Help needed from Classicists for an unoffical Perseus search tool.
Perseus and Medusa by Cellini. Photo by MHarrsch.
I’ve put together a search form to help search the Perseus Project. If you’re not a classicist (and even if you are), the Perseus Project is a database of translations of classical texts based on the Loeb translations. It’s based at Tufts, but I prefer the Berlin mirror, because I can actually access that. As wonderful as it is, I have a problem searching it. You can search single texts, and blocks of a few texts but, at least with Leicester PCs, you can’t search every original source in one go. So if I want to find all references to ghosts then I have to plod through each text one or so at a time, usually with zero results. It’s a bit time consuming.
So what I’ve done is build a form which sorts all that out. Great, so what’s the problem? Different browsers work differently. I’ve actually created two forms. One is better than the other because it produces bookmarkable results. The problem is that this version might only work with Firefox and certain versions of Internet Explorer.
The two forms areone form is on a temporarypermanent page here. Could you try them out for me, and if you find one doesn’t work could you add a comment to this entry saying which browser you’re using and which version it is. You can find this out by clicking ‘Help’ and ‘About’ on your browser.
Once I know what works and what doesn’t I’ll write other forms which will allow you to search directly in Latin and Greek and then release the code so that anyone can put it on their site, including – hopefully – the Perseus Project.
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