WHAT'S NEW?

10/3/2024

Luisa Sigea, Syntra and selected letters is now live and linked on the main Latin Texts page. Huge thanks are due to everyone listed on the credits page!

8/13/2024

The DCC Aeneid is now complete through Books 1 and 2, thanks to the work this summer by an outstanding group of students under the guidance of Dr. Lucy McInerney (Dickinson '15, PhD Brown '24). https://blogs.dickinson.edu/dcc/2024/08/13/aeneid-progress/ 

6/18/2024

Apollonius, Argonautica 4, edited by Peter Hulse (@chesswoodseats) has launched at last. This one has been a long time coming. The notes are rich and chock full of philological acumen, mythographic detail, and literary observation. The introduction is very substantial, there is a set of original cartoons by Rosemary Hulse, audio recordings by Peter Pond and Rosemary Hulse, abundant images, and maps. It's an amazing treasure trove of an edition.

5/29/24

The update of our theme in Drupal just went live. It was a significant amount of work, but should not materially affect the user experience. Please let us know if you notice anything amiss. The update from the no longer supported Zurb Foundation theme to the DXPR theme required a thorough re-making of the CSS and the transfer of all the existing content. Drupal developer Ryan Burke led the process. He had important help from Hayden Alexander ('24), who worked on the project in the course of his Spring 2024 Internship in Digital Publishing with DCC and Project Director Chris Francese.

12/31/2023

New at DCC: Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis, “The Voyage of Saint Brendan the Abbot,” edited by William Turpin. It’s a medieval Irish adventure involving monks on a boat, otters, a gryphon, volcanic islands, and the Promised Land of the Saints. Enjoy! 

12/29/2023

New at DCC: Eutropius: Breviarium ab urbe condita, edited by Kristin Masters with help from several Dickinson College students and faculty. Eutropius’ Breviarium is a summary of Roman history from the founding of Rome (traditionally set at 753 BCE) to the reign of the emperor Jovian (364 CE). It was dedicated to the reigning emperor, Valens (r. 364–378). Eutropius aimed to collect “the conspicuous achievements of the Romans, whether in war or in peace … [as well as] those topics which appeared exceptional in the lives of the emperors” Because of its important content and straightforward style, Eutropius’ work became a classroom staple in ancient times, and has remained so. I am most grateful to all the contributors for making possible what I am confident will be a useful resource for all students of Latin!

8/1/2023

Patrick Burns and Scott Farrington are now officially on the masthead at Contributing Editors of DCC. This is long overdue, since both scholars have made many contributions to the site. Scott is Associate Professor of Classics at Dickinson. He has reviewed many a proposal, advised on all things Greek, including the core vocabulary, and is currently leading a group working toward a commentary on Plutarch's The Bravery of Women. Patrick is Associate Research Scholar for Digital Projects at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University, and worked previously at the Quantitative Criticism Lab at the University of Texas at Austin and the Culture, Cognition, and Coevolution Lab at Harvard University. Patrick is working an online book to be titled Exploratory Philology: Learning About Ancient Languages Through Computer Programming, a code-first introduction to Ancient Greek and Latin. He is a core contributor to the Classical Language Toolkit, a natural language processing framework for working with ancient-language text. Patrick has made many behind-the-scenes contributions to do with data wrangling and vocabulary list creation. Welcome, Patrick and Scott!

4/17/2023

3-D model reconstruction of a Homeric ship, with annotations describing the parts & discussing the Homeric vocabulary for each, with links to the relevant passages in the DCC edition of Odyssey 9-12. Created by Austin Mason and Rob Hardy of Carleton College.

11/11/2022

Lysias, "For the Disabled Man (Oration 24)" edited by Taylor Coughlan.  Delivered at the turn the fourth century BCE, it is one of the few extant speeches intended to be delivered by a poor Athenian.

10/20/2022

Thanks to extensive work by Meagan Ayer the indices to Goodell's Grammar of Attic Greek now link directly to the relevant pages, not to the older deprecated version. Thank you, Meagan!

6/6/2022

Menander's Epitrepontes ("The Arbitration") with notes, vocab, and an English performance script by Marie Plunkett.

5/23/2022

Seneca, Natural Questions, selections edited by Christopher Trinacty.

