IRVINE : UCI Gets $1 Million for Greek Databank

UC Irvine has received $1 million in challenge grants to support the world’s only computerized databank of ancient Greek texts.

The grants of $500,000 each from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities have been awarded to UCI’s Thesaurus Linguae Graecae. The awards, which require UCI to raise additional money from private sources, will go toward building the first permanent endowment for the computerized Greek databank.

Such an endowment is necessary, according to Thesaurus Linguae Graecae director Theodore Brunner, if they are to continue adding known Greek texts.

So far, the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae includes virtually every surviving written text in Greek from the time of Homer, about 750 B.C., to 600 A.D. Researchers hope to expand the database to include everything through the fall of Constantinople in 1453. The 70 million words now logged in its central database are available by compact discs to more than 1,000 universities around the world.

An endowment is also vital to keeping the equipment functioning properly and readily accessible to classical scholars as computer technology develops.

The Thesaurus Linguae Graecae “is a resource of profound importance to research and scholarship in the humanities, one that serves a vast user base at a reasonable cost,” said Brunner, a longtime professor of classics at UCI. “But it also needs continuous care.”