News: Harvard Library commits $50,000 to complete The First Thousand Years of Greek segment of the Open Greek and Latin Project

Harvard Library commits $50,000 to complete The First Thousand Years of Greek segment of the Open Greek and Latin Project

March 31, 2016

Posted by Rhea Lesage under News

For the past two years, the Open Greek and Latin Project team in Leipzig has been collecting scanned editions of classical texts and running optical character recognition (OCR) optimized for Greek and Latin in an effort to build the largest and most comprehensive open-source library of classical philology to date. The Harvard Library has committed $50,000, using generous funding from Arcadia, to complete The First Thousand Years of Greek segment of the Open Greek and Latin Project. The First Thousand Years of Greek aims to serve as a prototype of the larger project and will permit researchers to freely search and access a digital corpus of Ancient Greek and download, modify and redistribute their textual data so they can fully exploit new methods of analysis. Harvard’s support will cover the raw data entry costs of corrected OCR and Text Encoding Initiative Extensible Markup Language (TEI XML) to help complete the list of standard Greek editions. Harvard College Library librarian Rhea Lesage is working with the Center for Hellenic Studies and the Open Greek and Latin Project team on this initiative.