Twenty-First Century Perseus
Perseus research strides forward into the new century! In mid-July, the Perseus Project was chosen to receive a prestigious $2.7 million grant from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and a consortium of other governmental organizations. The multi-agency Digital Libraries Initiative, Phase Two is funding the Perseus Digital Library for the Humanities, supporting the collaborative work Perseus has begun with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Modern Language Association, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the Stoa: A Consortium for Electronic Publication in the Humanities, and special collections at Brandeis, the University of Pennsylvania, and Tufts.
Based on the premise that technological advances allow us to re-examine and better structure humanities publications, the Perseus Digital Library for the Humanities will build the framework for an interdisciplinary and expandable digital library. Our goals will be both to improve the ways that humanists can perform their intellectual work and to design materials that are more accessible to the vastly expanded audience already reached by the World Wide Web. Some categories of publication are obviously radically new. We can now, for example, imagine publishing archaeological reports as integrated multimedia databases including lavish imagery, 3D reconstructions, and the databases of all objects found, as well as narrative text. But even well-established documents (such as dictionaries) can (and must) be completely rethought if they are to take proper advantage of a digital environment.
With this grant, Perseus staff and collaborators will not only be able to enrich and expand the contents of the Perseus Digital Library; also, and more importantly, we will build and study new methods for delivering data in intelligent ways. We are working closely with project co-leaders and Tufts professors Rob Jacob (Computer Science) and Holly Taylor (Cognitive Psychology), as we structure and design electronic documents that work together seamlessly, develop standard, scalable methods for visualizing and accessing data, and study the impact of these new digital library materials on learning.
What does this mean for visitors to the Perseus WWW site? Over the next five years, some things you can expect to see include more comprehensive, automatic interlinking of resources, innovative interfaces, visualization environments for museum objects, sites, and geographic space, better searching tools; more and higher-quality data, and flexible, user-defined access to different resources within Perseus. For more information on the DLI2 grant, see the annoucement here.
document placed on-line 12/29/99, LMC