Formally entitled "Herodotus," this class is a seminar-size group in advanced ancient Greek, with eight students enrolled, from the sophomore to the senior class. (Students must have the equivalent of two years of college-level training in ancient Greek to enroll; all the students this time have at least three years of ancient Greek or the equivalent.) It meets twice a week (Tuesday and Thursday), seventy-five minutes each time. It is not a new course at Holy Cross, but this is the first time that Perseus has been used in it. The curricular needs of the Classics Department this semester precluded my offering a course that would be a special "Perseus course" like the one I taught a year ago. As with that course, I will record my impressions of this course in this "stream-of-consciousness" journal, which represents my thoughts recorded with some subsequent editing. (Remarks enclosed in brackets [ ] are later additions to the text of this kind.) I plan to make periodic entries as new material or different kinds of assignments are introduced in the course.
The course is meant to be an intense study of the language and the content of selections from the work of the fifth-century B.C. author Herodotus, whose book generally referred to by the title Histories covers Greek history from the mid-sixth century B.C. to 479-8 B.C. (The entire Histories is included in Perseus in both Greek and in English translation.) The Holy Cross Classics Dept. offers so-called author courses such as this one as the pinnacle of its curriculum in ancient Greek (as in Latin). The primary emphasis of author courses is intended to be the syntax, vocabulary, style, and content of the author under study, with the majority of class time devoted to translation of the Greek text, commentary upon it, and discussion of its interpretation and significance. Since the students are our most advanced ones, however, it is normally expected that they will also read and critique modern scholarship on the author's work and undertake projects involving interpretation of the text, investigation of topics suggested by the text, and so on. Our textbooks are the edition with commentary of Histories Book 1 published in the Bryn Mawr Commentary Series, whose notes are meant to help students with the syntax and the Ionic dialect of Herodotus, and the translation of the Herodotus by David Grene entitled The History of Herodotus (Chicago, 1987). Further selections will be assigned from books 7-9 of Herodotus, for which there are no Bryn Mawr commentary editions. We will therefore use the Oxford Classical Text edition for those selections. Students will be expected to read the entire Histories in translation. We will spend most of our time reading selections from Book 1 because the episode of Croesus in it serves such an important purpose in setting a complex agenda for the Histories as a whole and is such an entertaining story.
As implied above, this course has not been billed as a special "Perseus course," unlike my course last spring (1994), on which I also reported in a journal. Rather, my goal is to make Perseus a part of the normal apparatus of instruction, so far as possible, and to see how students react to it and work with it in this context. Given the nature of the course, we will make use primarily of the philological tools in Perseus. That Perseus is purposely not singled out as a raison d'être of the course poses some problems for evaluation, at least of the kind that we have so far done in trying to understand how Perseus is functioning in classes. If the evaluators, as previously done, come into the class early on and ask questions about students' expectations of Perseus in this course, it is predictable that this unexpected focus of attention on Perseus via an outside authority's visit will lead to students becoming confused about or even developing incorrect assumptions about the place Perseus is meant to have in the course. I don't see how to solve the incompatibility between, on the one hand, my goal of having Perseus just be one of the tools (on the level of scholarly reference books, etc.) that a student is expected to be able to use to be a fully participating member of an advanced class, and, on the other hand, the special emphasis that Perseus would inevitably receive if an outside observer comes in to give Perseus special attention as something whose use is being evaluated. [Subsequently the evaluators and I decide not to have them visit the class.]
We will have both Perseus 1.0 (from CD-ROM) and the beta version of Perseus 2.0 (over the network) available for this course, but I plan to use 2.0beta unless something happens to force us to rely on 1.0. (We have Ethernet connections to a Power Mac in the department operating as our Perseus 2.0beta server. It has 2.0beta on a 3 gig hard drive and uses system 7 file sharing. We have a DAT backup for the drive but no redundant hard drive in case of failure.) We still face considerable difficulties in making access as simple as possible. We have two Mac LCs with 4 Mb of RAM available in the department for students to use during business hours. These machines can run 1.0 from the CD-ROM adequately, but they don't currently have enough memory to run 2.0beta over the network. This year we are supposed to have appropriate Macs available to students for extended hours six days a week (no Saturday hours) in our new Multimedia Resource Center in a nearby building. These machines can run 1.0 locally from CD-ROM or connect to our server in the department over the network. The MRC does not yet have a staff adequately trained to show students how to mount 2.0beta over the network, and my colleague Neel Smith is working to provide as automated a procedure as possible to do the mounting. We really need a server in the MRC because, with the server in the dept., it will not be possible to reboot after crashes (e.g., following power outages aut sim.) after business hours or on Sundays because there will be no one here to do the rebooting. It cannot be done remotely from the MRC. We will attempt to get a server in the MRC during the course of the semester. For class I bring a Centris 650 with an Ethernet connector into our seminar room, where I connect to our server through a network data port. We use a Sharp LCD projector to show the monitor video display on a screen at the front of the room. We have room darkening shades and track lighting on rheostats this year for the first time, which greatly improves the visibility of the projected image.
