Alpheios Project Ltd

The Need:

The study of the world's classical languages is perhaps the most rewarding activity one can pursue in the humanities, and comparative philology has long been recognized as one of the key pillars of all humanistic studies- literary, historical, philosophical, and religious. It sharpens one's eye when reading any text and makes one more critical of one's own use of language. Perhaps most importantly, it unlocks the riches of the classical texts, many of whose insights are becoming more relevant and urgently needed every day that passes.

But such languages are often thought to be forbiddingly difficult and too time-consuming to master fully. Currently the number of students studying the classical historical languages is dropping throughout the world, as is the number of their teachers. They are indeed rich and complex, but this, and their dramatic strangeness is a large part of what makes them such invaluable vantage points from which to gain a more comprehensive and realistic perspective on our own society and our contemporary speech.

   The Solution:

Fortunately, contemporary technology has dramatically lowered the barriers to effective study of the classical (typically highly inflected) languages and to appreciation of the precious texts within them. Much of this technology enables effective self-study, whether or not the user is enrolled in a formal course of instruction. The Alpheios initiative has been one of the most popular and successful efforts to exploit these new opportunities.

In 2007, noticing that new texts in classical languages (at that time chiefly Latin and Greek) were appearing on the Web in HTML unicode almost daily, Mark Nelson* recruited some developers from his former company Ovid Technologies  to create reading support tools that could be brought to bear on any text in HTML/Unicode as it was being displayed in a browser. The primary objective was to make available the most useful tools that the Perseus Project had developed and made available to the Classics community on the Perseus site for use with any text appearing on any web site. As Mark put it "to be able to read these texts without having to juggle a bunch of physical dictionaries, grammars and inflection tables."
 
The group chose the name Alpheios and implemented it as an add-on to the Firefox browser, which at that time was easily the most powerful and reliable browser.  As a browser addon, Alpheios provided the site-independent functionality that was the chief objective: selecting a word brings up a popup with basic information and a set of icons that link to more complete definitions, grammars and inflection tables.

   If other resources happen to be available for that text, other icons may appear. One indicates the availability of a complete sentence diagram.

   Originally designed simply to support extensive reading in classical languages, Alpheios gradually acquired additional pedagogical functionality, some of which also enabled students to contribute to the body of accumulating philological resources for the classics; in particular, separate editing modules for sentence diagramming and aligning an original text with a translation have become very popular.

   The Emergency:

   Unfortunately, in August of this year Firefox announced that it was deprecating some key infrastructure that Alpheios relies upon, creating an emergency situation for us. We currently have no resources that can be applied to making the needed changes in the original Firefox browser code. We are accordingly making a public appeal for support at this time. Less than 100k would probably be adequate for professional programmers, less if we can find someone through elance/Upwork.  The positive side is that the required changes would greatly facilitate making Alpheios compatible with Chrome as well as the new Firefox.

 We are convinced that this is one of the most important services currently available in the Digital Humanities, and have been both gratified and immensely grateful for readiness with which leading scholars and educator have been willing to  endorse for this initiative to preserve and extend it.

* Mark Nelson founded Ovid Technologies and developed it into one of the world's leading database aggregators before selling it to Wolters Kluwer in 1998.