Tuesday, September 24, 2019

Diogenes: A tool for searching and browsing the databases of ancient texts, primarily in Latin and Greek

[First posted in AWOL 5 November 2015, updated 24 September 2019]

Diogenes
screenshot
Diogenes is a desktop/laptop application for searching and browsing the legacy databases of texts in Latin and ancient Greek that were once published on CD-ROM by the TLG and the PHI. (NB. These databases are not distributed with Diogenes and must be obtained separately.)
Diogenes is a project of the Department of Classics and Ancient History, Durham University.

Version 4

Version 4 of Diogenes (released autumn 2019) represents a major overhaul of the software; all users are advised to upgrade. Previous versions of Diogenes are 32-bit software, so they will have stopped working under the Catalina release of OS X.

New Features in Version 4

Browser Component
Previously, Version 3 of Diogenes included a browser component (xulrunner) drawn from the Mozilla project. Unfortunately, this component is no longer supported. Version 4 integrates a completely new browser front-end (Electron), which is based upon Google Chrome. This major change has enabled the elimination of many bugs and the implementation of additional features.
User Interface
The interface has been modernised and made easier to use, with better usage hints. A number of frequently requested new features have been added, such as the ability to do a quick search within one author without having to first define a subset of texts containing that author.
XML Export
Texts can be exported as TEI-compliant XML for use with other text-analysis software. The development of his functionality was sponsored by the DigiLibLT project. Exported texts validate against a full TEI schema (see the notes on XML output).
TLL integration
PDFs of the print version of the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae have been made freely available from the website of the Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, and if you have downloaded them, Diogenes provides a link to the correct page of the correct volume of that lexicon for each Latin word that has an entry. If you have not yet downloaded the files, Diogenes provides a facility to help do this.
Corrected LSJ
Diogenes now includes by default the version of the LSJ Greek Lexicon from Perseus with errors corrected by the Logeion project.

3 comments:

  1. Is anybody running Diogenes under El Capitan or has the captain killed Diogenes?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Never mind! I did a fresh download and everything is fine!

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  3. Glad to hear it worked, Helma. I have not upgraded yet to El Capitan -- must do that soon.

    ReplyDelete