Beyond Translation: Building Better Greek Scholars

by Josh Kemp

Before embarking on my most recent project, I was honored to have the opportunity to work with Recogito once before — mapping the Catalog of Ships passage from Homer’s Iliad (2.494–759). This is an accessible text due to the high volume of locations where Achaeans sailed from, so it gave a great example of the capabilities of the geo-referencing function of Recogito. I was immediately engaged with the platform and hoped to work with it again, so I jumped at the chance to tackle the Odyssey as a Summer 2021 Research Fellow through the generous funding of the Furman University Office of Undergraduate Research, under the supervision of Dr. Chiara Palladino.

The goal was to have a large set of data that could allow an in-depth exploration of the Odyssey’s peoples and places: I used Recogito to annotate the text, and then exported the resulting data into the Scaife Viewer 2.0, creating a publicly available integrated version of the text in the original Ancient Greek, with maps and links for all named entities. The Scaife Viewer has been an essential element of my journey learning Attic Greek, and in the spirit of “passing it on” I thought it could be very beneficial to add annotation data to help the next generation of students approach the Odyssey from the original Greek

Figure 1. The Scaife Viewer features helpful learning tools such as side-by-side display of the Greek and English texts (this is Murray’s Greek and English editions).

I successfully combed all twenty-four books of the Odyssey. I used the 1919 Ancient Greek edition edited by A.T. Murray, Vols. 1–2 (available at

https://scaife.perseus.org/reader/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0012.tlg002.perseus-grc2), which was imported book by book from the Scaife Viewer using the Recogito CTS service. I then proceeded by systematically annotating all named entities in each book.

There were three different entity types I annotated: places (both real and mythological), ethnonyms, and personal names. Tagging places and ethnonyms derived from different regions on a map together was quite interesting, especially considering that I annotated each book separately. This gave me the opportunity to see where the story took place as it progressed across each book, which can be beneficial for students attempting to visualize Odysseus’ journey.

Figure 2. Here is an example map from Book III, which predominantly features the retelling of the Trojan War.

Any student that is studying the Odyssey probably has a working knowledge of the Greek gods and other important mythological figures, yet this is an epic with nine different characters that have names beginning with “Eury-”. This is just an example of the hundreds of characters named across all twenty-four books, some of whom are only mentioned once or twice. Even with characters who do little to impact the plot, I understood that there could be great benefit from providing background information. I created a separate vocabulary file by manually matching people in the Odyssey with the corresponding Wikipedia entries and used the “Tagging Vocabulary” feature in Recogito to create an authoritative tagset that I used to annotate every person in the text. Some minor characters (such as suitors whose only mentions came when Odysseus or his companions killed them) did not have a unique Wikipedia entry, but any other occurrence was matched with a link that would take the reader directly to the appropriate page.

Figure 3. This is the complete tag list from Book III. Since Telemachus is with Nestor in Pylos hearing stories of his father’s efforts in the Trojan War, they are the two most mentioned characters.

The goal of the project is without a doubt accessibility. There have been many maps of Odysseus’ journey, and anyone can research a character that they are unfamiliar with, but I wanted to contribute to the development of a tool that makes students comfortable with and excited about learning Attic Greek by studying the Odyssey. Therefore, after completing the annotations, I exported the data from Recogito and sent them to the Scaife Viewer team, which is currently working on Scaife 2.0, a new reading interface for ancient texts that integrates multiple annotation types, including translation alignment, metrical annotation, syntax trees, grammatical information, and so on.

Figure 4. This example from Odyssey 1.1–10 contains two named entities — Troy and the Titan Hyperion.

The new interface, previously sponsored through a Mellon Foundation Grant, is currently being developed within the framework of the NEH-funded Beyond Translation project. The resulting interface integrates the text with all the data resulting from my annotations: it enables the reader to visualize personal and place names in the original ancient Greek, to explore a map of all the places mentioned in each passage, and to gather additional information about people named through our Wikipedia references.

Figure 5. An overview of the map on the side, with a list of named entities that appear in the passage.

Having geographical, historical, and the Scaife lexicon’s grammatical information all in the same module can provide that accessible learning environment, and you can find it here.

Author: Josh Kemp, Classics major, Undergraduate. Furman University.

Contacts: Josh josh.kemp@furman.edu;
Chiara Palladino chiara.palladino@furman.edu