It's All Greek to Me!

When one is terminally unemployed, it seems wise to find interesting and practical ways to fill one's time.  Develop a new skill, say, or do something to help get that next interview.  I already volunteer at Oxfam, and I have great fun doing it.  However, I felt as though something was missing in my time-usage.  Something important that I couldn't quite put my finger on.  And then it hit me: I wasn't transcribing any Ancient Greek.

Fortuately, the fine fellows and females of Oxford University have been able to fill just such a gap.  Recently, they launched ancientlives.org, a website onto which they uploaded  tons of recently discovered Greek texts.  In terms of thousands of years old text, that's about as hot off the press as you can get.  I'm not sure I'm getting across the giddiness I get at the idea that these texts are previously untranslated.

Pictured:  My idea of a "fun night in"

There is, of course, a rather significant snag - I can't speak a word of Greek, ancient or otherwise.  Any other time, this would make me quite the usless drudge in a project dedicated to translating the stuff, but not here.  See, the researchers have created a special interface wherein all you have to do is identify the symbols, and the pattern you create gets entered into a database somewhere in the ether, which proper Greek-speaking researchers can access later on.

I hope that gives you some scale of the project - there are so many of these texts that the researchers are asking for volunteers who don't even understand the things to help them.  This is an entirely original idea on their part, but I still feel like I might be making some kind of a difference in joining in.

 

I might not understand it, but I can still enjoy it, dammit!

 Ok, so I can see that the appeal of trudging through all this unreadable text might not be instantly apparent to some of you, but here's some news.  Some of the texts found with the ones online have already been translated.  Amongst them are new poems by Sappho, and fragments of unknown Sophocles plays.  Even more amazing, a new story about Jesus has been discovered, written in 300 AD.  Just to clarify, that doesn't happen every other day.  Whilst there'll doubtless be lots of shopping lists and bills in the mix, maybe there's an undiscovered treasure.  If there is, someone's got to find it, and who wants to pass up that chance?

 

Shopping list?  It's clearly a lost Aescylus monologue about groceries!

This project's going to be around for a while, it seems.  If it goes well, the people behind it have promised to release another 200,000 or so texts on to the site.  Two hundred thousand.  That's a lot.  I don't know about you, but even if I can't understand it in its current form, it'd be pretty exciting to be a part of such a monumental undertaking.  This looks set to be the Classics' equivalent of the public submissions to the first OED: a little messy at first, but fundamentally changing the way things are done.  Who knows?  Maybe we'll see more projects like this in the future.  I, for one, look forward to the prospect!

TTFN!