Online Public Classics Archive
Classics has had a strong presence in the press. As Hardwick and
Harrison (2013) remark, “Greek and Roman texts, material culture and
ideas have always been widely and radically used and re-used by
individuals and by societies, and in recent centuries this has gradually
included more people who have not had a formal classical education of
any kind.” More recently, popular culture and the media have engaged
with antiquity for centuries (cf. Jenkins 2015), yet it is currently
difficult to search for and document the places where that engagement
takes place. One can Google “Plato and Trump” or “Xenophon and
leadership”, but the search results can often be too unwieldy and
lacunose to be of much productive use.
In order to document the great collective impact that our
discipline has had and continues to have on public ways of thinking, we
have created the Online Public Classics Archive, a public media Classics
database that archives and organizes the public media engagement with
antiquity on the Internet. This e-resource is linked to the way we
search on the Internet. If someone wants to search for "Epictetus” in
Google, one sees the Wikipedia entry and a few other philosophy
e-resources on the first search page. If one filters search results
through the “news” option, one sees some recent blog posts and articles.
But what if one wants to find out how many times reporters,
columnists, bloggers, and other public writers have discussed Epictetus
from 2007-2017? On a daily basis we see many of these articles
circulating on social media but they often end up sitting alone and
abandoned as bookmarks or downloaded PDFs only on our own computers.
Our database succeeds in providing a space (that is searchable by
keywords and tags and can be filtered by date) for both Classicists and
the public to examine just how much of an impact the ancient world has
had on contemporary thought. Though it is currently in the initial
stages of development, it is already clear that a substantial body of
public scholarship discussing antiquity has a robust and important
presence in public discourse.
The Online Public Classics Archive collects articles from across
the internet and from a variety of media sources. The views expressed
in these media are those of the authors and their publishers, and are
not endorsed in any way by the Paideia Institute. However, the Paideia
Institute Institute strongly condemns hateful language or attitudes
directed at individuals or groups based upon their nationality, race,
gender, religion, or sexual orientation. We welcome anyone with an
interest in ancient Greece and Rome, and strive to create a learning
environment in which individuals can pursue that interest without being
demeaned or attacked for who they are. As a result, articles which use
the Classics to attack individuals or groups for their identity or
beliefs are not included in the archive.
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