The most difficult issue in terms of computing is how to get the students up to speed without eating up lots of class time to train them. We don't have a MRC support staff to do this, although we are trying to get our departmental student assistants to the level of expertise at which they can train students. I will try the usual combination of a certain amount of in-class instruction (just as I spend time teaching students how to use high-level reference tools in conventional printed form, such as scholarly bibliographies and professional lexicons). But I want Perseus to seem like, in the words of my colleague Neel Smith, "like part of the furniture," that is, like something that every advanced student in Classics takes for granted as a necessary part of the took kit for doing our subject.
Although I have planned what I want to read from Herodotus if we go at the pace that I expect and I have planned a series of assignments using Perseus, I do not hand out a written syllabus at the beginning of the course. I do explain my plans orally in detail and tell the students to write them down in a notebook. But I avoid giving out a written syllabus for two reasons: (1) because my experience in author courses is that it is important to find the right pace for the mix of student proficiency that occurs even in advanced courses and that setting out a scheme of translation assignments in Greek before that pace has been identified can lead to unhealthy dissonance among the students, with them thinking either that they are too poorly qualified to keep up with the pace of the assignments (if they are too long) or that the course is not demanding and therefore not worthy of their full attention if the pace appears too leisurely; and (2) because I think giving out a semester-long written syllabus in this sort of advanced author course implies that is all the students have to do in the course and thus implies a passive attitude toward learning instead of the self-starting curiosity and energy to learn as much as possible that I believe advanced level students should cultivate and that Perseus certainly encourages. The implication is that, if we discover something exciting along the way, we can and will devote some attention to that discovery, while always keeping our overall goals in mind. I try to keep this vision constantly in front of the students by giving frequent oral updates on how I see our progress and how we are doing in the context of the overall goals of an advanced author course and by explaining on a weekly basis what the assignments for the next several weeks are intended to cover. I give precise translation assignments on a day by day basis, although I am ready to tell students exactly what passages we plan to be reading further on, if they are concerned to know. (Usually they aren't, I find.) My standard procedure will be, as I told the students, to assign both preparation of Greek text and additional work for the Tuesday class and only preparation of Greek text for the Thursday class (because there is much less time for preparation between the Tuesday and the following Thursday class than between the Thursday and the following Tuesday class).
Today I introduce the course, give a brief sketch of Herodotus's background, explain the aids in the textbook (brief overview on the Ionic dialect, apparatus criticus, and commentary), show Halicarnassus on the Perseus 2.0beta atlas, and translate the prologue to the Histories. The emphasis in the Greek reading is on grasping the significance of the words historia, apodexis, aklea, and aitie, and of the prominence of the mention of Greeks and non-Greeks (barbaroi) together. Perseus is not singled out for particular attention, in keeping with my position that it should be regarded as just another professional tool, albeit a powerful one that offers unique capabilities, that one takes for granted when working at a high level.
The assignment for next time is to read Grene's introduction, bring a notebook (preferably loose-leaf) for recording notes, and prepare to translate 1.5-1.7.
Meetings of 1/24/95, 1/26/95, 1/31/95, 2/2/95, 2/7/95, 2/9/95, 2/14/95
In these meetings we translate and discuss Herodotus 1.8-13 and 1.29-35 (reading the intervening sections in English). As always, we discuss grammar, syntax, and vocabulary, but we also pay close attention to the implications of the story of Gyges and the meeting of Solon with Croesus in terms of the role of gender, personal responsibility, the nature of divine power as it affects human beings, and the nature of human happiness and prosperity, especially the concept(s) of olbos/olbios.
The initial assignment in using Perseus is to look for all the occurrences of the word aitie in book 1. It first occurs in the prologue, which we read at the very beginning of the course. It occupies a very prominent place in the prologue and is usually translated into English as "reason." This abstract noun is apparently rare in Greek before Herodotus (though the adjectival aitios, etc. is not), and it seems interesting to ask what he seems to imply with this novel usage. The assignment is meant to have two consequences: (1) to introduce students to basic philological tools in Perseus with the fewest possible complications (given that my attitude is that I will help them with Perseus as much as they want but that the responsibility rests on them, as advanced students, to learn how to use this necessary tool, just as they must learn to use a grammar book or a lexicon), and (2) to show that aitie from its instances in book 1 can be seen to mean something like "a reason arising from something bad that somebody did." Looking for aitie in book 1 has the practical advantage for point #1 that everything one needs at each stage of the process of finding and reading citations appears on the first screen that pops up when each stage of the operation is performed. Nothing is "hidden" and no scrolling is required.
In class I give them a run-through of how to collect citations with Perseus and say that I am available for individual tutoring sessions on how to use Perseus to do the assignment, whether in person or via telephone or e-mail. Two students subsequently ask for in-person help, and in about fifteen minutes they are up to speed. One student has a question resolved by exchange of e-mail. In general things seem to get going very quickly, perhaps because some of the students have some familiarity with Perseus 1.0. But I suspect that making Perseus "not special" is contributing to this success. Students have clearly accepted that Perseus is something they need to know how to use and are going about acquiring the skill they need.
Of course, the intellectual content of this assignment could easily be carried out by giving out photocopies of the relevant entry in Powell's Lexikon to Herodotus, which lists all the passages needed, but by using Perseus to accomplish the same goal students are acquiring skill that can be used later to do things that they could not do with the Lexikon alone.
