Local News in Brief : Irvine : Greek Text Data Bank Developers Honored
In honor of their work on a unique ancient-language program at UC Irvine, two California residents are scheduled to receive the Medal for Distinguished Service from the American Philological Assn. at the organization’s annual meeting in New York City on Dec. 29.
The medals will go to Theodore Brunner of Laguna Beach, professor of classics at UC Irvine, and to David Packard of Los Altos Hills, president of the Packard Humanities Institute. They are being honored for their development of the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, the world’s only computerized data bank of ancient Greek texts.
Sixty million words, representing the writings of more than 3,000 authors from about 750 BC to AD 600, are recorded in the data bank, which is used by scholars around the world. Packard developed the computer used for the system.
The association’s board of directors, in praising Brunner’s and Packard’s work, said: “No other development has contributed as much to our field as the availability of resources in machine-readable form.”
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