All users of the current Perseus Digital Library (Perseus 4: the
Hopper) will have experienced frustrating error messages. Tufts runs
Perseus on multiple virtual machines. Tufts moved Perseus to new real
machines and that may have contributed to the issue (although it is not
clear to us why simply moving to new hardware will have caused problems
when the virtual machines have not changed). We have, however, also
found that these virtual machines have experienced unusual spikes in
traffic and the local server logs have actually filled up the local
servers, causing them to freeze. Our collaborator on this at Tufts has
been very helpful but is on vacation for the next couple of weeks. The
Crowdstrike disaster from last week also was a major drain on the Tufts’
system administrators who are here (2,000 Tufts Windows machines were
affected). We will do what we can with those who are available as
quickly as possible. We apologize for the disruptions that all of us
experience.
The Scaife Viewer does not
offer all the services to which Perseus users are accustomed but it does
provide basic access to a large body of Greek and Latin texts and
translations. The Perseus 4 Greek and Roman collection page also contains links to the Scaife versions.
Our main focus is, and has been for the last two years, creating a
new version of Perseus, which we consider to be Perseus 6. Where the
Scaife Viewer, built on a new code base, provided us with a much more
easily expanded framework for publishing core textual data, a NEH
Digital Humanities Grant allowed us to develop Beyond Translation
and, in so doing, to learn how to integrate many types of data,
including classes of annotation (such as Treebanks and Translation
Alignments). We view Scaife and Beyond Translation together as a Perseus
5.0. You can see features implemented in Beyond Translation and read a white paper about the work that has been done.
Support from the NEH Humanities Collections and Reference Resources
program has provided support to integrate the scalability of the Scaife
Viewer with the flexibility of Beyond Translation. We are fifteen
months into this new three year Perseus on the Web: preparing for the next Thirty Years.
We are moving as quickly as we can (and have accelerated our work to
the extent possible) to complete a working version of Perseus 6. Our
lead collaborator, James Tauber of Signum University, has made great
progress on a backend that can manage the data in Scaife and Beyond
Translation and that can be rapidly expanded. He is moving to the
frontend. We hope to begin replacing components of Perseus 4 in the
coming month. We are currently planning to test a prototype version of
the Perseus Word Study Tool.
Looking further down the line (and beyond what we can do in our
current project), the next step for Perseus would be to create what we
are calling a Portable Perseus. This would be a version of Perseus based
on the simplest technology base possible. This would not even require a
database – all links and all visualizations would be pre-computed. The
Canadian Endings Project has
proposed restricting implementation to widely supported technologies
such as HTML5, CSS and Javascript (without dependence on libraries that
may cease to run over time). The price would be flexibility: you would
only be able to perform functions that we had anticipated and run
services that we could implement in this simpler ecosystem. At the same
time, we believe we can represent the vast majority of services from
Perseus 4 in such a minimal computing framework. Such a version of
Perseus could be downloaded and run locally. It would be much faster and
would be structured to run for a very long time without needing to be
modified. David Mimno first developed Perseus 4 in 2003 and Bridget
Almas completed work on the current version ten years later in 2013. Our
hope is that a Portable Perseus could run much longer.
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