The Open Greek and Latin (OGL) project is the umbrella project for the development of corpus linguistic resources for the study of Classical Greek and Latin. The idea is to bring together in machine-actionable form all the Classical Greek and Latin texts from antiquity up to the present, to include both ancient and Neo-Latin and Neo-Greek texts, papyri, and inscriptions.

This ambitious goal was first articulated by Gregory Crane, Professor of Computer Science at Universität Leipzig, Professor of Classics at Tufts University, and Editor-in-Chief of the Perseus Project. The project aims to be comprehensive, to include everything, as opposed to the more practical and selective goals of Perseus, which will be included as a subset of OGL. It also aims to be more advanced technologically speaking; it will be a complete implementation of the CTS protocols for structuring and accessing references to texts in XML documents; it will include multiple and comparable versions of a given classical text wherever possible, and apparatus critici (reporting textual variants) where the German copyright law allows them; it will include POS (part of speech) data for every word in the corpus, with the ultimate goal of including treebanks of every text as well.

The CHS project entitled Free First Thousand Years of Greek (FF1K) is now a subset of OGL, and the OGL has a beta version of a viewer of the existing texts in the collection, which currently amount to about 20 million words of Greek and 15 million words of Latin, with more to come soon. The FF1K comprises the texts attested in manuscript from the earliest antiquity up to the 3rd Century C.E., with some later additions that are part of the “normal” corpus of texts that classical Greek and Latin includes, such as the marginal scholia for authors like Homer and Pindar, or Stobaeus (5th Century CE). The OGL now has a beta version of an interface into its texts, the Scaife Viewer, that exploits some but not all of the new technology it will eventually deploy. For a list of works to be included in the OGL, see the Perseus Catalog, http://catalog.perseus.org: for the OGL itself, see https://www.dh.uni-leipzig.de/wo/projects/open-greek-and-latin-project/; to see and download the texts currently in the FF1K, see https://opengreekandlatin.github.io/First1KGreek/; and for the Scaife Viewer, see https://scaife.perseus.org.

To see Gregory Crane’s “Individual Developments and Systemic Change in Philology,” from May 1, 2018, click here.