Students get their list of citations of aitie done on time, and we discuss them in class. As always, collecting data comes more easily than interpreting it. No one had independently grasped that aitie in book 1 turns out to have the connotation of a reason based on evil doing, but I quickly help them to draw that conclusion once all the data is in front of us.
The next assignment with Perseus is for the students to choose their own word from the passages we have read so far in Greek and then decide on a data set (that is, a list of citations in Herodotus) that will allow them to make a point of their choice about their chosen word. (All along I have been pointing out "hot" words during our discussions of translation assignments so that when this next Perseus assignment came up they would be accustomed to identifying particularly interesting words, which for me means words that imply complex concepts and for which translation into a single English word/term is at best an inadequate measure of desperation, such as eutychie ["good luck"?], eudaimonie ["happiness"?], olbios ["blessed"?] symphore ["catastrophe; happenstance"?]. This assignment is meant to ratchet up to a much higher level the kind of independent decision making that they have to make. The assignment is purposely open-ended, even somewhat vague, an approach that I would only take in a non-introductory course such as this one. The students are told to submit to me a written list of their data set as the first step in the assignment, and all but one student do so on time. Their choices seem good, so I tell them to prepare to make two-minute presentations using Perseus in class to explain the one citation that they found most interesting or perplexing or challenging and why they so classified it.
Meeting of 2/16/95
Unfortunately, we cannot have these reports because the server is down. Our hard disk on which Perseus 2.0beta resides is howling like a banshee and obviously in danger of imminent failure. By reformatting it, we stop the noise temporarily, but then it returns. We decide to try to make it until spring break (the first week of March) before sending it in for inspection and repair, but we don't know if it will make it. [The drive does hold up and does not cause further delays, it turns out.] In the light of this uncertainty, I tell the students to hold on to their data sets and be ready to give their brief oral reports next week, if the server holds up. I don't give another Perseus assignment for the weekend because of the possibility of the server going down again. The assignment is to prepare Herodotus 1.53-55, after reading the intervening sections in English, and to study the entries for nemesis and adrastos in the standard professional Greek lexicon, LSJ, ninth edition. I hand these out in photocopies. These words are relevant because we have just finished reading the first part of the story of the nemesis that strikes Croesus through the unwitting agency of Adrastos. The assignment will also help students to learn to decode the complicated shorthand of LSJ entries.
Meetings of 2/21/95 and 2/23/95
Fortunately, we are going to be able to set up a second Perseus server in the Multimedia Resource Center so that work can continue even if our hard disk fails on our original server in the Classics Dept. Mirabile dictu, the server in the department is still working because the disk continues to work, despite random patches of horrifying noise. We will press on.
On the 21st the server is not available yet, so we do not use Perseus. I announce a translation and syntax exam for 3/2/95 to cover all the material we will have studied in Greek up until that point. We spend the class on the assignment from Herodotus (1.53-55). The next assignment is to prepare 1.86 after reading the intervening sections in translation.
On the 23rd we go over 1.86 after a brief discussion of the section of the story of Croesus following 1.55 that was assigned in translation. After finishing that work, we at last turn to "two minute reports" on the citation found via Perseus that each student wishes to present as his/her "most interesting/perplexing/challenging." I open the primary sources to Herodotus and then ask the students to come to the computer to "drive" for their report; we are projecting the monitor screen onto a screen at the front of the classroom. The first student is puzzled how to get to the citation he has chosen and tries to use the "Find Text" button on the Herodotus 1.1 card. He says he doesn't know how to get to the text almost immediately after opening the dialogue box, so in the interest of time I tell him to use the "Go to" box instead. This he manages without any trouble. He had chosen the Greek term idiotes as his word and hadn't found any instances that struck him as significant. The next student used the "Go to" box flawlessly and had chosen "symphore" to investigate. As we proceed, I stress that they need to ask the next question about the meaning of their data and not be satisfied with their first observations.
This exercise helps them get over stage fright about using the computer in front of the class, especially when something goes awry. For example, one student has a reference that is non-existent (1.37.7). Perseus takes him to 1.37 but there are only three sub-sections. I show them how to use the arrows to go to the next text card and then back to verify what text is there. We check in the printed text to make sure Perseus is not in error. It isn't. He has written down the wrong number. Class time is up, so after class I find the citation by starting with the English work search for the term he was citing ("lucky"). There isn't enough time to show them how to do this search, which is a substitute for typing the accented Greek word (eutyches). Typing Greek is so cumbersome that it is not uncommon among Perseus users, I think, for alternate strategies to be used to avoid having to type Greek, above all cutting and pasting Greek words from the primary sources data base!
Meetings of 2/28/95, 3/2/95, 3/14/95, and 3/16/95 (3/7 & 9/95 are spring
break)
In these meetings we go on with our usual format for studying and translating the text. Perseus is on hold while we verify the stability of the current hardware. In Greek we cover 1.87-90 and also have a translation, syntax, and lexical examination (3/2/95). Since almost all the students show less syntactical competence on the examination than I had anticipated, we will in future take the syntax a bit slower in class.
