Crane, 'Response:  What Is Perseus?  What Is It Not?', Bryn Mawr Classical Review v3n05
URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/bmcr/bmcr-v3n05-crane-response

3.5.24, Response:  What Is Perseus?  What Is It Not? 
Comments on the BMCR Review of Perseus

Those of us who are involved in developing the Perseus database
read the review of Perseus 1.0 published by BMCR with great
interest.  All five reviewers obviously spent a great deal of time
working with the database, and a number of fundamental questions
were raised.  Obviously, the development of Perseus 1.0 is only the
start of a much longer process, and many things will change as
published versions of the database grow and mature.  In the long
run, most of the present objections may be met -- but in the long
run, as Keynes observed, we are all of us dead.  Even if we can't
do everything immediately, we need to consider the short term as
well.

The BMCR review of Perseus 1.0 deserves comment on a number of
points.  Whereas most reviewers are able to grasp the central ideas
of a well-written book, there are so many functions in Perseus 1.0
and some of the most important of these are so unexpected that
crucial points can easily escape notice.  No single reviewer was
able to examine each major feature in Perseus 1.0, and this had a
significant effect on some of the conclusions which they drew.  In
addition, some of their desiderata were options that we had planned
but that, over time and often to our surprise, turned out not to be
feasible for Perseus 1.0.  In some cases, we made definite, but
very debatable, decisions. Without attempting to assert that we
invariably chose the proper course (which we surely did not), it
seems appropriate for us to give some background as why various
decisions were taken.

This response thus sets out to provide some additional background
on what was done and thus to advance criticism and analysis of the
database as it stands.  Even as these words are being composed, we
are hard at work constructing the new version of the database that
will be shown at the New Orleans APA/AIA convention.  Work on
Perseus 2.0 will continue until the summer of 1993 and the next
version should be available in late 1993 or early 1994.  The more
comments and criticism we receive now, the more able we will be to
make Perseus 2.0 as useful as possible.

The discussion which follows begins with one aspect of the database
that escaped notice during the review: anyone interested in Greek
language or culture should explore the searching tools built into
Perseus.  From there, we move to the general problem of meeting the
expectations that we raise: we recommend that, for the foreseeable
future, users evaluate versions of Perseus on what it adds to our
capabilities rather than on the features or data that it lacks. 
The fourth section explores the tension between features and
long-term survival.  Many functions that appeared in early versions
of Perseus do not appear in Perseus 1.0, because considerations of
size and the long-term need to move Perseus from one computer to
another require a simpler and more restrained model.  Finally, we
identify what we see to be the most important long-term consequence
that such databases can have.
1.   Searching for objects or words: some overlooked features

First, none of the reviewers discussed the "Object Keyword Search"
for art objects.  Although the collection of objects in Perseus 1.0
is relatively small, students and even scholars can quickly find
many representations of material culture (e.g., musical
instruments, generic scenes).  Moreover, this kind of keyword
lookup will become progressively more important as the database
grows.  Reactions to its design and usefulness now could make a big
difference for Perseus 2.0, which will, for example, contain c.
1,500 vases, rather than 150.

Second, Perseus 1.0 is perhaps most innovative in its handling of
texts. Perseus is a first-generation project in classical art and
archaeology, but a second-generation project on the text side. 
Many of us who worked on Perseus had become interested in computer
applications to classics by developing text retrieval tools for the
Thesaurus Linguae Graecae.  Perseus 1.0 thus contains a relatively
small number of texts, but scholars and students alike can do
things with these texts that they cannot do in any other system. In
a traditional text retrieval system, to find examples of fe/rw, one
must enter a group of strings (e.g., fer-, ois-, enhnox- etc.).  In
Perseus 1.0, however, one can type in fe/rw and Perseus 1.0 will
automatically retrieve oi)/sw, e)nh/noxa, etc. This is possible
because we spent much of the last eight years developing an
elaborate system that can analyze Greek words.  We use this system
to analyze every lower-case word in every author in Perseus and
store the results in a database.  Classicists can effectively
search these electronic texts for ei)mi/ or i(/hmi or for any other
morphologically complex form.  Such searches are, however,
qualitatively different from those which have been generally
available.  This feature alone gives the serious as well as the
novice student of Greek a significant new tool.