2/13/2022

Thomas Van Nortwick and Rob Hardy's commentary on Homer's Odyssey Books 9-12 is now live. Like TVN's other DCC commentary on Iliad 6 and 22 it has an extensive Introduction and fresh close reading essays on the whole. These are the fruit of a career's-worth of research, reflection, and teaching and are not to be missed. Hang in there, Homerists, because another Van Nortwick-Hardy collaboration is in the works, Odyssey 5-8.

10/18/2021

Very excited to announce the publication of a brand new commentary on Seneca's Hercules Furens by Neil W. Bernstein and Kyle Gervais.

3/16/2021

 

1/26/2021

Quizlet sets for the Greek and Latin Core Vocabularies in groups of 100 are available thanks to Chris Francese (Greek) and Eric Foster-Whiddon (Latin).

The Core Vocabularies are now also available as a print book via IngramSpark.

Analytics: DCC usage continues to grow. We had nearly 2 million page views in 2020, according to Google Analytics. Details are on our analytics page.

1/29/2020

New commentaries at DCC: Epictetus, Encheiridion, with introduction, notes, and vocabulary by Albert Watanabe. Cicero, Philippic 2 selections, with introduction, notes, and essays by Ingo Gildenhard.

7/3/2019

New Latin commentary at DCC: Jerome, Malchus the Captive Monk, with notes by William Turpin. A fascinating story of enslavement, escape, and celibacy in late antique Syria: http://dcc.dickinson.edu/jerome-vita-malchi/intro/preface

5/9/2019

The DCC core vocabularies are now available in Turkish, thanks to Mert Inan.

3/20/2019

The DCC Ancient Greek and Latin Core Vocabulary lists are now available with definitions in Romanian, thanks to Mihai Vladimirescu: Greek; Latin.

2/4/2019

New videos are available that discuss how to write notes for DCC:
Part 1: Ten Principles: https://youtu.be/B1bvuQX9GU8
Part 2: Examples: https://youtu.be/p6LpIUb2ICw
Part 3: Style and Usage https://youtu.be/N-HLvQxGbGg

12/31/2018

In the Aeneid commentary links in the notes field to images of manuscript M (Florence, Laur. 39.1 + Vatican lat. 3225, f.76) are now updated and functioning. 

12/20/2018

Five new translations of the core vocabularies are now up and downloadable in various formats (download buttons can be found at the bottom of the pages):  Greek-Italian, by Elisa Ruggieri, Latin-Italian by Gian Paolo Ciceri, Latin-Portuguese by Vittorio Pastelli, Latin-Spanish by Francisco Javier Pérez Cartagena, and Latin-Swedish by Johanna Koivunen. We at DCC are extremely grateful to these scholars for their work. Thanks are due also to developer Lara Frymark, who figured out a way to upload the lists efficiently. If you would like to contribute a new translation (no German yet! What about French? Russian?) please see this page.

11/28/2018

Two new Greek commentaries have just launched, Homer, Iliad 6 and 22, and Ps.-Demosthenes, Against Neaira. In addition, the Caesar selections more than doubled in size this year, with notes now complete for Book 1, and approximately 200 newly digitized historical maps to go with the BG.  

1/29/2018

2017-18 winter break was quite productive! Dickinson students Eli Goings (’18), Beth Eidam (’19), and Carl Hamilton (’21) worked on Caesar's Gallic War, specifically on the text notes and vocabulary for Book 1, Chapters 8–54. This will soon give us a complete edition of Book 1. They made vocabulary lists using the Bridge, edited and added links in the notes (which had been previously gathered and edited by Jo Anne Miller from older school editions), edited the text to make it conform to the OCT, and created pages for notes and vocabulary.

Dickinson students Natalie Ginez (’21), Claire Jeantheau (’21), and Luke Nicosia (’21) worked on Wells Hansen's commentary on Lucretius, De Rerum Natura Book 3. They completed the Bridge lemmatization of Lucretius 3, added dictionary definitions based on Hansen’s notes, and created vocabulary lists. They re-formatted Hansen’s notes and created draft pages for the notes. They added scroll bars. They proofread the notes and vocabulary lists. A contest to see who could identify the most errors in the others' work was one by Claire, the prize being dinner for two.

Many thanks to Eli, Beth, Carl, Natalie, Claire, and Luke for all your care and hard work!

