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save latin and greek on alpheios

Save Latin, Greek and Arabic on Alpheios- Help to add other classical languages

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save latin and greek on alpheios

save latin and greek on alpheios

save latin and greek on alpheios

save latin and greek on alpheios

save latin and greek on alpheios

Save Latin, Greek and Arabic on Alpheios- Help to add other classical languages

Save Latin, Greek and Arabic on Alpheios- Help to add other classical languages

Save Latin, Greek and Arabic on Alpheios- Help to add other classical languages

Save Latin, Greek and Arabic on Alpheios- Help to add other classical languages

Harry Diakoff
Harry Diakoff
Harry Diakoff
Harry Diakoff
1 Campaign |
New York, United States
$5,815 USD 67 backers
11% of $50,000 Flexible Goal Flexible Goal

SAVE LATIN AND GREEK ON ALPHEIOS !

(and help extend its support to other classical languages)

THE PURPOSE

Many of the most important books ever written, the most profound and the most beautiful, were written in one of the ancient languages no longer spoken. 1 Translations can convey some part of what their authors intended, but by no means all. 

Traditionally it was necessary to devote prolonged study to each language, preferably with a knowledgeable teacher, before ever confronting the original text itself. Today, a variety of online tools can help anyone begin to appreciate the original language whenever they wish. The Alpheios Project was created to bring the latest technology to this task, and already has tens of thousands of users around the world with its reading support tools for Latin, Greek, and classical Arabic and Chinese. The software was designed to permit new languages to be added easily, and there are plans underway for its extension to other classical languages such as Persian, Sanskrit and several others.

In keeping with its mission to bring texts in the classical languages to the widest possible audience, Alpheios has always made its tools available for free and has kept its code open source for use by any other non-profit initiative. 

THE CRISIS

However, at the moment, not only the expansion but even the survival of the present Alpheios functionality is threatened by impending changes to the Firefox browser, which is currently the only platform on which Alpheios runs.  Significant modifications of our code will be needed, and at the moment we do not have the resources to make the changes in the required time frame.

THE APPEAL

We are consequently making our first public funding appeal. We are hoping to raise between fifty and one hundred thousand dollars so that we can employ professional programmers in an accelerated timeframe. Since we are a registered 501(c)3 non-profit organization, all contributions are tax-deductible in the United States.

If you consider this initiative worthwhile, please let others know about it, whether or not you are able to contribute yourself.

At this point we don't anticipate any insuperable technical challenges since the requirements are quite clearly defined and all the original developers of Alpheios remain available for consultation.  We just need competent hands to do the work before the clock runs out on Alpheios.

THE HOPE   

In addition to maintaining Alpheios on Firefox, the changes to the code that must be made will greatly facilitate porting Alpheios to other browsers and to mobile devices, among the most frequent requests from our users. They should also help bring an expanded Alpheios reading environment to other classical languages and provide a more convenient platform for the deployment of a greater variety of language learning games.  We believe that the supreme importance of the classical languages, and their immediate relevance to our present world,  can only be fully appreciated when they can all be studied with similar tools in a common reading environment. 

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(1) (Perhaps the best known of these "classical languages" are ancient Greek, Latin, Sanskrit and classical Chinese, Persian, Arabic and Hebrew, but there are many more, including Old Norse and Old English, Old French and the Langue d'oc, Old Spanish and Old and Middle High German, not to mention the great languages of the ancient middle east, such as Egyptian, Sumerian, Akkadian, Hittite, Classical Armenian, Syriac and Aramaic, or the classical Japanese of the Man'yōshū.  


SUPPORT
This appeal to retain Alpheios on Firefox and port it to other browsers is supported by:
  • Gregory Crane, Editor-in-Chief of the Perseus Project, Tufts University and Alexander von Humboldt professor of Digital Humanities, University of Leipzig
  • Donald J. Mastronarde, Melpomene Distinguished Professor of Classical Languages and Literature, Berkeley
  • Jens Erland Braarvig, creator of the Bibliotheca Polyglotta, University of Oslo, Professor of Religious Studies, Department of Cultural Studies and Oriental Languages
  • Mark Schiefsky, professor of the Classics, Department Chair, Harvard University
  • James A. Coulter, professor of Classics emeritus, Columbia University, former Department Chair
  • Christopher W. Blackwell, The Louis G. Forgione University Professor Department of Classics, Furman University, Project Architect: The Homer Multitext at the Center for Hellenic Studies of Harvard University
  • Neven Jovanović, Editor of the Croatiae auctores Latini digital collection Associate Professor, Department of Classical Philology Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb
  • Anke Lüdeling, Professur für Korpuslinguistik und Morphologie Institut für deutsche Sprache und Linguistik Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
  • Anise D'Orange Ferreira, Faculdade de Ciências e Letras, Sao Paulo State University UNESP, Araraquara, Sao Paulo, Brazil
  • Bruce Robertson, Head Department of Classics Mount Allison University, New Brunswick
  • Vanessa B. Gorman, Professor of History, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Associate Editor, Digital Athenaeus Project
  • Robert J. Gorman, Associate Professor of Classics, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Associate Editor, Digital Athenaeus Project
  • Jeff Rydberg-Cox, Professor, Department of English, Director, Classical and Ancient Studies Program, Affiliated Faculty, Department of Computer Science University of Missouri-Kansas City
  • Jonathan Robie, lead editor of XQuery / XPath, B-Greek forum, biblicalhumanities.org
  • David J. Kahn, Executive director of the North American Montessori Teachers' Association (NAMTA)
  • Jack Halpern, Founder and CEO of the CJK Dictionary Institute, Japan
  • Donald Sturgeon, Editor of the Chinese Text Project Digital Library
  • Joel Kalvesmaki, Editor in Byzantine Studies Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection
  • Federico Boschetti, Coordinator of the Cooperative Philology Lab (CoPhiLab) Institute for Computational Linguistics "A. Zampolli", CNR of Pisa, Italy