On 3/16/95 we return to the use of Perseus. In class, after completing the day's Greek assignment (which had been set at a length that I knew we could get through with appropriate thoroughness and still leave about fifteen minutes for a Perseus demonstration), I refresh their knowledge of how to start up Perseus over the network, how to get to the text, and how to use the analysis tool. We go to Hdt. 1.89.1 and select the Greek work doulos. I then show them how to use the Greek work search to find the citations of this word in Herodotus. Then I show them the Greek Word Frequency tool (and how to work around the current beta-version bug when one goes from the Word Search to it.) I explain what word frequency results mean in Perseus (as does the printed documentation).
I tell them the assignment is first to repeat what I did in class with Perseus in order to learn how to use these tools. Half the class is assigned the first twenty of the forty total citations of doulos in Herodotus and the other half is assigned the second twenty. They are told to construct a simple data base (on paper if they wish) for each citation of who is so designated and in what context. We will then discuss how to draw conclusions from this information. They are also told to use the Word Frequency tool to analyze doulos, to look at each of the three ways of displaying this data, and to begin to think about what conclusions one might draw from the data. I tell them to expect problems and not to quit when faced with them but to seek help from me. The Greek assignment is to read 1.91.
Meeting of 3/21/95
We read 1.91 and then discuss their findings on doulos. I try to show how the word can have different connotations in different contexts, from specific to comparative to historical to rhetorical (e.g., household slave, the status difference between Cyrus and Croesus after the latter's capture, Persian royal ideology on the position of the king, and the political subordination of one group to another without individual enslavement). I emphasize that my first assumption in such work is always that an English term will not be precisely congruent in meanings with a Greek term. We think we know what "slave" implies, but as researchers we have to be responsible in eliciting meaning from the data and not just from our assumptions.
I am impressed with the analysis of passages that they have done. All members of the class are able to contribute something that they found in studying the instances assigned to them. No one reports any difficulties using Perseus.
I intend to introduce the next stage in our work by demonstrating the Word Frequency tool again and pointing out the difference in frequency for doulos between Herodotus and Homer (it is at least ten times more common in Herodotus) and then to move on to the English-Greek Work Search to show how one can explore the possibility that different authors use different vocabulary for similar or analogous concepts. The network connection to the server is interrupted at this very moment, for the first time this term. It does not come back until after class. So, I tell them about the frequency differential and give them the assignment described in this handout:
Perseus Assignment: Herodotus Class 3/21/95
1. There will be a translation, syntax, and lexical forms examination on April 11th. It will be precisely like the previous examination and will cover the passages done in class since that examination.
2. It is now time to begin work on the take-home projects that, as originally announced, will take the place of a final examination. They must be handed in by 10:30am, Monday, May 15. There are two projects required, namely:
a. An investigation of word usage in Herodotus compared with that in the other authors available in Perseus 2.0. Read carefully the further information given below.
b. Two "Top Ten" lists compiled from Herodotus read in translation, namely: "Top Ten Amazing Customs or Natural Phenomena" and "Top Ten Great and Amazing Deeds Performed by Hellenes and Barbaroi." The lists must reflect knowledge of the entire History. Each item must be followed by the citation to its location in Herodotus.
Further information on assignment 2.a:
i. You may work as an individual or as a member of a team with other class members. If you work as a team, you must notify me of the membership of the team by April 18.
ii. You may use doulos as your word for investigation or any other word(s) of your choice.
iii. The assignment is to compile statistics on the usage of the word under investigation and then to explain what you find in terms of a comparison among the authors or groups of authors in Perseus 2.0. The explanation should encompass both similarities in usage and differences. An explanation will necessarily involve information about the contexts in which a word appears.
iv. Using the Word Frequency tool in Perseus 2.0, you are to compile statistics on the usage of your chosen word(s) in all the authors in Perseus 2.0. You are then to chose one author or one group of authors by genre with which to make a detailed comparison with usage in Herodotus. You must explain your choice of the other author or authors. The choice should be based on a question that you wish to answer, such as "Why does Herodotus use doulos much more frequently than Homer?" (You are not expected to know the answer before you do the investigation!)
v. To do this investigation responsibly, you will need to consider vocabulary, context, the data set compiled, and the philological tools that you are using. Concerning vocabulary, you will need to discover whether different authors use different words for the same concept. (You can use the English-Greek Word List tool in Perseus for this task. This tool will be demonstrated in class.) Concerning context, you will have to study the citations that you regard as significant. Concerning the data set, you will need to determine what it includes and what it does not so that your conclusions can be stated as accurately as possible. Concerning philological tools, you will need to be certain that you understand what the tools can and cannot do so that, again, your conclusions can be stated as accurately as possible.
vi. An investigation of this nature often yields a large amount of data, whose relevance to the investigation may not be immediately clear. It is part of the assignment for you to decide how to handle challenges such as these that arise from this kind of work. If, as is likely, you decide to limit your investigation, you should explain the reasons carefully.
vii. An investigation of this nature is open-ended and potentially huge. This assignment is meant to be preliminary and not burdensome. You will therefore have to decide how far to take it. So long as you explain your decisions and the consequent limits on your results, you will not be criticized for not going further than you do. I advise you to stay in touch with me on this point. I also strongly advise you to hand in at least one preliminary version of your work on 2.a for my comments before handing in the final version. I will read a preliminary version and hand it back within two days up until May 10. I would also be happy to comment on preliminary versions of assignment 2.b.
viii. We will discuss the assignment in class and in private conferences as often as you wish. Ask lots of questions! It is your responsibility to use me as a resource to help with anything you do not understand.