11/10/2017

An article was recently published by Concord Academy's website about their successful collaborative project  to translate the DCC Caesar into Mandarin. The project was led by CA's Latin teacher Liz Penland, with help from their Mandarin teacher and many students. The article quotes Liz saying some very nice things about DCC:

Penland believes a classical education should not just be the mark of the elite. “Anyone should be able to study Latin,” she says. With its peer-reviewed, crowd-sourced approach, DCC is leading a charge to make the classics accessible to anyone with an internet connection. And despite an international trend of declining study of the classical humanities, thousands of students in China are learning Latin and ancient Greek.

Many high schools, colleges, and universities rely on DCC commentaries, as does Penland. By aggregating generations of contextual notes, they reveal “a chain of interpretation, of teaching, and of use,” she says. “They help the text feel more like a cultural object that many people have read.”

11/3/2017

Rob Hardy's commentary on selections from Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica is now up. Austin Mason produced the splendid interactive Bede Atlas. Rob started working on in 2014, and had help along the way from several others. Three different Carleton students worked on the project: Sasha Mayn ('18), who co-created the Dickinson Bede Atlas with Austin, Bard Swallow ('18), and Martha Durrett, both of whom worked on vocabulary lists. Bret Mulligan at Haverford College masterminded the process for creating vocabulary lists. Bill North and Clara Hardy recorded audio versions of the text. The participants in the 2016 Dickinson Summer Latin Workshop took the commentary out for a spin and made numerous helpful suggestions. Dickinson students Cadence Doyle ('17) and and Alexandra Stagliano ('17) read sections of the commentary in Fall 2016 and numerous helpful suggestions. Many thanks to Rob and everyone esle for the many hours of work that went into this project!

10/24/2017

Kandace Kohr wrote a nice feature for Dickinson Today on the DCC Arabic resources. Thank you, Kadance!

9/28/2017

The DCC Greek core vocabulary is now available in Arabic translation by Leon Blosser and Bilal Temeni. 

9/18/2017

We were deeply saddened recently to hear of the death of James Morwood. Prof. Morwood was a great friend of the DCC, a member of the editorial board, and an early supporter of the idea. His humane approach to teaching and scholarship was one that all classicists would do well to emulate. Here is an essay he wrote in 2013 for the DCC blog, on his favorite classical commentary. He will be sorely missed by all who love the classics.

9/1/2017

Kelly Lambertson (Dickinson '21) has created a deck of flashcards for the DCC Latin Core list on Anki. Anki is a clever flashcard program that uses spaced repetition. In other words, you tell the program how well you know a thing, and it brings it back up less or more frequently as requried. Thanks, Kelly! Ok, here's the link (free account creation required).

8/17/2017

DCC texts now have ISBNs, which we hope will make them easier to cite and review. For the Open Book Publisher content, we give their e-pub ISBN. These spiffy new citation footers will be up soon!

William Turpin, Ovid: Amores Book 1. Carlisle, Pennsylvania: Dickinson College Commentaries, 2012. ISBN: 978-1-947822-00-9. http://dcc.dickinson.edu/ovid-amores/preface 

Bret Mulligan, Nepos: Life of Hannibal. Carlisle, Pennsylvania: Dickinson College Commentaries, 2013. ISBN: 978-1-947822-01-6. http://dcc.dickinson.edu/nepos-hannibal/preface

Christopher Francese, Caesar: Selections from the Gallic War. Carlisle, Pennsylvania: Dickinson College Commentaries, 2011. ISBN: 978-1-947822-02-3. http://dcc.dickinson.edu/caesar/caesar-introduction

Christopher Francese, Sulpicius Severus: Life of St. Martin. Carlisle, Pennsylvania: Dickinson College Commentaries, 2011. ISBN: 978-1-947822-03-0. http://dcc.dickinson.edu/sulpicius-severus/preface

Meagan Ayer, Allen and Greenough’s New Latin Grammar for Schools and Colleges, edited by J.B. Greenough, G.L. Kittredge, A.A. Howard, and Benjamin L. D’Ooge. Carlisle, Pennsylvania: Dickinson College Commentaries, 2014. ISBN: 978-1-947822-04-7. http://dcc.dickinson.edu/grammar/latin/credits-and-reuse

Eric Casey, Stephen Nimis, and Evan Hayes, Lucian: True History, Book 1. Carlisle, Pennsylvania: Dickinson College Commentaries, 2014. ISBN: 978-1-947822-05-4. http://dcc.dickinson.edu/lucian-true/book-1/1-1