more from the experts ...

"...but what continues to impress me most about the project is the thoughtfulness of its architecture. The lexica (such as Liddell-Scott-Jones for Greek, and Lewis-Short for Latin) and linguistic information (very comprehensive morphological analyses, and for some sets of texts, syntactic tree banks of the kind David Bamman's research uses) are cleanly organized as services that are accessible over the internet. If there is another project in the digital humanities that has grasped this fundamental architectural principle as clearly as the Alpheios project has, I'm not familiar with it. "  Neel Smith, Holy Cross  (2010)

“Clearly the Alpheios project has produced some very good lexical tools for use in an internet reading environment. The speed by which one can access lexical information in a number of languages, classical and modern, is nothing less than amazing. Beside this, it is also a very important learning tool for multingual language training, at the same time producing new lexical resources. For the Bibliotheca Polyglotta it is a must, as surely for other internet language projects, and we look forward to its further development and its stable presence on the net." Jens Erland Braarvig, Oslo  (2015):

"Alpheios has transformed my teaching experience and has been responsible for engaging more students and faculty in learning and teaching Greek.  Alpheios is involved in several graduate students' forthcoming theses and dissertations at our university and we do hope Alpheios will continue its immense contribution to the classics community by maintaining its development."  Anise D'Orange Ferreira, UNESP, Brazil  (2015):

                                                               o o o

"Alpheios is fire in a fennel stalk."   Chris Blackwell,  Furman  (2015)

                                                               o o o










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Choose your Perk

become a forum participant

$10 USD
become a charter member in one or more of the Alpheios fora devoted to discussing problems and opportunities related to comparative philology and cross-disciplinary research. Initial fora are devoted to individualized learning, crowdsourcing relevant resource development, and methods of outreach to both students and adults.
Estimated Shipping
December 2015
14 claimed
Ships worldwide.

have a question?

$50 USD
email response to any inquiries about the current alpheios functionality
Estimated Shipping
December 2015
0 claimed

webinar on use of alpheios

$100 USD
interactive webinar on the use of the new alpheios tools
Estimated Shipping
November 2016
0 claimed

25$ Living Latin NYC Discount

$100 USD
A 25$ discount on the Paideia Institute's Living Latin Program in New York City at Fordham next February http://www.paideiainstitute.org/events/living-latin-in-nyc
Estimated Shipping
February 2016
0 claimed

discount on Telepaideia

$200 USD
10% discount on any Telepaideia course from the Paideia Institute in the Spring semester. http://www.paideiainstitute.org/programs/telepaideia-latin-and-greek-online
Estimated Shipping
January 2016
1 claimed

six months technical support

$500 USD
six months of technical support via email with a 24-hour response
Estimated Shipping
November 2016
0 claimed

local alpheios

$1,000 USD
Technical assistance with the use of the Alpheios API to embed the new Alpheios functionality in your own website so that users won't need to have alpheios loaded in their own browsers.
Estimated Shipping
November 2016
0 claimed
Ships worldwide.

your choice of new language

$2,500 USD
technical assistance with implementation of a new classical language in the alpheios tool set. We cannot yet promise full support for scripts without spaces between words (scriptio continua).
Estimated Shipping
November 2016
0 claimed

Sponsor

$5,000 USD
participate in interactive Hangouts with developers to discuss developmental priorities.
Estimated Shipping
December 2015
0 claimed

Patron

$25,000 USD
Jump to the head of the line with feature requests. Face to face meetings with developers and real-time contact whenever desired. Show you appreciate what the world is in danger of losing with the progressive loss of contact with its classical heritage.
Estimated Shipping
December 2015
0 claimed

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