I wanted to illustrate the concrete example of doulos in Herodotus vs. Homer as a "hands-on" way to lead into the necessarily abstract instructions of the handout, but this proves impossible as a result of the technical glitch. So, I ask them to study the handout in preparation for further discussion next time. The assignment in Greek is 1.94.
Meeting of 3/23/95
We translate 1.94; some very interesting issues come up from our reading of the text (the relationship between reproduction and property in the context of 1.94.1 and the opening sections of book 1; the seeming equation of the power of gaming and eating). We therefore spend longer in discussion than usual. There is only a short time left at the end of the class to discuss the goals of the assignments described in the handout and to give a preliminary demonstration of the Greek Word Frequency tool and the English-Greek Word Search tool. I tell them to study the printed documentation for these tools and to practice using them before the next class. They are then to study dmos and dmoe (which I point out to them among the fifty entries reported for "slave" using the English-Greek Word Search tool in a "This word only" search). I tell them to use the Word Frequency tool in this task and to pay special attention the results for Homer. I tell them only that this task bears on the first of the four criteria (i.e., vocabulary) identified in the handout as essential for this kind of assignment.
The assignment in Greek is 1.206-207.4. This is a somewhat longer assignment than before, as we are going a bit faster now that the course is in its second half. The problem remains that it is difficult to allow enough time to read Greek in the traditional fashion of such courses and also spend enough time "modeling the behavior" for students in using Perseus. And to include Perseus has meant leaving aside other work that I would otherwise assign, e.g., bibliographic searches for modern studies using the available printed tools, especially L'Année philologique and Classical Review. This is a zero-sum game; introducing new material into a course means spending less time on something else. I think this dilemma will only become more pressing as information technology provides us with more tools for our work. Perhaps the long-term solution is to hope that information technology skills will gradually become part of the expected preparation that students bring with them already to classes, at least advanced ones. Such a happy outcome will not come about automatically, however, and we need to think about ways to facilitate its genesis. I think a course on "information technology in Classics" would be a good first step for our departmental program in Classics, which is large enough to include such a course; it would teach not only computing but also the information technology of traditional, printed resources that are not transparent to students, such as epigraphic corpora or specialized reference works. Useful materials that emerge could be distributed on the WWW.
Meeting of 3/28/95
Two observations that need to be recorded: (1) it has become more clear to me than ever before that instructors need the easiest possible and most constant possible access to electronic materials if they are to use them efficiently and (2) putting computing technology into courses is truly a zero-sum game in which something else in the class has to be reduced, a situation only exacerbated by the tendency of the proper use of this technology for learning through discovery to open interesting and unexpected paths that entice one to follow them (the reward: intellectual excitement and increased learning skills; the price: time taken away from other class materials).
As for (1), it is a detriment for me not to have Perseus accessible to me in my office or at home for class preparation. This situation is caused by our having to allot the computer in my office to use as our WWW server (a Mac LC 575 running MachTen's splendid UNIX for Macs). The machine doesn't have enough memory or processor speed to do this task, which supports another class currently being taught (Prof. Smith's new course on travel and exploration), and also to access our Perseus server over the network. Thus, I have to go down the hall to use our moveable machine (a Mac Centris 650 on a cart that we roll into class to hook up to the network and our LCD projector) that lives in our "Perseus Project" room when not in classroom use and is there on the network for connection to the Perseus server in Prof. Smith's office or in the MRC in Stein Hall. Unfortunately for my purposes, our departmental student assistants are using that machine almost constantly during the "business hours" when I happen to be free for preparation, making it awkward for me to ask them to stop so that I can use it for class preparation. I cannot emphasize enough how important the message is that Kenny Morrell has preached for years: the technology has to be on the instructor's desk if productivity is to be increased and innovations introduced in the most efficient manner. Next time I will have to have a machine in my office that connects me to Perseus.
As for (2), this class is supposed to cover an amount of Greek suitable for an advanced class and also go further in reading Herodotus in translation and in interpreting his work with the help of modern scholarly work. The last of these goals is getting left aside because we don't have enough time to do the Greek we should, use Perseus well, and do all the things we did in such courses before we tried to introduce this technology. Perhaps I should have anticipated this situation better in planning for the course. Next time I think I will try to design assignments that do not concentrate exclusively on the "primary texts" but that involve studying them using Perseus and then comparing what students discover with, say, some scholarly articles or chapters on the topic at hand to see how the technology allows us to go further or deeper than print resources did in the past.
We do the Greek assignment and then turn to Perseus, only to discover that the server has gone down. This prompts the students to report considerable and recent difficulties in getting to the Perseus server from the Macs in the MRC. I promise to check on this problem, which has not been solved despite pleas to the MRC supervisor that routine software maintenance be done on the machines there to make sure that problems are not being created at that end. I suspect that the Perseus server now set up in the MRC has not been correctly maintained or perhaps not correctly tested after installation by our departmental research assistants. (It has been a problem to impress upon our student assistants how important it is to test installations thoroughly after doing them.)