The morphological analysis feature still has some problems.  The
morphological analyzer, for example, contains a number of features
to determine the dialect of the form, but, for simplicity's sake,
we chose to follow the traditional dialectology such as one finds
in Smyth with occasionally unnerving consequences.  We had,
therefore, waited with anticipation to see what weaknesses our
reviewers would find or what suggestions they would make.  We were
surprised to learn that a problem in setting up SMK GreekKeys
prevented Richard Hamilton from learning how to type in Greek
accents and that this, compounded with a lack of emphasis in our
documentation, had prevented him from even noticing the new
searching capabilities.  As a result he concluded that Perseus 1.0
could only serve as a research tool for "scholars not able to read
Greek, a prospect that turns my heart to stone." We understood this
physiological sensation very well as we read these words.

It is easy to see, in retrospect, how such a problem could have
arisen.  The "Greek Word Search" does not occur in the
"Philological Tools" section of the documentation, but under "Word
Searches," and the picture illustrating a Greek word search shows
the blank search screen without showing the results of an exemplary
search -- a printed search screen that automatically retrieved
h)/negx' (Aesch.  PV 638) and oi)/sesqai (Lib.  992) with fe/rw
would have caught the attention of anyone who has toiled with
existing search programs. Users of Perseus who are especially
interested in the Greek language should therefore spend some time
not only with the Greek word search but also with the English-Greek
word list described on pp. 76-7 of the documentation.  Not many
classicists can, for example, quickly name a half-dozen Greek words
used for "wallet." Anyone seriously exploring a concept or semantic
field in Greek stands to benefit from this feature of Perseus.  We
also suggest that users explore the English translation as a new
tool to augment searching.  If one is interested in temples in
Thucydides, for example, searching the English translation will
locate to\ Lewko/reion kalou/menon at 1.20.2, to\ H(/raion at
1.24.7, tou= E)leusini/ou at 2.17.1, to\ A)pollw/nion at 2.91.1
etc., where i(ero/n has been left out of the Greek.  Even a
translation, when converted into an electronic form, can in such a
fashion help the most knowledgeable Hellenist.

2.   What expectations can Perseus 1.0 meet?

James O'Donnell is right when he observes that the ambitious goals
of Perseus 1.0 are its greatest defect.  If we had constrained our
goals, Perseus 1.0 would be much easier to evaluate.  A
computerized database can be enormous, but even a smaller dataset
can allow us to do things that we could not otherwise do.  Perseus
1.0 simply does not, for example, contain enough material to
support encyclopedic research in art history, but this does not
mean that this version has nothing to offer advanced users.  The
potential of Perseus should not obscure its smaller, but
nonetheless tangible, present advantages.

Perseus 1.0, for example, contains detailed images of sixty-four
vases that we photographed ourselves.  Many of these vases had
never before been published in any form (that is one reason why a
total of only 137 vases appear in 1.0 -- we needed to do much more
work on basic documentation than we had anticipated).  Some had
been published, but not adequately.  Harvard 1960.236, for example,
is a large kalyx krater by the Kleophrades Painter and an important
illustration of his work.  We include 111 views of this object and
Perseus 1.0 will allow serious students of Greek vase painting --
whether professional researchers or those who find themselves
attracted to the subject -- to study this object in much greater
detail than was possible before.  More important, perhaps, Perseus
1.0 contains the first full and detailed photography (c. 400 views)
of both the east and the hitherto unpublished west pediments from
the Temple of Aphaia on Aegina.  If we had published these
photographs as a separate, $125 paper catalogue, no one would
question the fact that we had contributed to the published record;
those publishing research which touched upon these objects would,
even if they had their own private photographs with which to work,
still cite our publication for its visual documentation.  Likewise,
if we had dumped out the morphological data and just printed a
"semi-lemmatized" index to Pausanias that tied, for example, all
the forms of fe/rw under a single entry, everyone would accept that
this was a research tool, but they would object that it was too
specialized and boring to serve in teaching.

