The Alpheios Project is an open source initiative originally focused on developing software to facilitate reading Latin and ancient Greek. Dictionaries, grammars and inflection tables were combined in a set of web-based tools to provide comprehensive reading support for scholars, students and independent readers. The tools were implemented as browser add-ons so that they could be used on any web site or any page that a user might create in Unicoded HTML.
In collaboration with the Perseus Digital Library, the goals of the Alpheios Project were subsequently broadened to combine reading support with language learning. Annotation and editing tools were added to help users contribute to the development of new resources, such as enhanced texts that have been syntactically annotated or aligned with translations.
The Alpheios tools are designed modularly to encourage the addition of other languages that have the necessary digital resources, such as morphological analyzers and dictionaries. In addition to Latin and ancient Greek, Alpheios tools have been extended to Arabic and Chinese. The Alpheios Project is a non-profit initiative. The software is open source, and resides on Sourceforge.com. The Alpheios software is released as GPL 3.0 and texts and data as CC-by-SA.
History
The Alpheios Project was established in 2007 by Mark Nelson, the founder of the commercial software companyOvid Technologies, which he started after writing a search engine for medical literature that became widely popular in medical libraries and research facilities. Nelson, who holds an MA in English literature from Columbia University, sold the company to Wolters Kluwerin 1999. Nelson created Alpheios by recruiting several developers and programmers from his previous company, defining the project's initial goals and funding its first three years of operation. In 2008 he also provided the initial funding for The Perseus Treebank of Ancient Greek, which has subsequently been crowd-sourced. In 2011, the Perseus Project hired key Alpheios staff and the activities of the projects were extensively integrated, although Alpheios remains an independent organization focused on developing adaptive reading and learning tools that can provide formative assessment customized to the individual user's special abilities and goals, including the study of specific authors or texts. To date, all Alpheios applications, enhanced texts and code have been provided without any fees or licenses. A separate Alpheios LLC provides commercial consultation on customization and extension of the Alpheios tools.
Currently Available Alpheios Resources
Reading Support Tools (Available as Browser Plugins)
Latin
Dictionaries
Grammars
Morphological Analyzers
Inflection tables
Greek
Dictionaries
Grammars
Morphological Analyzers
Inflection tables
Arabic
Dictionaries
Morphological analyzer
The reading tools also contain some pedagogical features typically found in e-tutors such as morphological and lexical quizzes and games and the automatic comparison of the user's own claims about vocabulary proficiency with his recorded use of the dictionary resources.
Enhanced Texts (originals derived chiefly from the [Perseus Project])
Supports manual diagramming of sentences in any language that has spaces or punctuation between its words, annotating the nodes and arcs as desired, and exporting as a re-usable xml document.
Alignment editor
Supports manual word or phrase alignment of a text in any language with its translation into any other language, and export as a re-usable xml document.
Other Alpheios Projects
Research Collaborations
Chief Pedagogical Collaborators
Alpheios encourages participation by interested individuals whether or not they have current academic affiliations.