We manage to discuss the Greek words dmos/dmoe from their notes, which seem quite good, without having Perseus as a display as planned. They had grasped the essential preliminary points: these words for slave are epic and poetic. Only one prose instance had been found. We then briefly discuss how one can go about devising non-trivial hypotheses to test once one has a set of data like the ones they have started. We have to postpone further discussion until next class because the unexpected discussion of the technical glitches in the MRC took time away from our philological work. The Greek assignment for next time is 1.207.5-209.
Meeting of 3/30/95
Prof. Smith and I spent several hours on the previous day trying to discover the cause of the failed server in the MRC. Today we deduce that the machine doing the server or its network connection is faulty. Since Holy Cross, just as, I suppose, many other institutions, is suffering from a severe shortage of technical support as the information technology revolution picks up speed, we do not have technicians upon whom we can rely to solve this sort of problem within any time frame that would work for our purposes. Anyone with even the minimum of experience in using computing in teaching knows how critical the problem of technical support is in an academic environment, so all I will do is add yet one more voice to this chorus: you can never have too much technical support. Having to little is bound to cost you instructionally.
The current solution for the MRC is to take the problematic machine out of service (along with another machine that has had an intermittent hard disk problem and thus caused students to think Perseus wasn't working or that they had done some harm to the machine by trying to use Perseus) and hook up another machine in the MRC as the server. This leaves us with only two Macs working in the MRC.
In the light of these difficulties [whose solution described above I am only able to verify after class is over today], I do not give a further demonstration of the Perseus philological tools. I do tell the students to think about whether they want to do assignment 2.a (see handout above) on slavery or on some other topic, for example one from the list of words that were assembled earlier in the course. The next Greek assignment is 1.210-212.2.
Meetings of 4/4/95, 4/6/95, 4/11/95, 4/18/95, and 4/20/95
These meetings are almost exclusively devoted to continuing work on the Greek text for two reasons. (After reading through 1.214, we go on to selected excerpts in book 7.) First, since there is an examination on the 11th (just before Easter break), it is appropriate to spend as much time as possible before this class period on the work of translation, syntactical analysis, etc. upon which they will be tested on that date. Second, my attempts to get the students started on their final, Perseus-based projects, are frustrated by (1) the difficulty of my setting aside enough time to devote to using Perseus with them in class, given that we have to cover the Greek text in sufficient quantity and depth to fulfill the requirements of an advanced language course, and (2) continuing problems with students using Perseus in the MRC.
The basic practical difficulty seems bipartite: first, the MRC, which at present has much larger constituencies to which it must respond, hasn't been able to devote personnel resources to making sure that the "Perseus Macs" are working flawlessly all the time; second, my students don't have the computer literacy to fix problems themselves. (The problems seem to be not with Perseus itself but with keeping a publicly accessible machine in optimum condition. For example, aliases that give access to the Perseus server get trashed somehow; applications get left open, thus eating up memory and giving students "Not enough memory" dialogue boxes; and so on.) After getting yet another report from a student that they hadn't been able to get to Perseus in the MRC, today (4/20) I sent one of our departmental student assistants down to the MRC to see what was wrong. It turned out that on one machine the Local Stuff folder with aliases to the Perseus disks was completely missing, while on the other the Telnet application had been left open (but with no document showing) and ate up all the available RAM. We clearly need either a support staff large enough to look for and correct such problems on a regular basis, or a student body that could diagnose and fix such problems themselves. Unfortunately if understandably, we have neither at present.
Our situation raises the general issue of whether institutions like mine are yet structurally prepared to use information technology in the classroom as "just part of the furniture." At this stage of the revolution, as it were, it looks like instructors in situations like mine are going to need to continue to do more themselves than I had hoped in purely practical maintenance of the hardware/software, if students are to have much success in using it.
Meetings of 4/25/95, 4/27/95, and 5/2/95
In these final classes of the semester we read the remaining Greek assignments in later books of Herodotus. Students are heavily involved in papers for other classes, preparation for exams, and, for seniors, preparation for graduation. Therefore, not everyone seems to be working on his/her final "Perseus project" yet, a symptom no doubt of my having allowed them time beyond the end of scheduled class meetings to finish these assignments to try to compensate for the time lost previously with the various technical problems that we have had during the semester. On the bright side, there seem to be no more insuperable problems of this kind now that one of our departmental student assistants has volunteered to go down to the MRC on a daily basis to make sure that all the machines
running Perseus are healthy. Unfortunately we couldn't arrange for this kind of support during the term; I can see that it makes all the difference. Having someone do the "housekeeping" (e.g., make sure that Hypercard has not been trashed, that memory allocations for applications have not been reset wrongly, that network connections are properly maintained, etc.) on publicly-accessible machines on a very frequent basis is clearly crucial for efficient execution of the kind of work that we want to do.
