Accessing Antiquity

Book excerpt: The study of classical culture flourished for well over two thousand years before the computer age, but in the past three decades the computer has given classical scholarship its most productive tool. Accessing Antiquity collects original essays on the application of computer technology to research in classical philology and archaeology, each essay discussing the history, present state, and future direction of a noteworthy classical database from the perspective of the pioneer(s) who developed it. The book's coverage ranges from the earliest attempts at creating machine-readable versions of classical texts to the widely distributed CD-ROM containing the entire corpus of ancient Greek literature. A panoramic view of the remarkable transformation recently brought about in the study of antiquity, Accessing Antiquity offers historians of classical scholarship - and scholars who may be interested in developing a major computerized research tool - firsthand accounts of what it has been like to undertake such projects. It captures a period that has great interest for the technician and classical scholar of today as well as for the scholar and technological historian of tomorrow.