Harpokration, done but not even almost.

About eight months ago we announced a lightweight tool to support collaborative translation of Harpokration–we called it ‘Harpokration On Line.’ Well, we took our time (Mack finished a dissertation, John made serious progress on his, Josh did his first 24+ hour bike ride), and as of a couple days ago there is at least one rough translation (in some cases more than one) for every entry.

We had help from others. Chris de Lisle invested considerable effort, for which all should be grateful! And our colleague Matthew Farmer (U Missouri) signed on at the very moment when our to-do pile contained mainly entries that we had back-burnered, while we chewed through the easier ones! His timing (and efforts) couldn’t have been better!

So, we are done, but far from done. Now begins the process of correcting errors and infelicities, of which there will be many; adding new features to the tool (e.g. commentary, easy linking out to related digital resources such as Jacoby Online or Pleiades, enhanced encoding in the Greek and features built atop that, perhaps eventual reconciliation of text with Keaney as warranted). This is just a start really.

For next year we plan a course at Duke in which the students will (1) start translating their way through Photios’ Lexicon in similar fashion and (2) help design and implement expanded features for the translation tool. We will welcome collaborators on that effort as well!

So, here again, please feel free log in, fix, add, correct, disagree and so on (see instructions). Please note that we do handle login via google; so, if that is a deal-breaker for you, we apologize. We have a rough workaround for that and would be happy to test it out with a few folks, if any should wish. Happy harping.

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