I think the extra time that I felt obliged to give the students to do their assignments is turning out to be a double-edged sword. Most students seem, quite understandably, to be postponing their Perseus work until after they have completed their other responsibilities that have closer due dates. This means that I will not be seeing them in class as they complete their assignments, and this lack of regular contact will make it less likely that they will confer with me as much as I think would be optimum. On the other hand, they will have adequate time to do their assignments with some care.
In the end only two of the eight students in the class came in for discussions of their work in progress and also turned in written drafts of their work for me to comment upon before completing the final version of the paper. Two others came in for discussions of what they were doing but did not submit drafts for revision. The other four students (three out of the four being seniors, who naturally have other things on their mind at this point so close to graduation) did not confer with me before completing their papers. It would have been better, obviously, to have had the Perseus projects due before class meetings ended so that I would have had more opportunity to buttonhole everyone about their work, given that I want to stress the importance of revision and rethinking in this kind of "learning through discovery." Circumstances, however, conspired to rule out this arrangement, as I have explained above. Rather than summarizing all the papers here, I will comment below on what seems me to significant about student use of Perseus 2.0beta in this collection of work.
As students became more familiar with the technical workings of Hypercard and of our network setup, they gained some ability to deal with minor technical glitches, such as resetting an insufficient memory allotment for Hypercard. In any case, whereas early in the term they seemed to have a tendency to give up if they encountered any difficulty, they eventually seemed to become less distracted by problems and more willing to try to solve the trouble on their initiative right away, whether by finding another machine that was operating properly, asking a staff member at MRC to help out, or sending me email requesting aid. In the end, no one mentioned that their paper was adversely affected by technical problems.
All the papers demonstrated that students could use the philological tools of Perseus 2.0 without apparent difficulty. This result seems an important indication that, once students overcome any difficulties caused by unfamiliarity with Macintoshes or other general aspects of computing, they do not find Perseus itself a problem, especially if they have been shown that the tools work, encouraged to test them, and convinced that they cannot do any harm to the program or the machine by using them. My conclusion is thus that the differences in the papers in terms of their depth and intellectual quality did not reflect differing degrees of ability in using Perseus and its philological tools.
The new philological tools, especially the word frequency tool, attracted considerable attention. Only one student failed to grasp the essential point that the ratio of occurrences to total words in an author is the significant number, not the total number of occurrences; this student had been absent several times late in the term and therefore may have missed my stressing of this point in classroom demonstrations. A couple of students seemed so engrossed in the word frequency tool that in their papers they did not get much beyond making long lists of usages of terms in which they were interested for a large selection of authors. They seemed content to summarize the range of possibilities of meanings that they found without taking the next and necessary step of looking deeper into the evidence. One student, however, did use this "grapeshot" approach to the authors in Perseus to good effect in studying the word idiotes (often translated as "private person"). By investigating the use of this word in all the genres in Perseus, the student felt that he could "propose a better definition (of the word)." I agree. He concluded that "whether the context is concerned with the military, the world of education, money, the courts, the realm of the royal, or the cults of heroes, a fitting translation for this word is 'not especially outstanding or extraordinary in any way.' " Thus, he discovered that idiotes indicates what I would call, in appropriating a term from linguistics, the unmarked category of the individual as opposed to the marked category. Without the tools of Perseus this student could not have made this discovery.
Another student was intrigued by what the philological tools showed did not exist. He began by investigated the term despotes ("master, ruler") and was intrigued to find it nearly missing from the historian Thucydides while not uncommon in Herodotus and Xenophon. Suspecting that Thucydides must use different terms to express the concept implied by this term, he used the English-Greek word search tool to find other such words. He was confronted by many possibilities, and in the end constraints of time limited the range of his investigation. His preliminary conclusion (which he rightly flagged as preliminary) was that Thucydides in fact seems to use a limited range of terms in this context, emphasizing the verb krateo. He concluded that he would need to "limit" his investigation further in order to take it further toward a meaningful interpretation and that his work left him with more questions than answers. Another way of saying the same thing is that a more refined hypothesis would be needed to go further on the topic and that true research has as one of its primary (and, I think, desirable) outcomes the generation of hoards of new questions.
One student, who had taken my "Perseus class" last year, came in several times to discuss how to make sense of her data and what to look for at the next stage of her investigation (and never to ask how to use Perseus or complain about problems). Our conversations revealed that she had started to think about interpreting her data from a very early stage, constructing and refining what amounted to a metaphor to explain the pattern of the evidence she was finding (namely, that Herodotus presents the concept of catastrophe, symphore in Greek, as operating as if it were an infectious disease). Noticing the (in her description) "surprising" frequency of this term in Lysias, an orator, and wishing to compare two different literary genres (history and oratory), she studied the term in Lysias' works as well as in Herodotus. Her conclusion was that, although Lysias uses the term in a wider array of contexts than does Herodotus, a definite overlap occurs in the use of the term by both authors to signal the presence of a "crippling agent" in human affairs. The notion of agency is not linked, however, to a definite origin in these authors. In sum, I found the paper to be a thoughtful treatment of the evidence selected for review. The most significant result in this case for my money was that the student seemed very comfortable with this method of working. She was finding evidence, studying its meanings, contexts, and implications, constructing a hypothesis to test, searching for further material for meaningful comparison across genre boundaries, and drawing conclusions that were appropriately qualified. This seem to me to be the method of research. The value of Perseus 2.0beta in this case was to enable the student to use this method easily and quickly and, with its expanded array of philological tools, to inspire her to go further than would otherwise have been feasible.
