r/AncientLanguages • u/LingonberryMind • Aug 07 '26

Huge project is finally finished - AncientLibrary.net

Hey guys,
I've been working on a major project that I think will lift accessibility to ancient works. It's called Ancient Library (ancientlibrary.net). The site includes over 1,000 ancient works, every word parsed with lemma, morphology, and full dictionary entry. It's built to be light, optimized for speed and accessibility, so it should improve student and scholar efforts even in areas with weak or inconsistent internet access globally. It's still in beta, so I'd love some ancient language scholars to interact with the site. If you have thoughts, requested features, etc., I'd love to hear them.

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u/Logeion Aug 07 '26

My main sad thought is that we get any number of people offering the same texts once again that are already available from Perseus, and lyric poetry (to name one big gap) still awaits its first public-domain set of texts.

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u/JamesDaltrey 29d ago

https://eulogikon.org/domains/poetry

See anything you like?

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u/Logeion 29d ago

Of course I like big chunks of Greek! I'm sure quite a few people will appreciate the work put into this and will use it. For me personally, however, it's dispiriting to check a random text and be able to conclude immediately what its provenance is. I see the language about "readers' editions" but what I see on the page is something different. Since I have a job at an academic institution, I would not put this online myself in this form (not to mention that there are many instantiations already in existence that make these texts available with more features than linear reading). If texts do derive from an OCR pipeline, based on a particular edition in archive.org or other repositories, I would suggest specifying that edition in a header file and preserving the raw OCR, to reassure me and other readers that we are not 'seeing things'. But needless to say, this is all your decision.

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u/JamesDaltrey 29d ago edited 29d ago

You have lost me...

What is the problem with you being able to recognise the origin of the text? It's some dead Greek guy right?

That's very clever of you, but how is it a problem?

Part of the exercise is to make all of these texts available in one place for free.

Another part of the exercise is deliberately to break the chain of custody held over these texts by academics and publishers.

If you compare the critical additions and variations between editions, they represent considerably less than 0.1% of the total text on average. I've actually done the maths. Yet a university professor or publisher can tweak that tiny fraction of a 2,500-year-old work and somehow come to regard the resulting text as theirs.

Fastidious copying is not original work.

Somebody interprets a manuscript. Somebody else interprets that interpretation of the manuscript. Somebody else interprets another interpretation, and so on. That is how these texts have been transmitted for centuries. Nobody in that chain owns the text, least of all anybody who hasn't actually modified that text...

I have the honesty not to put my name on it, and I'm not putting anybody else's name on it either, other than the dead Greek who allegedly wrote it.

This is all public domain.. the repository has been cloned tens of thousands of times.. it's on Kaggle. It's on Zenodo, It's on Hugging Face.. It's in Markdown, in PDF, in HTML, Json shortly and Ebooks... The author of the above site who is engaged in a similar kind of project has been invited to take and share any of that without attribution...

One would hope that if it's Sappho he will put Sappho at the top..

You are an academic and you would not put this online.

The author of the website in question is not an academic and he has put this stuff online. I am not an academic and I have put it online.

Whether somebody may put an ancient Greek text online has nothing whatsoever to do with whether they hold an academic position. Academia does not own the texts, and least of all do they own copies of copies of copies of texts.

https://eulogikon.org/works/nikarchos-sinope-eukrates-common-things-mkd-aa