that James has written already). My second thought: there is a clear tendency to have that second accent in the nominative -- adikos tis, adikoi tines.