Gregory Crane: "To Advance the Common Understanding: Reinventing the Humanities in a Digital Age" at UF on Thursday at 7:30pm

Please join us this Thursday evening for:

5 April, 7:30 pm, Smathers 1A, University of Florida

Gregory Crane (Tufts University; Editor in Chief, Perseus Project)

To Advance the Common Understanding: Reinventing the Humanities in a Digital Age

The rise of vast digitized collections and increasingly sophisticated analytical methods has begun to transform both the depth and potential scale of humanities research. New media are, however, far more important because they have the potential to change the “who” and not simply the “what” of humanities discourse. We have an opportunity to redefine the relationship between what happens in the academy and society as a whole, but the degree to which we pursue that opportunity depends upon serious decisions that we will make, whether explicitly or by default. This talk will explore both the challenges and opportunities as Humanists explore their ability to realize their highest goal, advancing the intellectual life of society as a whole.
Gregory Crane earned his Ph.D. in classical philology at Harvard University in 1985. Since then, he has published on a wide range of ancient Greek authors (including articles on Greek drama and Hellenistic poetry and a book on the Odyssey). Much of his scholarly work has been devoted to the Greek historian Thucydides; his book The Blinded Eye: Thucydides and the New Written Word appeared in 1996; his second Thucydides book, The Ancient Simplicity: Thucydides and the Limits of Political Realism, was published in 1998. Professor Crane also has a long-standing interest in the relationship between the humanities and rapidly developing digital technology. He first developed a Unix-based full text retrieval system for the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae that was widely used in North America and Europe in the middle 1980s. He also helped establish a typesetting consortium to facilitate scholarly publishing. Since 1985 he has been engaged in planning and development of the Perseus Project, which he directs as the Editor-in-Chief. From 1998 through 2006 he directed a grant from the Digital Library Initiative to study general problems of digital libraries in the humanities, and in 2006, he produced a named entity identification system, published a 55 million word collection, and authored several publications describing the system. Since the rise of the Google Books project in 2004, with support from the DLI-2 program, the Institute for Museum and Library Services, and the Mellon Foundation, he has studied the problems and opportunities that arise when whole libraries rather than curated collections become available on-line.

  • This event is free and open to the public.
  • Lecture sponsored by the UF Office of Research and the UF Department of Classics
  • For more information, contact  humanities-center@ufl.edu

For an overview of the Rehumanizing the University Speakers series, click here.
Past lectures can be viewed online here
This series of twelve lectures is co-sponsored by the UF Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere (Rothman Endowment), the Harn Eminent Scholar Chair in Art History Program, the UF Honors Program, the Alexander Grass Chair in Jewish History at UF, the UF International Center, the UF Office of Research, UF  College of Liberal Arts and Sciences,  the UF Center for Jewish Studies, the UF Libraries, the UF College of Public Health and Health Professions, the UF France-Florida Research Institute, the  Hyatt and Cici Brown Endowment for Florida Archaeology, the UF Department of History, the UF Department of Classics, the UF African American Studies Program, the UF Center for Women’s Studies and Gender Research, UF College of Design, Construction and Planning, and the Alachua County Library District.