One other student produced a remarkable paper using this same basic methodology. She began by using the English-Greek word search tool to investigate laughter in Herodotus, a topic that we had discussed briefly a couple of times in class when it came up in our translation of the Greek text. Using the English-Greek word search tool, she identified six words in Herodotus that expressed the concept of "laughter." She hypothesized from preliminary data that Herodotus used these terms to imply mockery and disdain rather than (in her words) "what one would have generally guessed," namely, joy and humor and merriment. After analyzing all the instances in Herodotus, she concluded that none of them expresses joy and that the overwhelming majority of the instances explicitly or implicitly express mockery and disdain. She then turned to Homer to see if there was a precedent there for this usage. (She chose to look at Homer because in class we stressed the importance of Homer as a text informing the text of Herodotus.) She indeed found the precedent there, concluding that about half of the instances of laughter in Homer occur in this sort of context. Other instances in Homer do express merriment, however, she concluded. Thus she further concluded that Herodotus was both using Homer as a precedent for this usage but also making his text different in choosing to exclude the usage of laughter to express joy, etc. The remarkable aspect of this paper is that its conclusions about Herodotus and laughter essentially coincide with those published by a well-known classical scholar, namely, Donald Lateiner in his article entitled "No Laughing Matter," published in the professional journal Transactions of the American Philological Association for 1977. Since we on purpose did not read modern interpretations before doing these particular philological investigations, I am confident that this student had never read Professor Lateiner's article. In other words, she was able to gather data and then offer an interpretation of it that is validated by independent, professional scholarship. That an undergraduate could produce this result seems me to me very encouraging for the use of Perseus as a tool and an inspiration for learning through discovery. It is also encouraging that having data readily available in Perseus made it natural for a student to go on to do comparative work that went beyond the text of the one author with which the investigation began.
Of course I am not saying that such work cannot necessarily be done without using Perseus. For the (relatively few) texts for which printed lemmatized concordances or lexika exist, such as Herodotus, one can study the instances of the occurrences of words using only the books. Yet no school will have multiple copies of such books so that a class of students could readily use them for research projects with maximum flexibility. The simple convenience of having texts and tools readily available in Perseus is no trivial advantage for students. Furthermore, the word frequency and English-Greek tools allow approaches to questions that no print tools can provide. Students may not realize that they are doing things with Perseus that no one could do before and come to take these possibilities for granted, but it still seems wonderful to those of us who remember only too well when none of these advantages had yet been created.
As often, the painfully obvious became obvious to me after experiencing the pain. What everyone else no doubt would expect on general grounds is now clear to me: students experience an exponential rise in their comfort level with the use of computing technology from one course to the next in which such tools are employed. The one student in this class whom I had in my "Perseus course" last year had at that time expressed considerable unhappiness about using a Mac (she was a DOS user), etc. This year she went about her business with nary a problem or complaint and exhibited a greater tolerance than her colleagues for the technical problems that we encountered this semester. She also was the student who came in the most frequently to discuss her ideas and research strategies, which I take as a sign that her previous experience also taught her the value of discussing work of this kind at every stage and of doing drafts for revision and rethinking.
Just as it takes time for students to learn to approach technical and practical computing problems with equanimity and initiative, it apparently also takes a while for the value to sink in of the kind of work methods that use of Perseus promotes. This same student had written a thoughtful paper in last year's "Perseus class" despite her complaints, but she did not seem very pleased with it at the time. Some months later, however, she came to retrieve this paper to submit it as a writing sample for a fellowship application because, she told me, "it was the best paper I've done so far in college." Both these observations suggest to me that the optimum use of Perseus for major research projects will be in non-introductory courses, at least until students come to college already equipped with greater familiarity with computing technology than seems still the case. This level of expertise will be reached once students in secondary school are taught to use computing technology as a tool of research and not just as electronic wizardry.
Until this point is reached, it will be easier to do "Perseus courses" than to insert the use of Perseus into courses that have not been expressly designed or rethought with this goal in mind. Many challenges arise in using this technology regardless of the genesis or nature of the course, but they are perhaps most severe in any attempt to combine traditional (and valuable) modes of instruction with a "learning through discovery" method, at least if the discovery is not predetermined to yield canned results but rather is genuinely open-ended for both students and teacher. It is highly challenging to mix linear learning, such as lectures, with open-ended assignments, such as the kind of data-search and interpretation that Perseus allows and that I value so highly. The management of time and students' expectations about learning become much more complicated with such a mix because a syllabus of lectures and reading assignments assumes a precise schedule and creates expectations of "getting through the material," while open-ended assignments do not assume a pre-identified finishing point or even an easily quantifiable amount of material to be "covered." At this stage of my experience with using Perseus in classes as more than a display mechanism to illustrate my presentations, I can only stress the crucial importance of explaining over and over to students the methods and aims of the class and the instructor's commitment to a fair and generous evaluation of their effort in using what is still for most of them something quite new.