Footnotes to Plato: A passage-level citation index of five ancient authors across the journal literature

Welcome! Footnotes to Plato (and Others) is a tool for scholars in ancient philosophy, classics, theology, reception studies, intellectual history, history of the humanities, and digital humanities.

It tracks citations to five ancient authors—Homer, Pindar, Plato, Aristotle, and Paul—across a corpus of 48 academic journals, published between 1827 and 2022. Shoutout to the folks at JSTOR who kindly provided the data!

Three visualization tools let you analyze how scholarly attention distributes:
• between texts, and text-groups, over time,
• within texts, at passage-level granularity,
• and how it differs from journal to journal and discipline to discipline.

You can also create exportable bibliographies of articles citing a specific passage at one click.

For the list of journals covered see here; for the full method see methods, and for the data, the data page. For suggestions, questions, feedback feel free to get in touch here: contact.

5
ancient authors

88
texts indexed

492,748
citations placed to a passage

48
journals included

1827–2022
period covered

The three tools

Viewer ATexts over Time

Plot whole texts, or clusters of them, against each other across two centuries. Set Republic beside Laws, or the Platonic corpus beside the Aristotelian, and watch the shares of attention rise and fall.
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Viewer BPassage-level attention distribution

Inside a single text: which pages, sections and lines the literature keeps returning to, and which it leaves alone. Drill through any passage to the articles that cite it, and export the list as a bibliography.
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Viewer CComparing disciplines

Set two groups of journals against each other on a single text — philosophy beside theology, or any journals you pick — and see, passage by passage, which journals/fields emphasize which passages.
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