The problem that we face is, of course, that we are not trying to
build a database with limited and well-defined functionality.  The
ambitions which drive our work not only pose technical problems,
but raise expectations so high that users inevitably find
themselves, at least for a time, disappointed with the reality.

As we developed the documentation for Perseus 1.0 and helped Yale
University Press design the brochure, we were concerned that those
using Perseus 1.0 should not come to this tool with unrealistic
expectations.  While we accepted that publishers' brochures adopt
a somewhat enthusiastic rhetoric, we insisted that the Perseus
brochure list precisely how much material Perseus 1.0 contained
(only 137 vases, for example and ten authors). The documentation
for Perseus 1.0 opens with an overview (vii-x) that attempted to
outline the strengths and limits of the database.  The general
documentation (in particular, Appendix B, "The Twelve Labors of
Perseus," pp. 105-109) was intended to help people work through
ways in which the database could be used.  Finally, the guided
tours section of the documentation touches on every tool and
feature of the database, so that the novice user who has just
opened the package can get at least a brief glimpse of the
capabilities of the system.

Clearly, we need to do more to make our intentions and assumptions
clearer.  While the vastly greater scale of Perseus 2.0 will
obviate some criticisms, our experience suggests that the more we
provide, the better people will understand what is possible and the
more they will want.  Electronic tools, by their size and
flexibility, breed curiosity rather than satisfaction. Several of
the BMCR reviewers discussed the lack of focus in the presentation
of the Perseus materials, if it is to be used as a teaching tool;
they point out that it lacks extensive secondary sources, a
unifying vision of a problem or set of problems, and specific links
across different parts of the material.  First, we should make it
clear that we are not trying to replace the instructor or give
Perseus a dominant authorial voice -- we talked to a great many
classicists early on in our work and the vast majority made it
clear that they had their own ideas of how and what they wanted to
teach.  We have thus sought to provide a multivalent system with
basic tools.  Since it is, as one reviewer points out, too early to
decide exactly how such electronic databases are best used in
teaching and research, we thought it best to leave that prerogative
up to our users.  To this end, we have emphasized the collection
and organization of primary material, and leave it to the human
instructor to decide how best to integrate this resource into his
or her work. In addition, we tried to provide some tools that will
facilitate navigation for all users, such as the lemmatized Greek
word search and the keyword database for archaeological objects. 
It is these, specifically electronic, search and retrieval tools
that make Perseus different from the books on Jerome's or a
student's desk.

3.   Technical constraints: balancing longevity and immediate use

Any humanist developing a complex academic database must confront
two opposing forces.  First, we had to build for the long term. 
Classicists create documents that must last for decades.  Unlike
many scientists, for example, we do not spend most of our time
working with publications that are less than five years old.  We
designed Perseus from the start to be, as much as possible,
independent of any particular system or program.  Pictures are
stored archivally as slides and can be redigitized as technology
improves. Texts are encoded in a powerful format called SGML. 
Tabular data is stored in standard relational databases.  Nothing
in Perseus 1.0 is tied to any one program or computer, and much of
our energy has gone into making sure that the data that we
collected would become increasingly useful as computer systems
became more powerful, rather than drift into obsolescence.  Equally
important, Perseus was built to grow larger.  It is easy to create
a useful, small database that collapses under its own weight as it
becomes larger.  Much of our effort has gone into making Perseus
"scale" properly, so that Perseus as a whole as well as its various
components can expand over time.

