No ordinary book learning

Tuesday, 26th July 2011

It’s a rare life to be a Classics don, and now you can try your hand at it. The process is remarkably simple: go to Oxford University’s Ancient Lives website, where the university’s enormous archive of ancient manuscripts has been stored, and take a very quick tutorial.

After that, you will be presented with an untranslated fragment. You can read the letters or hieroglyphs by matching them up with those contained in a transliteration tool situated beneath the fragment; you can also measure papyri using a simple scrolling tool. The aim is to discover if the document has been translated by an academic. If it has been, then you can read it and work out what the ancient symbols signify; if it has not been translated, then your transcribed fragment will be sent to a Don, who will translate it for you and for posterity. Finally, there is an unusually genteel internet forum to discuss the findings. It’s great fun, provided that dead languages excite you.

The ‘democratisation of academia’ is in vogue at the moment and this resource is in the same league as the British Library’s recent online collation of eighteenth century documents and Faber&Faber’s Waste Land mobile phone App. In fact, the Ancient Lives resource probably exceeds those two as an aide to learning, allowing bemused students to see how easy it is to master the ancient Greek alphabet, and allowing them to get their fingers on a priceless and perhaps previously unseen artefact, albeit virtually. It has the potential to inspire a renaissance in the ailing Classics.

Blog Tags: Academia , Classics , Education , Internet , Non-fiction