Computers New Tool In Classics Scholarship

It is the dusty, head-in-the-past Classics Department that is firing the first salvo in the computer revolution here and at other universities, scholars say.

While Harvard is considered to be far behind other universities in using computers for educational purposes, scholars say its Classics Department is part of an effort to bring the study of classics into the 21st century.

As part of this scholararly trend Harvard's Classics Department--the first department here to dedicate staff, time and foundation money to bring computers into the process of scholarship--is applying the technology in two widely different ways. The first is to aid classics scholars in their effort to obtain the breadth of knowledge necessary for their work. The second is to increase the availability of texts to those studying the classics. Both these developments may change the nature of the field.

Despite the irony that the classics has become the first humanity to widely apply computers, scholars say that there is a specific reason for the technological revolution to be occuring in this ancient field. Scholars of the classics are considered to be in a small group of academics--including Biblical and Shakespearean experts--who discuss a relatively select collection of works. Thus it is possible to gather all the classics into one condensed work.

All of the remaining Greek literature from Homer to 600 A.D. is "500 fat books," Classics scholars involved in using computers are fond of saying, and at the University of California-Irvine they have spent $6 million and 15 years trying to make that information available to all the scholarsin the nation.

More than 60 million words have been stored ona five and three-quarter inch compact disc whichlooks identical to those discs which play music,says Theodore Brunner, a professor of classics whochairs the Irvine group called the ThesarusLinguae Graecae project.

At Harvard, Assistant Professor Gregory R.Crane '79 is creating software to allow theClassics Department to tap into the Irvinedata-base.

"I used to go to the Classics departmentlibrary and look at the volumes and say gee isthat all there is, but when I want to deal withit, it is very different. The level of detail isso complex it boggles the mind," says Crane, whonever took an undergraduate course in computershere.

As the head of the Harvard Computer ClassicsProject (HCCP), Crane, along with graduatestudents and undergraduates, has written exams toallow students and professors to easily search forthe various contexts in which an author uses aparticular word. By calling up on computer everyexample of when an author used a certain word,scholars can have a better grasp of the subtlemeaning for each word.

The professor likens the sophisticatedtechniques that he employs to reconstruct themeaning of words used by ancient Greek society tothe physcial reconstruction done by acheologists."When I discover a new meaning of a word," Cranesays, "it is like I have blown the dust away" fromsome artifact.

The work of these young Turks--Byzantines ifyou will--is making the encyclopedic classicalknowledge of more traditional scholars irrelevent.It succeeds in creating the "ground-work" forliterary criticism, which scholars weretraditionally able to do only after years ofdetailed study.

"Computers have had an incredible impact onclassics," Brunner said. "They have reversed theratio" of time that a scholar spends doingresearch. Scholars, in the past, would typicallyspend 85 percent of their time procuringinformation, using the remainder to come up withtheir original theories, Brunner says.

Crane says that all the department's Greekexperts and many of its Latin experts have usedthe HCCP hook-up in their most recent scholarship.

As computers offer scholars new efficiency andbreadth in their research, they are alsoincreasing the extent to which texts are availableto scholars and students around the country.

Aside from tapping into the results of theThesaurus project Harvard will do some condensingof its own. Crane is in now in the process ofnegotiating for a $500,000 contract to beginproducing compact discs which would contain afifth of all the pre 600 A.D. Greek material.

The Perseus project would result in theproduction of the discs for approximately $50. Inaddition to containing heavily annotated directsources from Greek literature, the disc wouldcontain 10,000 images.

The computer screening of the contents of thedisc would be a lot like reading a book, Cranesays. There would be footnotes running along sidethe text which would vary in complexity accordingto the level of the reader. Crane says that thecomputer-stored information would be able to beused by lay student and scholar alike.

Computer packagers of texts will become theequivalent of the editor of the traditionalclassics texts, Crane says. It will require thesame decisions about the validity of texts andannotation that the editors of books must make, headds.

Such analysis of texts is one of the mostimportant roles of a scholar, Crane says.

"One of the most respected areas of scholarshipis being the one who gets the most information tothe people," Crane says.

"The people who have the most clout edit thetexts," he says.

A spokesman for the agency giving the moneysays that the money is the second stage of acontract which will result in a test disc at theend of a year. Crane said he expectsmass-production of the disc in three years, whichwould require more grant money