Second, we wanted to create something that served a significant
group of people in a reasonable period of time.  The long term
always extends into the future, and visionary projects have a
tendency to remain visions.  After much hard thought and debate, we
chose to develop a tool that would run on a system that was as
flexible as possible but that was also accessible to a wide range
of individuals.  On the one hand, we had for years developed
searching tools in the Unix operating system and we considered
developing Perseus on powerful, but expensive, Unix workstations. 
Had we done this, we would now have a much more flexible database
(and one better suited to the needs of researchers); but even today
few classicists have Unix workstations with graphics capabilities
on their desks, and our audience would have been small. Instead of
helping democratize information, we would have appealed to a tiny
elite.  On the other hand, we could have built something that would
run on a very inexpensive machine running DOS (and, ultimately,
Windows), but we could not have created anything nearly as useful
as we have on the Macintosh.  The software tools and general
environment in the DOS world were not as powerful as those offered
by the Macintosh when we began work in 1987.

Our goal in 1987 was to create something that would run on a
Macintosh system that cost less than $3,000.  As of November 1992,
we have exceeded that goal.  A thrifty shopper could put together
a Macintosh LC II, color monitor and CD ROM player for about
$2,000.  Ultimately, we hope that not only all professors of
classics, but every serious student as well, will be able to own
their own copies of Perseus.

4.   Beyond the carrel

These requirements have forced us to be restrained and to emphasize
fundamental, although often unglamorous, tasks.  Anyone who
compares Perseus 1.0 with the Perseus Sampler that we distributed
in 1988 and 1989 as an example of what we planned to build will
find that Perseus 1.0 is, in many ways, much simpler than what we
had planned.  We actually began work in 1987/1988 by building the
kinds of dynamic maps, tools for automatically juxtaposing vase
paintings, talking documents, detailed tutorials, etc. that Lee
Pearcy calls for.  His criticisms came as something of a surprise,
and brought home to us how far our thinking had evolved in the past
five years.  It was as if someone had studied our earlier plans and
were chiding us for stream-lining our immediate intentions.

The problem with many attractive applications revolves around
standards.  Hundreds of useful software tools developed in the
1980s have vanished, because software requires constant maintenance
and periodic major revision.  Until well-developed,
system-independent standards for multimedia documents appear, the
kinds of applications suggested by Lee Pearcy will tend to be tied
to a particular system or application.  If Perseus is going to have
a long-term existence, then it must be constructed in such a way
that we can move it from one system to another with the least
possible effort. Converting generic databases into a version of
Perseus for the Apple Macintosh running Hypercard has grown
increasingly automated, but it still requires at least of month of
concentrated effort by several people.  As the basic textual and
visual materials are completed, and as the overall architecture of
Perseus becomes more fully developed, it will be possible to
develop even more sophisticated tools.  If we do not show restraint
and discipline now, however, then the database will grow too
complex and will collapse under its own weight.

To us, the question is not whether we should build a large database
or create a highly focused tool, such as Robert Winter's splendid
hypertextual introduction to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, published
by the Voyager Company.  Rather, we built Perseus to provide the
infrastructure that would, among other things, allow someone to
build such a focused tool for a specific topic such as Aristophanes
or Greek religion.  We want to provide a foundation that increases
in size but is stable enough so that others can extend it. 
Classicists do not use textbooks, and our early research made it
clear that those teaching about ancient Greece were interested in
examples of pedagogy, but that they create their own syntheses. 
Perseus is thus not a curriculum or even a course, but a tool
whereby others can reconceptualize what they do and develop their
own courses.

As the basic database takes shape, we look forward to including
contributions of various kinds from a wide variety of sources. 
Individuals will be able to contribute new translations or
editions, interpretative essays, pictures, drawings, or even
software modules.  From a practical point of view, one could create
an electronic course on, for example, vase painting that worked
with, but was separate from, Perseus.  The course itself might be
distributed on floppy disk and contain its own links into the
Perseus database -- a number of us who have used Perseus in
teaching have already created small versions of such "add-ons."
Likewise, a written document can simply direct its readers to
specific pieces of the database.

