Gregory Crane
Professor and Chair, Department of Classical Studies, Tufts University
Winnick Family Chair of Technology and Entrepreneurship
Adjunct Professor of Computer Science
Editor-in-Chief, Perseus Digital Library
μανθάνειν οὐ μόνον τοῖς φιλοσόφοις ἥδιστον ἀλλὰ καὶ τοῖς ἄλλοις ὁμοίωςLearning is a great pleasure, not only for philosophers but for everyone else as well. — Aristotle, Poetics 1448b13Hover over a Greek word—or focus it with the keyboard—to see its gloss and analysis. Data from the augmented Kassel treebank, Poetics 4.4.
I work on how people read the languages and sources of the ancient world, and on how digital methods can widen the circle of those who are able to do that reading. Most of this work happens through the Perseus Digital Library, which has been publishing primary sources for the study of antiquity since the late 1980s. This page gathers current projects and some of the working materials behind them; much of it is unfinished and changes often.
Forthcoming book
Philology in a Digital Age: Selected Papers
This volume collects essays from more than four decades of work, from the first Perseus proposals of the late 1980s to recent reflections on large language models, open data, and the place of Greek and Latin in a multilingual world. Read together, they trace how Greco-Roman philology has changed as its infrastructure moved from print to digital media, and they make a case for a field that keeps adapting to new technologies while remaining open and inclusive. Several of the pieces are published here for the first time.
Book page at Harvard University Press →
Contents
- Introduction: autobiographical motivations and the pre-digital world
- Perseus: the original proposal (Annenberg/CPB, 1988; previously unpublished)
- Building a Hypertextual Digital Library of London (JCDL 2001, best paper)
- What Do You Do with a Million Books? (D-Lib Magazine, 2006)
- Cyberinfrastructure for Classical Philology (Digital Humanities Quarterly, 2008)
- Classics in the Million Book Library (Digital Humanities Quarterly, 2008)
- Give Us Editors! Re-inventing the Edition and Re-thinking the Humanities (Rice University Press, 2010)
- Greek, Latin and a Global Dialogue among Civilizations (Center for Hellenic Studies)
- Opening up Classics and the Humanities: Computation, the Homer Multitext Project and Citizen Science (2014)
- Greco-Roman Studies in a Digital Age (Daedalus, 2016)
- Thoughts on Classical Studies in the 21st Century United States (Center for Hellenic Studies, 2021)
- Greco-Roman Studies and the Future of Europe (Center for Hellenic Studies, 2022)
- Classical Greek in the Open Greek and Latin Project (Journal of Open Humanities Data, 2026)
- Perseus and the Open-Source Ecosystem of Greco-Roman Studies (Journal of Open Humanities Data, 2026)
- Philology in the Age of Large Language Models
- Conclusion: the next fifty years
Current projects
Perseus MVP (Minimum Viable Perseus)
For more than twenty years, the current Perseus Digital Library (P4) has been the main home for Perseus collections. It has become hard to update and is prone to outages under automated scraping. Perseus MVP, now in public beta, is our effort to keep it available over the long term. It compiles the TEI collections that Perseus maintains into static pages delivered by a simple web server, and all computation happens in the reader’s browser. It keeps the familiar P4 reading experience of texts, translations, and click-to-look-up words with Logeion, LSJ, and Lewis & Short. It also adds content not found in P4, including draft digital versions of critical editions, commentaries, and dictionaries. Several P4 features, such as corpus search and cross-references, are still to come, and we would be grateful for reports from those who use it.
The implementation is by Charles Pletcher, building on a design by Clifford Wulfman and on decades of curation by Lisa Cerrato, Alison Babeu, and others. Support from the National Endowment for the Humanities (“Perseus on the Web: Preparing for the Next Thirty Years,” PW-290565-23) let us prototype the rebuild on the Scaife Viewer and will help us add new features. The Schmidt Sciences Beyond Translation project made it possible to build the new serverless version and, with it, a more sustainable infrastructure.
Perseus Multitext Viewer
This is my experimental environment for trying out new features and new content. Some of what proves useful here, though not necessarily all of it, is meant to feed into Perseus MVP.
A reading environment in which a text appears beside its translations, commentaries, word-by-word linguistic annotation, lexicon entries, and manuscript images, all aligned to the same passage. It runs as a static website with no server behind it, which keeps it inexpensive to host and easier to preserve. Alongside Greek and Latin it already includes Arabic, Persian, and Japanese texts, and it is meant over time to cover the canonical Greek and Latin corpus. The code and data are open, and corrections are welcome.
Aristotle’s Poetics in Greek, Arabic and Latin
With support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, we are bringing together the Greek text of the Poetics, its Arabic and Latin transmissions, and modern translations as a step towards a variorum edition. The Poetics also serves as the main test case for how the Viewer presents a work that has travelled across languages.
Working materials
- Treebank visualizations: verb paradigm frequencies
- Teach yourself Greek with Pharr: vocabulary for lessons 10 and 40
Support
Perseus is currently supported by the Schmidt Sciences Humanities and AI Virtual Institute (HAVI) (“Beyond Translation: Opening up the Human Record”), the National Endowment for the Humanities (“Perseus on the Web: Preparing for the Next Thirty Years,” PW-290565-23; and “Aristotle’s Poetics in Greek, Arabic and Latin: Towards a Variorum Edition,” RQ-306857-26), and Tufts University.