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A Companion
Website and Database for Speech Presentation in Homeric Epic
Posted:
19 Oct 2017 06:39 AM PDT
A Companion Website and Database for Speech Presentation in Homeric Epic
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Digital humanities have rich and largely unexplored potential
for philological research in Classics. I hope that making my database of all
the speeches presented in the Homeric epics available online will offer a
specific example of how new technological tools can enable Classicists to
develop innovative and fruitful approaches to the enduring questions that are
central to our discipline. My book, Speech Presentation in Homeric Epic (University
of Texas Press, 2012), explores how various ways of depicting speech shape
the narratives in the Homeric poems; similarly, this database and the kinds
of questions it allowed me to ask has shaped the scholarly narrative in my
book. I hope that making it directly available to all will shape future
scholarly inquiries, and that users of the database will tell me how they
have used it and what kinds of questions it has helped them to explore.
The origins of the database, as a personal research tool
developed incrementally over a long period of time, led the design in
somewhat different directions than it would have gone if broad
user-friendliness had been a top priority from the beginning. I hope that
this online database - unlike my personal FileMaker 9-generated version - is
clear and straightforward to use, for which I owe warm thanks to the LAITS staff who prepared it for online use,
especially Gavin Sellers and Lauren Moore. Moreover, some aspects of the data
are formatted differently for the online interface than they were in my
FileMaker version; this means that some searches that appear in my book
cannot be exactly replicated with the online database. Some kinds of
multi-field searches are not yet available at the time of release (July
2013), but we expect to make more kinds of functionality gradually available.
If you have requests or suggestions about this, please email me at database@utlists.utexas.edu
- we are eager to make the database as responsive as we can to users' needs.
The database has been proofread to a high, but not a perfect, standard of
accuracy.
The user notes are intended to complement the section
of the book's introduction that explains how the database was constructed
(introduction available here). A series
of screen shots under examples illustrate a few sample searches as a
way of explaining how the online interface works, and what kinds of searches
it is most suited to explore.
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Search
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About
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User Notes
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Examples![]()
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