Christopher Francese, Core Latin and Ancient Greek Vocabularies. Carlisle, Pennsylvania: Dickinson College Commentaries, 2013. ISBN: 978-1-947822-06-1. http://dcc.dickinson.edu/vocab/core-vocabulary

Susan Stephens, Callimachus: Aetia. Carlisle, Pennsylvania: Dickinson College Commentaries, 2015. ISBN: 978-1-947822-07-8. http://dcc.dickinson.edu/callimachus-aetia/preface

Christopher Francese and Meghan Reedy, Vergil: Aeneid Selections. Carlisle, Pennsylvania: Dickinson College Commentaries, 2016. ISBN: 978-1-947822-08-5. http://dcc.dickinson.edu/vergil-aeneid/preface

Cynthia Damon, Tacitus: Agricola. Carlisle, Pennsylvania: Dickinson College Commentaries, 2016. ISBN: 978-1-947822-09-2. http://dcc.dickinson.edu/tacitus-agricola/preface

Mathew Owen and Ingo Gildenhard, Tacitus, Annals, 15.20–23, 33–45. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2013. ISBN: 978-1-78374-003-1. DCC edition, 2016. http://dcc.dickinson.edu/tacitus-annals/preface-and-acknowledgments

Ingo Gildenhard, Cicero, Against Verres, 2.1.53–86. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2011. ISBN: 978-1-90692-463-8. DCC edition, 2016. http://dcc.dickinson.edu/cicero-verres/preface-and-acknowledgements

Ingo Gildenhard, Louise Hodgson, et al., Cicero, On Pompey’s Command (De Imperio), 27–49. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2014. ISBN: 978-1-78374-080-2. DCC edition, 2016. http://dcc.dickinson.edu/cicero-de-imperio/preface-and-acknowledgments

5/8/2017

The DCC edition of Callimachus Aetia by Susan Stephens et al. has received a glowing review in BMCR by María Natalia Bustos de Lezica of Fordham University. The review, which is in Spanish, describes the site in detail and mentions the roles of the various contributors. It praises in particular the introductory matter by Prof. Stephens, and recommends the site both for first time readers and for more experienced scholars. Here is the summation: "El sitio es ideal para los estudiantes, que pueden tener fácil acceso a todos los elementos que necesitan (diccionario, mapas, fotos). También lo es para los especialistas en el poeta alejandrino que, además de tener a su disposición los nuevos hallazgos papirológicos en un formato donde las ventajas visuales son notorias, pueden intercambiar información con otros estudiosos y realizar aportes o introducir sugerencias. El sitio facilita el estudio y la comprensión de la poesía de los Aetia y también la investigación y producción de nuevas ideas, ya que el estudioso tiene acceso inmediato bibliografía, interpretaciones recientes y temas de discusión. Es un placer navegar por este sitio y disfrutar de la poesía del poeta alejandrino, de sus relatos sobre tradiciones únicas del mundo antiguo, con medios que hacen lo complejo fácil y lo oscuro cercano. En síntesis, el sitio es una creación fascinante que hace desear la existencia de sitios similares también para otras obras y autores."

4/19/2017

The Chinese-language version of the DCC Caesar Gallic War commentary was created by a group of students and faculty at Concord Academy in Concord, Massachussets, USA. Many thanks to magistra Elizabeth Penland and her amazing team! Further resources for Chinese-speaking readers of Latin can be found at our sister site, Dickinson Classics Online.

2/3/2017

James Dappert (Dickinson '17) prepared an analytics report on the usage of DCC over the month of January 2017 with figures for each commentary, and a summary of figures for the whole site in 2016. He also completed the task of changing all links to Allen & Greenough's Latin Grammar from the older version to the newer, multimedia one.

1/30/2017

Welcome Clara Hardy, Professor of Classics, John E. Sawyer Professor of Liberal Learning at Carleton College, to the editorial board of DCC!

1/28/2017

Missing section summaries have been added for Aeneid Book 1. These were gathered and edited by Michael Niu (Dickinson '17).

1/23/2017

It was a busy fall! Cynthia Damon's edition of Tacitus' Agricola is up, as are the edition of selections from Vergil's Aeneid by Chris Francese, Meghan Reedy et al., and the edition of selections from Tacitus' Annals by Mathew Owen and Ingo Gildenhard. Thank you to everyone who contributed to those sites! Plans for the spring include better organization of our audio content.

10/3/2016

Ben Johnson, the talent behind the Latin Tutorial video series, has created nifty online quizzes for DCC Latin core vocab. Check out the video here!

