People
Gregory R. Crane
Professor
Winnick Family Chair in Technology and Entrepreneurship
Editor-in-Chief, Perseus Project
Contact Info:
Tufts University
Department of Classical Studies
322 Eaton Hall
Medford, MA 02155
Office: 617.627.2435
Fax: 617.627.2896
Email Prof. Crane
Curriculum Vitae
Expertise:
Greek & Latin Language, Digital Humanities
Research:
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
traditional scholarly work 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.
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
Classical Studies 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.
From 1998 through 2006 he directed a grant from the Digital Library
Initiative to study general problems of digital libraries in the
humanities. Under the DLI-2 program, he worked on a range of topics,
including such topics as London, the history of Mechanics, and the
American Civil War. Each of these collections provided new insights into
the implications of such new electronic tools on learning. In 2006, he
produced a named entity identification system, published a 55 million
word collection, and authored several publications describing the
system.
With the rise of the Google Books project in 2004, he began to focus
upon the problems and opportunities that arise when whole libraries
rather than curated collections become available on-line. The broad
range of projects that he supported with support from the DLI-2 program,
the Institute for Museum and Library Services, and the Mellon Foundation
provided a broad foundation within which to frame his current generation
of research projects on Classical Studies at Perseus. Crane oversees the
overall research program at Perseus.
Crane is especially interested in helping the emerging
Cyberinfrastructure serve the needs of the humanities in general and
classical studies in particular.
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