Bringing it together - #1 in a series

The main reason I started writing this blog, after years of eschewing the “social internet” was to keep a public record of things, personal thoughts and experiences certainly, but mainly things related to the projects that occupy so much of my time.


I think that this might be particularly interesting to current or prospective students of Furman University, where I teach Ancient Greek in the Department of Classics.

My two main research projects these days are closely related. The first is the work I do for Casey Dué and Mary Ebbott, who are the Editors of the Homer Multitext, a project of the Center for Hellenic Studies of Harvard University; my friend Neel Smith and I work on the technological infrastructure for this digital-library project.

This project aims to collect as much real information about the history of Homeric poetry as possible, and share it with the widest possible audience in the most useful ways we can imagine. Along the way, the project’s editors hope to further their insights into the fundamental nature of the Homeric poems as oral compositions, products of a tradition of composition-in-performance (like jazz music) whose influence persisted long after the poems ceased to be songs to be sung and had become mainly written texts to be read and studied.

The second is my work with Brent Seales of the University of Kentucky’s Center for Visualization and Virtual Environments, on an NSF-funded project called “FoLIO: Framework for Longitudinal Image-based Organization”. I have worked closely with David Jacobs and Juan Garces of the British Library on this, as well.



This project aims to develop techniques and standards for organizing collections of images and registering them with each other in such a way as to allow measurement along different axes. For example, how can we organize images of a manuscript taken in 1900 and others taken in 2007 in such a way as to measure change in the physical artifact over time? Or, how can we organize the collection of a patient’s medical imagry that might include x-rays, MRI imagery, and ultrasounds, so that the same structures can be measured and compared precisely?

This work is nothing but pleasure for me, for a number of reasons. First, my professional collaborators are both brilliant, and great friends. Words cannot express what a luxury this is to me.

Second, my professional collaborators range from senior scholars to undergraduates at Furman University, and it is impossible to imagine this work going anywhere without all of their contributions.

So, in the postings that follow, I am going to try to describe each of these projects, include some pictures, and generally set the stage for the regular updates I plan to post this summer, as my collaborators and I pursue our projects in Greenville, as well as in England, France, and Spain.

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