rOpenSci | Exploratory Data Analysis of Ancient Texts with rperseus

Introduction by OpenMethods Editor (Delfim Leao): The rperseus package provides classicists and other people interested in ancient philology and exegesis with corpora of texts from the ancient world (based on the Perseus Digital Library), combined with a toolkit designed to compare passages and selected words with parallels where the same expressions or words occur.

 

Working with the Perseus Digital Library was already a trip down memory lane, but here’s an example of how I would have leveraged rperseus many years ago. My best papers often sprung from the outer margins of my Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece. Here the editors inserted cross references to parallel vocabulary, themes, and even grammatical constructions. Given the intertextuality of biblical literature, the margins are a rich source of questions: Where else does the author use similar vocabulary? How is the source material used differently? Does the literary context affect our interpretation of a particular word? This is exploratory data analysis in biblical studies.

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