5.   Beyond incunabula: How does the medium really change?

Lee Pearcy raised a major problem that all designers of
hypertextual databases confront.  He asks whether we are not
creating a "horseless carriage," and failing to look beyond the
limiting paradigms of print.  Builders of hypertext more frequently
ponder the limits of early film, in which a static camera faced a
stage and imitated the experience of someone watching a play. It
was D. W. Griffith who, with his epic (and racist) film, Birth of
a Nation, introduced close-ups, pans, zooms and the other basic
elements which distinguish film from theater.  More academic
hypertext builders might think of the early printed books, the
incunabula which were designed to imitate the appearence of
manuscripts.  We all run the same risk of perpetuating, rather than
transcending, traditional limits and preconceptions.

Anyone who has tried to introduce electronic tools into the
curriculum has, however, encountered the problem that computers are
already too different and disorienting for the novice users.  In
the late 1980s, the Apple Macintosh redefined the paradigm of
computing because its interface appealed to what was familiar and
sought to ease the transition from print to the electronic medium. 
Computers are revolutionizing the way we work and even think, but
they must do so incrementally, building on prior experience,
solving old problems even as they open up new vistas.  The BMCR
review reminded us how different and foreign Perseus 1.0 is, and
how difficult it is for those who have not worked with it for years
to become familiar with what it can and cannot do.

The historical model of print has had a profound impact upon our
work and upon the goals that we have set for ourselves.  The
automated printing press stabilized our texts, made possible the
great project of modern textual criticism and allowed us to reverse
the decline in textual accuracy.  But the modern scholarly edition,
important as it is to us, is hardly the most important consequence
of print.  Print revolutionized scholarship in humanities, but it
did quite a bit more.

The printing press did not simply redefine the tools with which
intellectuals worked.  It also lowered the cost of print so much
and made books so accessible that an entirely new class of reader
emerged.  Farmers and shop-keepers rejected the intellectual
authority of the church and insisted that they could read the text
themselves and make up their own minds.  Print served as a catalyst
for social change that led to the best aspects of modern democratic
society.  Print had this effect not only because it helped the
traditional intellectual elites work more effectively, but because
it disseminated knowledge to new segments of society and thus
redefined the class of those with the ability to draw their own
conclusions.

Many of those who work with Perseus are anxious to define it as
either a teaching tool or as a research tool.  Underlying this
distinction is a pernicious dichotomy that splits the world into
two extreme groups: the undergraduate population which needs (but
is only imperfectly capable of) enlightenment vs. the professional
classicists, who have laboriously mastered the tools of our trade,
assimilated a deep understanding of the ancient languages,
familiarized ourselves with the secondary scholarship and become
capable of evaluating and even altering the sum of received wisdom. 
In the middle, graduate students struggle painfully upwards in
their long and dangerous ascent from the general populace to the
elite.  In this model, the omniscient specialists stride across
their areas of expertise, carefully developing their own work,
keeping to their own turf and pumping any interlopers full of
intellectual birdshot.
The first part of this piece pointed to some specific electronic
tools in Perseus 1.0 that allow the researcher and the
undergraduate to perform their traditional tasks more effectively,
and such resources will only increase in number and in power, both
in Perseus and elsewhere.  Classicists stand to gain a tremendous
amount from the new technology.  But if we are to understand the
broader implications of such technological tools, we might consider
a third category of thinker whom we all know and may admire, but
who is often (as in the the BMCR review) overlooked: the specialist
in one field who wishes to work with material from another.

