Talk:Perseus Digital Library

Untitled
The Classicist’s Tantalus! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.82.169.203 (talk) 21:04, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

I've used, or have attempted to use, Perseus for several years and after all this time I can honestly say that it is a failed undertaking, a brilliant concept in throughly clumsy, apathetic and consummately incompetent hands.

There really is no excuse that I, nor any other scholar in the field can really accept for Perseus' largely inoperable and malfunctioning website. If I may liken Perseus, appropriately, to a Classical myth, then it would be Tantalus, whose punishment was to suffer eternal hunger and thirst despite the fact that a bounty of water and food lay before him, only to retreat at his approach.

This is the travesty that is Perseus. A wealth of knowledge, wonderfully laid out with a conscientious approach which lauds both the fields of humanities and web design. However, this is the tantalizing irony - Perseus rarely can make available all of its knowledge due to incessant hardware problems and an apparent inability to handle web traffic. For the first year or so of using Perseus for various Latin and Greek projects, it might have taken several minutes to access a page, or bring a lexical and/or morphological entry (as it still does, if anything at all comes up), but I sympathized with Perseus' now standard excuses of hardware problems, lack of funding, high volume of traffic, etc.

Well, after so many years, Perseus has been stagnant. The release of Perseus 4.0 was and still is a joke; it still doesn't work properly and is abysmally slow. As a teacher, I use to occasionally recommend Perseus to my students, but seldom so as I didn't want to make my students dependent on Perseus for a variety of reasons (the biggie being that Perseus will let you down, and another being that the "instant answer" approach of Perseus tends to create a dependency of learning, to the detriment of a student's problem solving skills).

By now the excuses have worn thin. I realize the situation of the Perseus staff and the funding situation and what have you, but after so many years, surely someone should have developed some kind of solution. I see Perseus going down in Humanities computing history as the most promising and brilliant project undertaken that could have been, but was squandered and badly handled due to mismanagement, incompetency and a lack of resourcefulness on the part of the Perseus staff.

The Perseus staff needs to take drastic action, sacrifices need to made and risks need to be taken otherwise Perseus will remain a largely useless embarrassment to Humanities computing. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.90.172.95 (talk • contribs) 13 June, 2007

To the academic above, I reply: SO TRUE! Tantalus is pretty close to the right metaphor. When it works, Perseus is great; but that only increases desire, which is thwarted more often than not. Perseus is more like finding a mate who is seemingly perfect over the course of the first week of the relationship, only to find in subsequent weeks that the beloved is unreliable and insane, with brief and occasional glimmers of the perfections that keep one coming back for more abuse. —Preceding unsigned comment added by User: (talk • contribs) May, 2008

A few weeks ago I edited the article to reflect the fact that Perseus has become extremely stable in the past year. My sentence was excised. This is wikipedia bullying of the worst kind. The person who "owns" this article has decided about Perseus. In 2010 justifying to foundations and grant-givers large expenditures on Latin and Greek projects is not easy (and I am not Gregory Crane) but Perseus has turned a corner. Maybe you might give it a shot. They keep getting new texts. So if you want to patrol and keep different opinions off your page be my guest; I won't be back. Perseus is a magnificent resource. --Tony (talk) 21:08, 27 August 2010 (UTC)


 * I made this revision, however, I don't own the article; I'm an editor just like you are. I reverted the revision because it was unsourced and entirely complementary about the subject to the extent of being puffery. I stand by my decision. I'm sorry you've had a bad experience of wikipedia, but suggest that it might have been a better experience if you'd chosen to work on projects which you didn't have a conflict of interest with. Stuartyeates (talk) 23:38, 27 August 2010 (UTC)

bad link
I have changed the link to Perseus because the old one pointed to a page that is almost a year old and makes people think that they have a server down. It also leads to links that require the user to configure their display, which I NEVER could get to work. My link leads to pages that display beautifully and can even be copied and pasted into Word. Have fun. I am. 4.249.198.140 (talk) 01:52, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

Availability/Reliability
I have removed the following sentence from the lead section: "Suffering at times from computer hardware problems, its resources occasionally are unavailable."

From this talk page it appears there has previously been controversy about this statement, so I wanted to explain my thinking. The key issue with this statement is that it is unsourced. To the extent that editors may have added the statement based on their own experiences as users of Perseus, that would constitute original research (with possible WP:NPOV issues). For the article to contain any statement about Perseus' availability, it must be based on published reliable sources.

An additional concern is undue weight. This was previously the fourth sentence of the lead, coming before such basic information as the scope of Perseus' collections. If sufficient sources do exist, it would probably be more appropriate to discuss availability in a section later in the article. LiberalArtist (talk) 02:34, 26 November 2017 (UTC)

Perseus Digital Library - Page overhaul
Hi everyone.

This page feels like it could really use some modernisation. For starters, it seems that the website is nowadays mainly called Perseus Digital Library - a research on JSTOR or google books leads far more results for Digital Library than for projects, and disambiguates from other projects (like an aerospatial one).

Apart from that, the page is small, lacks an infobox, and there is lots of literature on the library (seeing how widely it is used in the Digital Humanities). The Digital Humanities page seems quite thorough and informed, so I'll use the ressources found there and on JSTOR.

I'm going to start working on all that. If any of you want to pitch in, have sources, recommendations, please share below! Tsiluciole (talk) 09:23, 23 November 2022 (UTC)


 * Alright!
 * Took some time for me to finally get to it and rework the page but it's done.
 * Since the page before was basically a stub, I reworked it from the grounds up searching for secondary references. I hope the page is satisfactory now. I'm not sure the infobox is really good and the page could benefit from a logo, so I asked the webmaster of the page to please provide one to wikicommons.
 * Tsiluciole (talk) 13:19, 20 January 2023 (UTC)