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

Greg Crane

Summary:

Crane’s involvement with digitizing goes back to 1982, when he was a graduate student and had access to the first chunks of electronic texts and magnetic tape. Crane remembers something like 60 megabytes of classical Greek texts that were typed in and available for use, flooding the storage available at the time. Harvard Arts and Sciences, where Crane was a graduate student, had two 60 megabyte drives that “looked like washing machines.” Crane remembers how getting any text at all was a big deal, even if it couldn’t be transcribed.

In 1983, Crane visited Xerox Park and saw his first digital color image projected and realized anything could be done; the opportunities were endless. Students of the ancient world have had to deal with information sources in a very disciplined way. Everything had to be analytic and the text, reconstructed. There was a contained set of linguistic data, studied very intensely, where one needed to come up with methods to find patterns in the text.

For the philologists (literary studies and scholarship linguists), computers were a natural extension of what they were trying to do. Crane’s field really started building resources in 1972 when they decided they wanted to digitize this corpus of Greek thus creating the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG). Crane began working on the project 10 years later, in 1982. It was clear to Crane that if you wanted to study the entire ancient world (the archeological, linguistic record all together) you couldn’t’ do it very well in print because you couldn’t get the data. Movement toward the digital environment allows for the possibility of having this accessible model. One of the key motivations of the project was to have an environment where everything was available. It was clear to Crane in 1983, that anything you could do in a normal library could be done better and with more clarity in a digital library. The Thesaurus Linguae Graecae made information sharing possible and easy to access.