Let me tell you about a little side-project I’m cooking up.

One of the great advantages Latin students have in seeking a lot of reading content, is that between the easy reading material that some Latin teachers are pumping out, and the products of the Direct Method, there’s a fair amount of reading material to get stuck into. (See here, here, here).

Not so with Greek. The Direct Method advocates produced not very much Greek, unfortunately. You can see some on the second half of that vivarium novum page. However they are not very accessible either.

So, what I’ve been doing is scouring the 18th and 19th century textbooks, a range of books with endless variations on “A First Greek Reader”. I have almost 30 in scanned pdfs. Some are more “directish method”, others are very traditional, almost all are far more advanced than “easy greek reading” should begin at.

The project:

• Digitise: create plain text copies of all the readings in these books.
• Lemmatise: lemmatise all the texts as well
• Gloss: produce a version with appropriate glossing to help readers
• Annotate: provide notes to go with each text to help readers
• Record: audio files for each text
• Scaffold: write Greek language content as both pre-reading and post-reading material.

Actually, there are some more things going on behind the scenes as well. Most of my side-projects these days involve overlapping and interlocking methods and goals. In this case, the goal is to create a digital resource of freely available material that helps bridge the long plateau between “1st year Greek” (not a real thing) and “fluently read authentic high-register ancient texts” (a real thing and quite difficult).

More on this, obviously, as it develops…

Actually, since I’ve penned this post, there are at least 2 people doing OCRs of this kind of material. So that means I’m probably going to shift my focus from simply digitising, to making more of this material more usable.