Classical Projects Overview

My projects in Classics cover several interconnected fields. Here you can get a very essential overview of some of them whose aspects are somewhat treated in this site.

In this picture you can see four main software components families and their links to some of the topics covered in this site (yellow clouds). Three main areas of interest and work gave rise to these components during the past years: Classical metrics, historical linguistics, and the digital publications in a very broad sense, started for several commercial projects for some Italian publishers (paper and cd-rom publications, mainly in the area of dictionaries and Classics), and then applied to the collection of XML-based highly opened and structured data of ancient inscriptions, literary passages and non-inscribed objects.

The XML-based corpora (see Cadmus) are related to several epigraphical-centric projects, which must also include a huge quantity of meta- or extra-textual data variously interconnected for specialized purposes and require quantitative and qualitative expansions during all the data collection stage. These corpora are just Unicode XML files and implement a similar structure, specialized for each collection of data: at this time Cadmus handles collections of inscriptions, literary passages and non-inscribed objects. As for in-place search since edit time Cadmus uses a Lucene-based textual and metatextual engine, connected to a more general textual corpora search framework applied also to other projects.

Some helpers for Classical texts antiquities can be placed in the editor or in the publication software to allow for smarter searches or editing aids.

Metrics and morphology are covered by the language software components family (Chiron). This large family includes components which offer two main services: a full metrical analysis of Classical texts and the automatic historical inflection of all the lemmata of Latin or Greek. For obvious reasons several of these components are shared between phonology and morphology, and their architecture is thought to be open to extension (so that for instance the syllabification algorithm can be easily applied to other languages like Italian).

Finally, all these components share a set of textual encoding converters which can deal with a lot of specialized or arbitrary encoding systems, like Beta code, SAMPA, Unicode and arbitary font-based encodings (often used in conjunction with Greek text: see e.g. Theuth). These converters allow to manipulate texts from various sources for data import/export and also to generate formatted output in 'smart' ways (you can have a read at some sections of this paper to learn more).