Crowd-sourcing classics research

Wall painting of papyrus plants

A pair of articles reminds me how grateful I am for online research tools, as a professor at a somewhat isolated and small university. Oxford University is asking the public to help them transcribe the remaining Oxyrhynchus papyri. Go to ancientlives.org and you can view a section of one of the papyri and match the letters with standard Greek characters. Papyrology can be an elusive discipline even for professional classicists, so this is a truly exciting project.

The other piece is over at the NYT Arts Beat blog, on a Google tool that lets you search for strings of words in their Google Books archive, and track their use over time (the 'Ngram Viewer'). Google Books and Google Scholar have been a huge boon to me as I have bounced all over the country from one temporary teaching job to another*. I often didn't have access to an adequate classics library, and it was just reassuring to know I could look at a few pages of any book I needed. archive.org is also a great source for older books.

*Hopefully we will be staying in the place we most recently moved to! Hooray! Pin It