Passages from a Greek reader in the Scaife Viewer of the Perseus Digital Library

A look at the state of open philological assets for Ancient Greek

Posted by Neven Jovanović on November 18, 2018

Perseus Catalog and Scaife Viewer

Next step in enhancing our Ancient Greek reader is to connect it with existing open digital resources for Ancient Greek. First, we turned to the Perseus Digital Library, its wonderful Catalog, and its brand new and stylish Scaife Digital Library Viewer.

State of the Viewer

In our reader there are 60 brief extracts from Ancient Greek prose, comprising authors from Herodotus to Plotinus. All passages have CTS URNs in the Perseus Catalog; 17 passages are absent from the Scaife Viewer, and an additional passage returns an error in the viewer (the issue has been reported on Github).

Currently about two thirds of our selections are accessible in the Scaife Viewer. This is indicative of the current coverage of Ancient Greek literature there.

Not bad at all, but, of course, we hope that the extent will grow. Everybody can help!

A more detailed list of our passages, with CTS URNs both for the Perseus Catalog and for the Scaife Viewer, is available in the wiki of the Bitbucket repository.