9/26/2016

New texts are now linked to the front page: selections from Vergil's Aeneid, Tacitus' Annals, and a new version of Allen & Greenough's Latin Grammar with color charts and media.

9/2/2016

The bibliography to Callimachus' Aetia has been expanded and improved, including individual fragment-specific lists in the notes fields. The bibliography was compiled by Susan Stephens and edited by Meagan Ayer and Chris Francese. Several scholia have been added as well, on the first fragment (Against the Telchines) and the seventh (Argonauts), with translations by Meagan Ayer and Chris Francese.

4/18/2016

Tip of the hat to Rex Stem for his kind words about DCC in a recent BMCReview of Bret Mulligan's Nepos: "I have never taught from an online commentary, but I am persuaded that this text would be an effective way to do so. The different types of information that the student needs are easily accessible, the format is pleasing and intuitive, and the level of the notes is appropriate and rigorous. The printed version is successful in itself, but the appeal of the online version is manifest. My pedagogical habits would have to change somewhat if I were to teach from an online commentary (would we all have screens in front of us? would we also still want to have printed texts to annotate?), but this is precisely the sort of online teaching resource that encourages experimentation with new formats and methods. As a pedagogical platform for teaching Latin with digital materials, this text is visionary in its design."

4/5/2016

We are pleased to announce that Peter Anderson has joined the DCC editorial board. Peter is an experienced commentator on Martial and Seneca, with a special interest in digital annotation. His recent chapter in Classical Commentaries: Explorations in a Scholarly Genre (Oxford University Press, 2016), is called "Heracles' Choice: Thoughts on the Virtues of Print and Digital Commentary." His forthcoming commentary for DCC on Seneca's De Providentia will be the first English commentary on that work, and the first in any language since the late 1970s. Welcome, Peter!

3/23/2016

"Suggest an edit" links were added to all content types at the foot of text pages. These send emails either to dickinsoncommentaries@gmail.com, or directly to the editor.

8/19/2015

Cicero, On Pompey's Command is now equipped with full vocabulary lists in the DCC style: all non-core words are glossed. A link at the top of each vocabulary field goes to the main core list. This improvement is due to the work of Lara Frymark (Dickinson '10), who digitized Francis Kelsey's lexicon of Cicero and matched it with the lemmata of LASLA. Dominique Longree of LASLA kindly provided a fully parsed text of the speech. By combining these two spreadsheets Lara was able to make the lists, which are both accurate in terms of their identification of the dictionary headwords (because the LASLA parsings are done by hand by experienced Latinists) and have fully apposite definitions (because Kelsey's dictionary was made specifically for a collection of Cicero speeches, including the De Imperio). Thanks to Lara and Dominique for this valuable addition to the site.

7/27/2015

Cicero, On Pompey’s Command (De Imperio), 27-49, by Ingo Gildenhard, Louise Hodgson, et al. is now live. The site represents an online version of the book published by Open Book Publishers, Cambridge, UK, in 2014. Paperback, hardback, and .pdf versions can be obtained directly from OBP. The content of the site is substantially the same as that of the book, except that, in conformance with the normal DCC editorial policy, we put macrons on the Latin text, added audio recordings, and omitted the translation. Full vocabulary lists in the DCC style are in preparation.

7/10/2015

The Latin and Greek Core Vocabularies are now available in Chinese, thanks to a wonderful team of scholars from universities all over China that met in June of 2015 at Shanghai Normal University. For details on how these translations were created, see here.

7/6/2015

The Latin Core Vocabulary is now available as a set of flash cards at Cerego, thanks to Bret Mulligan.

5/23/2015

Rebecca Harrison (Professor of Classics at Truman State University) has submitted another invaluable series of edits to the vocabulary and notes and text of Caesar, this time BG 5.39-48. The sections (especially the vocabulary lists) have been much improved by her eagle eye. Thank you, Prof. Harrison!

5/15/2015

The core Latin and Greek Vocabularies are now available in Polish, thanks to the efforts of a wonderful Association of Classical teachers called Ship of Phaeacians. The work was carried out by Statek Feaków, Agnieszka Walczak, and Marcin Kołodziejczyk. Thanks are due to them, as well to our Drupal developer Ryan Burke, who made the translation module work so that all translations can be linked to the same nodes, and created the views. This the second of our international collaborations for translating the core vocabularies. The Greek core is already in Portuguese thanks to Caio Camargo. Next month we plan to put up the Chinese translations as well following the DCC seminar in Shanghai June 12-14. Would you like to help create a new translation in another modern language? Please let us know!