Deep divisions exist even within classics, and our habits do much
to reinforce these divisions.  Perseus 1.0, for example, includes
fifty illustrations for a given vase because we do not accept the
distinction between specialists in vase painting (who have to see
every scratch on the surface of the vase) and non-specialists (for
whom one or two good pictures are adequate).  Many people really do
want to see the details as well as the big picture.  Students
complain when an object does not have multiple views and crucial
details (the rendering of a musical instrument, the precise
expression of a mouth) are obscure.  One classicist being shown
Perseus noticed that the same scenes of Artemis Mistress of Beasts
and of Ajax bearing Achilles appear on both handles of the Francois
Vase.  He set the two images side by side and began comparing the
similarities and differences.  In this case, however, we did not
have details of every figure and the lack was keenly felt.  We
wanted to see how details of dress, facial expression, or gesture
differed, but the pictures before us (which were as good as we
would have expected in print) restricted the questions that we
wanted to ask and truncated our study.  There are logistical
reasons for taking many pictures -- once you send a photographer to
Paris and get a vase out of its case, you might as well record
everything -- but one real motivation for such coverage is to raise
the level of questions that the person working with Perseus can
pose of published images.  Perseus includes exhaustive visual
documentation because we believe that many objects deserve a more
detailed and thoughtful consideration than four or five grainy
black and white prints stimulate.  Nor does the primacy of the
specialist suffer -- the more attention these objects attract, the
more valued and important the contribution of the specialist.

More generally, there are many problems for which no one is
completely qualified.  No classicist can master all those ideas
relevant to our day-to-day work developed in anthropology, literary
criticism, economic history, cognitive science, etc.  Conversely,
scholars concentrating in other disciplines simply do not have the
time to become fluent masters of Greek.  At Harvard, for example,
the history of science graduate seminars on Aristotle explicitly
state that knowledge of Greek is not necessary.  If an historian of
biology writes a book which covers Aristotle's Historia Animalium,
are we to dismiss the strengths of this research -- such as a
knowledge of the history of biology that no full time classicist
could ever match -- because the author does not also know Greek?
Likewise, the eminent sociologist Orlando Patterson recently
published a book called Freedom in the Making of Western Culture
(Basic Books 1991).  It would be easy for a classicist to work
through this book and underline statements with which specialists
in Greek might quibble, but no classicist could replace Patterson's
particular angle of vision on the problem of freedom.  Far from
dismissing or discouraging such forays into our field, we need to
do everything in our power to attract more of them and to help such
work be as good as possible.  In the United States, at least,
classics only begins to assume its proper role when it extends
beyond the thin ranks of professional classicists.

As Perseus gets larger and its databases grow fuller, it will
inevitably become more and more useful to traditional specialists
within classics.  But if a Perseus -- or a Perseus-like database --
has the potential to stimulate revolutionary change, it will be by
transforming the way in which the researcher, with detailed
training in some other field, can work with our subject.  We are
not advocating dilettantism or the lowering of overall intellectual
standards.  There are philosophers, historians of science, experts
in religion, anthropologists, literary critics, social historians,
etc. who have expertise that could do much to strengthen our
understanding of antiquity. Two of those who have worked on Perseus
from its inception have, for example, spent a significant amount of
time studying Akkadian and integrating Near Eastern materials into
their research on Greece.  The morphological lookup and dictionary
tools in Perseus are often dismissed as cribs for undergraduates,
but if such basic tools existed for Akkadian texts, a lot more
classicists could pursue far more interesting problems than is now
possible.  Our frustrations and desires, as we toiled through
various fields outside of classics, have guided us in much of our
work to date.  We are building Perseus for ancient Greece today so
that we can hasten the day when similar resources may appear for
other disciplines beyond our expertise but nevertheless of interest
to us as classicists.

When all is said and done, Perseus has already begun to meet its
most important goal.  When we began planning Perseus in 1985, we
wanted to see what would happen when we created a single,
heterogeneous database with many kinds of evidence about a
particular culture.  We wanted to see what would work and what
would fall short of our expectations.  Above all, we wanted to give
classicists and students of all cultures a concrete object of
analysis, to begin moving the discussion out of the subjunctive and
optative. Electronic tools of various kinds will become more
numerous and significant in the years to come, but these tools can
evolve in very different ways and can cause harm as well as good. 
The better we understand what we want (or what we don't want), the
better prepared we shall all be to see that these new tools support
the values in which we individually believe.

Gregory Crane and the other creators of Perseus