I was very excited to hear about Logos Bible Software
’s
Noet product, their expansion into classical, philosophical, and literary e-books. I was particularly excited to see that their Classical Greek and Latin bundles included content from the
Perseus Digital Library, one of the most valuable information sources in the history of ever, if you are a classics geek. I also noticed that Logos is busy digitizing my
other favorite thing in the world, the
Loeb Classical Library.
And then, on a whim, I searched to see if the Perseus material was going to be available as a stand-alone product.
And it is. Already.
FOR FREE.
I don
’t have the full version of Logos on my work computer, so I can
’t delve too deeply, but it
’s a tremendous number of Greek and Latin texts and translations.
It doesn’t look like they are morphologically tagged, so it isn’t a complete replacement for the (clunky) Perseus web interface. But Logos says they are “looking into” morph tagging, and there is already a right-click option to send a selection to Perseus’ parsing tool. I stand corrected! They aren’t fully morph-tagged like the Bibles, but they have the same morph data that you’d get from the Perseus parser (e.g., it will tell you that form
could be nominative, vocative, or accusative, but not which one it
is.) At least that’s the case with Aristotle’s
Metaphysics. Joy!
This won
’t keep me from buying the various other Noet and Loeb offerings, of course. Because you can
’t have too many books, especially when they don
’t weigh anything. But oh man, does this make it a lot easier to, say, pull up the original Greek of the Phaedrus on my phone at a cocktail party. And we all know how often that comes up.
*jumping up and down with geeky joy*
(They also have other material from the Perseus database, including Beowulf and the Duke Documentary Papyri, if that’s how you roll.)
ADDENDUM: It turns out the Perseus material has been (incrementally) available on Logos for almost two years now. Still pretty cool, though.
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