Greek Core Vocabulary in Polish

Latin Core Vocabulary in Polish

4/20/2015

Welcome Christopher Trinacty of Oberlin Colllege, who has agreedd to serve on the DCC Editorial Board. He is the author of Senecan Tragedy and the Reception of Augustan Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2014), and is currently working on a commentary on Seneca's Natural Questions. Thank you, Chris, and welcome aboard!

2/5/2015

Several corrections were made to text and notes and vocabulary of Caesar, Galllic War 5.39, 40, 42, and 43, thanks to the eagle eye of Rebecca Harrison, Professor of Classics at Truman State University, and a Dickinson alumna ('80). Check out her site, Characteristics of Caesar's Latin.

2/3/2015

The About page has been revised and expanded to include a fuller, more accurate list of contributors, and a better definition of the roles of various types of contributors. We also added a section on "Peer Review," which makes our editorial process more explicit, and an "In Development" section that specifies what commentaries are currently in the pipeline.

1/7/2015

A review article by Anne Mahoney in the newest issue of Teaching Classical Languages compares DCC and Ingo Gildenhard’s edition of Virgil, Aeneid 4.1–299 (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2012). She looked at our site very closely, and has many positive things to say. The highlight is probably the final paragraph:

Certainly both series provide good scholarship and good pedagogy, but it’s only the DCC series that pushes the bounds of commentary form. Commentaries have been part of classical scholarship at least since the Alexandrians; they’re the most basic way we engage with texts, first as students and later, perhaps, as authors. The Open Book commentaries are not fundamentally different from the 19th-centuryCaesar texts excerpted in Francese’s commentary, nor, even, from the marginal scholia in our manuscripts. The DCC commentaries aim to be something more, both in presentation and in access. There is of course still a place for print books (or their e-reader avatars), but there is also a place for scholarly work that uses the resources of the web, and DCC shows us a model for doing that well.

It is great to get validation that we are headed in the right direction, or at least a good direction.

11/8/2014

Edited and corrected vocabulary lists for Caesar, Gallic War 1.1-7.

10/8/2014

Edited menus on Resources page to include Goodell's School Grammar of Attic Greek (still undergoing final editing), and the Aeneid Vocabulary (see below).

9/18/2014

The DCC Aeneid vocabulary is now up and running. Based on Henry S. Frieze, Vergil’s Aeneid Books I-XII, with an Introduction, Notes, and Vocabulary, revised by Walter Dennison (New York: American Book Co., 1902), it includes frequency data derived from a human inspection and analysis of every word in the Aeneid (Perret's text) carried out by teams at the Laboratoire d'Analyse Statistique des Langues Anciennes (LASLA) at the Université de Liège. Users can search both Latin and English words, and display items alphabetically or by frequency. By using The Bridge, users can create custom lists for line ranges in the Aeneid, including or excluding vocabulary from the DCC core, or from several introductory Latin textbooks. This data will form the basis for complete running lists for the whole poem, to be created in the coming years as part of a larger multimedia edition of the Aeneid.

9/4/2014

Edits and corrections made to the notes and vocabulary lists of Caesar, Gallic War 6.14-18. More notes added, definitions corrected.

8/19/2014

The Resources page now includes the link to our newly digitized version of Allen & Greenough's New Latin Grammar. The home page now includes an announcement of the forthcoming Aeneid selections. We took down the announcement of the Aetia selections, pending some further work on that content.

8/9/2014

The new image viewer is complete. This spring we put some thought into the question of what metadata we need for images. After looking at the various metadata standards (VRACore, Library of Congress, etc.) and examining some good museum websites, we settled on a fairly limited set of fields that give 1) the basic information about the object or art work; 2) clear source credit and terms of use for the image itself; and 3) scholarly description and discussion. This information is divided into tow tabs, "Properties" (for basic data), and "Annotation." Annotations include a straightforward description, typically taken with credit from the museum web site or other image source, and "Comments," which will normally be original DCC content connecting the image with a particular passage in a DCC text. Under Annotations there is also space for bibliography, and links to associated passages. This is an overdue infrastructure improvement that will help us make illuminating connections between texts and images, a key goal for the Aeneid edition in progress. If you go to the Images link on the fron page, you'll see that most of the content uploaded so far is related to the Aeneid (by Lucy McInerney and Tyler Denton). Thanks to visual resources librarian Jen Kniesch at Dickinson for advice, and to Drupal developer Ryan Burke for making this tool.

