Perseus under PhiloLogic
Available
Director
- Helma Dik
Description
The Perseus Under Philologic project allows for linguistic exploration of the texts from the Perseus Digital Library], allowing for complex queries.
From the description from the main page of the project, accessed 10-07-2025):
The project makes a selection of the Perseus texts available, "but the mechanism for browsing and searching them is a different one. It is PhiloLogic, an open-source system that was especially developed for large textual databases by the ARTFL project at the University of Chicago.
The Perseus under PhiloLogic collection is intended to use the "rich encoding for searching the texts, and for other tasks that are less about reading and more about research: corpus linguistics, above all."
Currently it is possible to search not only for words or strings, but also for occurrences of a lemma or part-of-speech code, thanks to prefixes 'lemma:' or 'pos:'. For example, 'lemma:nostos' or 'lemma:sum'.
The prefix 'form:' ignores the more complex instructions for part-of-speech codes that follow. You simply write out what you think wiLSJll sufficiently describe the form you are looking for, in any order, but use hyphens between terms. For instance, 'form:optative-act-singular' for an active optative in the singular, where 'form:sg-opt-act' would do the same thing.
In May 2021 the old server was unplugged and the material of the project is available through new links: