Abstract: This talk explores (and argues for) the emergence of a new cultural informatics. This informatics applies scalable methods to generate, exchange and preserve knowledge about an open-ended set of cultures and languages, past, present and emergent. It can contribute not only traditional humanistic pursuits but issues of trade and security as well.

About the Speaker: Gregory Crane's interests are twofold. On the one hand, he has published on a wide range of ancient Greek authors (including articles on Greek drama and Hellenistic poetry and a book on the Odyssey). Much of his recent energy has been devoted to Thucydides; his book The Blinded Eye: Thucydides and the New Written Word appeared from Rowman and Littlefield in 1996; his second Thucydides book (The Ancient Simplicity: Thucydides and the Limits of Political Realism) was published by the University of California Press in 1998. He is currently conducting preliminary research for a planned book on Cicero.

At the same time, he has a long-standing interest in the relationship between the humanities and rapidly developing digital technology. He began this side of his work as a graduate student at Harvard when the Classics Department purchased its first TLG authors on magnetic tape in the summer of 1982. He developed a Unix-based full text retrieval system for the TLG that was widely used in North America and Europe in the middle 1980s. He also helped establish a typesetting consortium to facilitate scholarly publishing. Since 1985 he has been engaged in planning and development of the Perseus Project, which he directs as the Editor-in-Chief. Besides supervising the Perseus Project as a whole, he has been primarily responsible for the development of the morphological analysis system which provides many of the links within the Perseus database.

He is currently directing a $2,700,000 grant from the Digital Library Initiative to study general problems of digital libraries in the humanities. Current work is refining the classical collections in Perseus and establishing testbeds in other humanistic areas, ranging from ancient Egypt to nineteenth century US history. Much of his personal scholarship since 1998 has gone into expanding the Greco-Roman materials in Perseus, designing collections on such topics as London, the history of Mechanics, and the American Civil War. Each of these collections provides new insights into the implications of such new electronic tools on learning. He is particularly interested in the extent to which broadcast media such as the World Wide Web not only enhance the work of professional researchers and students in formal degree programs but create new audiences outside academia for cultural materials. His current research focuses on "computational humanities" and how this new field can help to democratize information without compromising intellectual rigor.

For more information, visit http://www.informedia.cs.cmu.edu/colloquia/