6/12/2014

Meagan Ayer (PhD University at Buffalo '12) is putting the finishing touches on our new version of Allen & Greenough's New Latin Grammar (sample). Kaylin Bednarz (Dickinson '15) spent about 8 hours per week in AY '13-'14 editing the XML provided by Perseus, doing a fresh scan of the pages, digitizing the index (which was absent from the Perseus XML), and creating new html pages that combine a nice visual presentation, a link to the XML, and a page image. Meagan is editing those html pages. Ryan Burke created the menus. After the html is done, the plan is to put it into Drupal to facilitate linking from our notes fields.

Bret Mulligan, Assoc. Prof. of Classics at Haverford College and editor of the DCC edition of Nepos' Life of Hannibal, is busy with his students improving the Nepos site. In the introduction there is a newly reorganized page called vocabulary, text, and maps, which consolidates the wonderful resources that Bret has created. More to come on that front.

Chris Francese and Ryan Burke created a new metadata scheme for image assets on the site which will make images much for organized and findable (sample). Based on VRA Core, it imitates some museum sites, such as the Walters Gallery, but is adapted to our needs. In its current look it has a tab for descriptive information "properties," as well as a tab for scholarly discussions, "annotations." These latter will include both the professionally written descriptions from museum web sites we borrow from, and our own annotations that relate the particular image to a particualr text on our site. And there is an easy linking feature to texts, so you can see what texts are relevant to a particular image.

9/28/2013

A table is now up collating the vocabulary of the widely used textbook Wheelock's Latin with the DCC Latin core. This work was undertaken by Ruiqi Geng at Carleton College in the summer of 2013. Big thanks are due to Ruiqi and to the Department of Classical Languages at Carleton for supporting her work.

9/1/2013

Bret Mulligan's edition of Nepos' Life of Hannibal is now up. Huge thanks are due to Bret, and the students and staff at Haverford who helped him create this superb content.

A big thanks also due to Nick Genovese, who sent along this list of corrections to hidden quantities for the text of Amores 1:

1.11 īnsignem, 20 cōmpta (cf. prōmptus), 21 prōtinus

3.1 Iūsta, 10 sūmptus, 26 iūnctaque

4.18 fūrtīvās, 51 ūsque (I could be wrong about this; cf. 6.35), 52 fūrtim, 62 ūsque

5.11 fōrmōsa, 20 fōrma, 24 ūsque

6.8 mōnstrat, 35 nūsquam (no? cf. ūsquam), 61 cōnsūmpsī, 70 absūmptī, 74 cōnservae

7.6 sānctōs, 51 ăstitit (cf. 2.51 ăspice), 51 āmēns

8.23 lūx, 24 ūsque, 25 fōrma, 27 fōrmōsissima, 29 Mārtis, 30 Mārs, 34 ēmptam, 41 sēgnis (Allen, Vox Lat. 73), 43 fōrmōsae, 44 rūsticitās, 52 canēscunt, 53 fōrma, 60 cōnsona, 63 redēmptus, 79 īrāscere, 109 vōx

9.29 Mārs, 39 Mārs, 43 fōrmōsae

10.43 inēmptīs, 58 cōnferat

11.3 fūrtīvae, 10 ōrdine, 11 Cupīdinis, 19 perlēctīs, 21 ōrdinibus, 24 scrīptum

12.2 īnfēlix, 5 trānsīre, 7 fūnĕbria (cf. Hor., Epist. 19.49)

13.6 iūncta, 21 cōnsultō, 35 nārrāre, 42 nūpsistī, 44 fōrma

14.16 ōrnātrix, 17 ōrnāta, 21 neglēcta, 31 fōrmōsae, 37 cōnsuetīs, 48 ēmptā, 56 cōnspiciēre

15.6 prōstituisse, 39 pāscitur, 39 quiēscit (Note misprint: 34 TaTagigī.)

