The Chicago Homer

Are you reading Homeric Greek? Whether you are a total beginner or an advanced Homerist, here you can meet kindred spirits. Besides Homer, use this board for all things early Greek poetry.
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sfryer
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The Chicago Homer

Post by sfryer »

I thought I'd pass on this information as being of interest to those studying Homer and Homeric Greek. It looks very interesting.<br /><br />>An improved version of The Chicago Homer is now available at<br />>www.library.northwestern.edu/homer<br />><br />>The Chicago Homer is a bilingual database that uses the search and display<br />>capabilities of the digital surrogate to make distinctive features of Early<br />>Greek epic accessible to readers with and without Greek. In particular, the<br />>"digital page" of the Chicago Homer makes repetitions visible. It is a<br />>fundamental insight of twentieth-century scholarship that the Homeric poems<br />>are rooted in a tradition of oral verse making and that every hexametric<br />>line is shot through with idiomatic phrases that resonate in the listener's<br />>memory. For the modern reader these resonances are not easy to hear, but in<br />>any "page" of the Chicago Homer you can see just what is repeated, and links<br />>from any visible repetition let you navigate the neural networks of bardic<br />>memory. This is true even for readers who cannot read Greek: since they can<br />>see that something is repeated, they can follow the web of translations via<br />>interlinear translations.<br />><br />>The Chicago Homer also includes a complete morphological description of<br />>every word occurrence in terms of the appropriate categories of tense, mood,<br />>voice, case, gender, person, and number. These morphological criteria can be<br />>combined with narrative, locational or frequency-based criteria and let you<br />>look for unknown words and phrases that meet specified conditions, such as<br />>accusative neuter plural adjectives, nouns in the speech of female<br />>goddesses, words that occur once in the Iliad and once in the Odyssey,<br />>phrases that are repeated more than a dozen times, are three words long and<br />>contain the name "Achilleus", occur in Iliad 16 and 22, but nowhere else,<br />>and so forth. <br />><br />>The texts and associated data tables of the Chicago Homer are based on<br />>standard electronic texts and include the Iliad, the Odyssey, Hesiod's<br />>Theogony and Works and Days, the Homeric Hymns, and the pseudo-Hesiodic<br />>Shield of Herakles.<br />><br />>The Chicago Homer includes Richmond Lattimore's translation of the Iliad,<br />>Daryl Hine's translations of the Theogony, Works and Days, and Homeric<br />>Hymns, and the 18th century German translations of the Iliad and Odyssey by<br />>Johann Heinrich Voss. It does not at the moment include an English<br />>translation of the Odyssey.<br />><br />>The Chicago Homer is associated with the still experimental Eumaios site,<br />>which includes access to the Iliad scholia in Hartmut Erbse's edition and to<br />>Dana Sutton's list of papyri, now maintained by the Center for Hellenic<br />>Studies. Wherever there is a papyrus reading or scholion for a Homeric<br />>line, a hyperlink in the margin of the Chicago Homer puts it immediately at<br />>hand with a single click. For the Homer scholia, this means that for the<br />>first time since the medieval manuscripts and earliest printed texts they<br />>have regained their status as true marginalia, albeit in a digital manner.<br />><br />>All the functionalities of the Chicago Homer work with Mozilla 1.3 or<br />>Netscape 7.1 on Windows and Macintosh OS 10.2 computers, with Internet<br />>Explorer on Windows NT or later, and with the Safari browser on OS 10.2.<br />>Some routines do not work dependably on earlier browser/OS combinations.<br />>Transliterated Greek can be displayed on any browser, but the display of<br />>Greek characters requires a browser with a Unicode (UTF-8) font that<br />>includes the extended Greek character set.

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Jeff Tirey
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Re:The Chicago Homer

Post by Jeff Tirey »

I saw this too and was very impressed with the technology. I like how it shows both English and Greek text. I'm going to be spending some time there.<br /><br />jeff<br />
Textkit Founder

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