Rome Wasn't Digitized in a Day - Council on Library and Information ...

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learn<strong>in</strong>g environment that is built upon a spatial and cultural metaphor of ancient <strong>Rome</strong>.” To explore
this virtual space, users can log <strong>in</strong> as guests or apply for a VRoma character and password.
Another onl<strong>in</strong>e learn<strong>in</strong>g environment is Silver Muse, 625 a resource created by the Classics Department
of the University of Texas-Aust<strong>in</strong> that seeks “to provide a Web-based system to teach and promote
research <strong>in</strong> Lat<strong>in</strong> epic poetry of the early empire” and <strong>in</strong>cludes authors such as Ovid and Lucan. The
Silver Muse system provides a hypertextual read<strong>in</strong>g environment of the text of the poets, with l<strong>in</strong>ked
read<strong>in</strong>g guides, commentaries, and essays. The reader can access the full text of a number of works and
click on any word to get both a translation and an example sentence.
The Alpheios Project, 626 which makes software freely available for read<strong>in</strong>g and learn<strong>in</strong>g languages,
has recently released several tools for read<strong>in</strong>g Greek and Lat<strong>in</strong> onl<strong>in</strong>e. 627 These tools are Firefox
extensions that add some specific functionalities to the browser and are usable with any HTML and
Unicode-compliant text. After download<strong>in</strong>g the Alpheios toolbar, the user must choose either Greek or
Lat<strong>in</strong>, and can then utilize several important features that <strong>in</strong>clude the ability to look up a word by either
click<strong>in</strong>g on it or by enter<strong>in</strong>g it <strong>in</strong> the toolbar and to listen to how a word is pronounced. 628 A personal
vocabulary tool stores the words a user has looked up. The Alpheios website also provides access to a
number of “Alpheios Enhanced Texts,” and when read<strong>in</strong>g these texts the toolbar has an additional
feature that allows the user to access diagrams of each sentence <strong>in</strong> the form of a dependency tree. Users
can also create and save their own dependency tree diagrams of sentences.
This is just a sample of the wealth of material onl<strong>in</strong>e for both the formal and <strong>in</strong>formal student, and
opportunities for collaboration were particularly evident <strong>in</strong> TextKit and VRoma. The possibility of
mean<strong>in</strong>gful participation by students <strong>in</strong> more formal classical teach<strong>in</strong>g and scholarship is a more
difficult proposition, but one that Blackwell and Mart<strong>in</strong> (2009) believed could be addressed by new
models of undergraduate research. 629 While the potential of undergraduate research was also
considered earlier <strong>in</strong> the discussion of the Ashes2Art project (Arne 2009) and through the creation of
scholarly treebanks (Bamman, Mambr<strong>in</strong>i and Crane 2009), Blackwell and Mart<strong>in</strong> exam<strong>in</strong>e the
potential of several digital classics projects, particularly the HMT, to provide students with new
research and publication opportunities. The traditional task of teach<strong>in</strong>g students to read scholarship and
produce essays with primary and secondary source citations, Blackwell and Mart<strong>in</strong> argued, needs to be
revamped for the digital world. One way to engage undergraduates <strong>in</strong> scholarship, they suggested, was
to have them create onl<strong>in</strong>e publications that would be read by more than just their teacher and that
made extensive use of actual primary sources (rather than rely<strong>in</strong>g solely on secondary sources that
reference them).
A related challenge of this proposal, however, is the need for far more access to both primary and
secondary materials onl<strong>in</strong>e so students can both make use of and l<strong>in</strong>k to them. While the authors
625 http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~silver/
626 http://alpheios.net/content/alpheios-texts
627 The Alpheios project has made extensive use of various resources of the Perseus Digital Library, <strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g both the Ancient Greek and Lat<strong>in</strong> treebanks.
The code for their tools can be downloaded from (http://sourceforge.net/projects/alpheios/).
628 This feature utilizes the open-source tool eSpeak Speech Synthesizer (http://espeak.sourceforge.net/). Another onl<strong>in</strong>e learn<strong>in</strong>g resource that <strong>in</strong>cludes
audio samples of Greek and Lat<strong>in</strong> is the Classical Language Instruction Project at Pr<strong>in</strong>ceton University (http://www.pr<strong>in</strong>ceton.edu/~clip/). This website
conta<strong>in</strong>s samples of scholars read<strong>in</strong>g Greek and Lat<strong>in</strong> prose and poetry <strong>in</strong> order to help students get acqua<strong>in</strong>ted with the sounds of Greek and Lat<strong>in</strong> and to
practice their read<strong>in</strong>g skills. The authors <strong>in</strong>clude Homer, Plato, P<strong>in</strong>dar, Virgil, and Seneca. Another unique audio resource is “Ancient Greek Music”
http://www.oeaw.ac.at/kal/agm/<strong>in</strong>dex.htm, a website that conta<strong>in</strong>s record<strong>in</strong>gs of “all published fragments of Ancient Greek music which consist of more
than a few scattered notes.”
629 One model of undergraduate research has been developed by Sunoikisis (http://www.sunoikisis.org), a national consortium of classics programs that
was founded <strong>in</strong> 1999 and runs an annual undergraduate research symposium where students present their papers on research regard<strong>in</strong>g Greece, <strong>Rome</strong>, and
the Classical Tradition (http://www.sunoikisis.org/blog/students/symposia/).