7/22/2013

The Greek Core list is now available in a flexible and searchable database format. You can filter it for one or more parts of speech or semantic groups, or a combination of these, and view the words by frequency rank. And the whole list can be downloaded in various formats with one click. I consider this a major enhancement, and hope you like it as well. Please let me know if you have any suggestions for improvements (francese@dickinson.edu). Another added feature is the numerical frequency ranking, based on the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae. The database was built in Drupal by Qingyu Wang, with help from web developer Ryan Burke, and Lara Frymark. Lara performed the tricky job of entering the TLG frequency data. I have revised the About text for the vocabulary lists to reflect these developments, to state more clearly the source of the frequency data, and to give more prominent credit to all those who helped create the lists. Thanks are due especially to Qingyu for her work on this enhancement.

6/28/2013

The Latin Core list is now available in a flexible and serachable database format. You can filter it for one or more parts of speech or semantic groups, or a combination of these, and view the words by frequency rank. And the whole list can be downloaded in various formats with one click. I consider this a major enhancement, and hope you like it as well. Please let me know if you have any suggestions for improvements (francese@dickinson.edu). Another added feature is the numerical frequency ranking, based on the "LASLA" data from the Dictionnaire fréquentiel et Index inverse de la langue latine (Liège: Laboratoire d'Analyse Statistique des Langues Anciennes, 1981). The database was built in Drupal by Qingyu Wang, with help from web developer Ryan Burke, and Lara Frymark. I have revised the About text for the vocabulary lists to reflect these developments, to state more clearly the source of the frequency data, and to give more prominent credit to all those who helped create the lists. Thanks are due especially to Qingyu for her work on this enhancement.

4/25/2013

Substantial rewriting of the definitions in the Greek Core Vocabulary list by Eric Casey and Chris Francese. Some highlights:

old: ἤδη already

new: ἤδη already, now (of the immediate past); presently (of the immediate future)

old: αὐτός -ή -ό self, same, s/he/it

new: αὐτός –ή –ό him- her- itself etc. (for emphasis); the same (with article); him, her, it etc. (in oblique cases only)

old:φύσις φύσεως, ἡ nature

new: φύσις –εως, ἡ nature; (of the mind) one’s nature or disposition; regular order of nature

old: ὦ oh!

new: ὦ oh! ; unemphatic when with the vocative

4/9/2013

A series of about 70 cosmetic alterations, edits, and corrections have been made to the Latin core vocabulary. No words have been added or removed. It was a matter of adding or removing some errant macra, fixing some formatting inconsistencies, and in a few cases adjusting lemmata and defintions for the sake of clarity. The most significant altered definition is that for modo, which formerly read "just, just now" but now reads: "just, just now; modo ... modo: now ... now, at one moment ... at another, sometimes ... sometimes." The vast majority of these improvements are due to the superb proof reading and philological acumen of Alex Lee (see below). I continue to take full responsibility for all remaining errors and infelicities, and would be grateful for notice of any that you find (francese@dickinson.edu).

4/1/13

Both the Greek and Latin core lists are now available via the smart (and free) flashcard program Mnemosyne, thanks to Alex Lee, a graduate student in classics at the University of Chicago. This excellent program includes a tagging feature, which allows for easy targeted learning of groups of cards, and most importantly it adjusts to your learning progress to give you cards that you are less familiar with more frequently. Highly recommended. Alex has written a detailed set-up tutorial on the DCC blog. Thank you Alex!

2/6/13

The verbs in the Greek core vocabulary lists are now fully equipped with principal parts. This task, which should have happened last summer, was undertaken better late than never by Chris Francese, with a lot of help from the verb list in Hayes and Nimis' edition of Lucian's True Story. I checked things with the TLG, and the final list was greatly improved thanks to the eagle-eyed proof reading of Eric Casey. For more on the principal parts in the DCC Greek list, see this post on the DCC blog, along with the interesting comments in the comment field below.

1/2/13

Peter Sipes has kindly made available a Google spreadsheet containing the DCC Core Latin Vocabulary.

12/6/2012

Members of the DCC team presented a NITLE seminar, hosted online via NITLE’s videoconferencing platform, and available to NITLE members. Official description:

"Collaborative Digital Scholarship Projects: The Liberal Art of Drupal." This seminar features members of the team behind the text annotation site Dickinson College Commentaries (faculty director, web developer, and students) who will discuss the problems, pitfalls, and opportunities of collaborating with Drupal in a liberal arts context. This seminar will be especially interesting to those interested in creating collaborative digital scholarship projects in a small college setting, as well as faculty in classical studies and other disciplines that work with text and commentaries.

Here is the Powerpoint presentation (2MB).