Greg Crane

Interview date: February 8, 2010
Medford, Massachusetts and Centennial, Colorado

Greg Crane is professor of Classical Studies at Tufts University and editor-in-chief of the Perseus Digital Library. Crane’s first exposure to digital technology in the humanities came when he was still a graduate student at Harvard, and developed a full-text retrieval system for the Thesaurus Linguae Gracae.  From 1998 through 2006, Crane directed a grant from the Digital Library Initiative (DLI) studying problems related to digital libraries for the humanities. Under the DLI-2 program, he worked on a range of topics, varying from the city of London to the history of mechanics to the American Civil War. Each collection provided new insight to electronic tools for learning and scholarship.

With the rise of the Google Books project in 2004, Crane began to focus on the problems and opportunities that arise when whole libraries (rather than curated collections) become available online. The broad range of projects that he undertook with support of the  DLI-2 program, the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS), and the Mellon Foundation provided a strong foundation within which Crane could frame his current generation of research projects on Classical Studies at Perseus. Crane oversees the overall research program at the Perseus Digital library and is especially interested in finding ways the emerging cyberinfrastructure can serve the needs of the humanities and classical studies.