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Please find below useful information from Dr Neil O'Sullivan regarding
accessing and using Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG) Online. Either
click on the links in the menu below for specific sections, or scroll
down through the page to review all of the information provided. Introduction
Using the system
Setting up Safari for Unicode
Using the TLG Website
Links to Perseus
Unicode and legacy systems (e.g. Graeca)
Further information
TLG Online: www.tlg.uci.edu
Updated version for Mac OS 10.4.8 and Word 2004
Neil O'Sullivan, 29 March 2007
Introduction
The Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG) is an electronic data bank of
virtually all Greek literature from Homer to the end of the
Byzantine period. It is an enormously valuable resource for all
those involved in the study of ancient Greek texts, enabling
searches and browsing through individual authors and the whole
corpus. In the past we accessed the material via CD-ROM through a
Macintosh software program called Pandora, but our institutional
subscription is now online, directly accessing the data from the
TLG website at the University of California, Irvine.
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Using the system
Only one computer on campus can access our TLG web-based
subscription, and that computer is #23 in the computer lab in
Arts room 1.54. The room is normally secured, but you should be
able to open it by swiping your campus card on the reader
outside. (All enquiries about access to the lab should be
directed to Faculty Computing.) #23 is clearly marked with signs which ask others to
give preference to TLG users (our access to the database is based
on the unique identity - the IP address - of that computer).
Like all computers in that lab, #23 is a Macintosh running the
current operating system, OS X. Start by logging on to it under
your user name and password. On the bottom of the screen you will
see a row of small icons (in the 'Dock' in OS X speak). Single
click on the compass - this is Safari, the Apple browser for OS
X.
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Setting up Safari for
Unicode
At this stage you will have to make a couple of changes to the
set-up, but only this first time - the computer should remember
your preferences on subsequent occasions. These changes are to do
with the way you will enter Greek and have it presented to you on
the screen. Select from the menu bar Safari
->Preferences...->Appearance, and select at a decent size -
I recommend 16 pts - as your standard font one of the built-in
Unicode fonts: these are Arial, Helvetica, Lucida Grande (my
personal preference) and Times (not Times New Roman). Close the
Appearance box. Then via the Apple menu select 'System
preferences...'->International->Input Menu and scroll down
until you find 'Greek polytonic', the icon of which is a Greek
flag accompanied by the dinky façade of a temple. Click in
its box and also the one which called 'Keyboard viewer', then
close the dialogue box, first making sure that the 'Show input
menu in menu bar' box is clicked. This will make the required
Greek keyboard available to you for easy selection.
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Using the TLG
Website
You should now be ready to visit the TLG website
(www.tlg.uci.edu). The browser will take you to the site's
homepage, with useful links to information about the project,
access to the canon of authors and texts and so on. In the left
hand frame you will see a heading 'Search the Online TLG' with a
link to 'Institutions'. Click on the link, and you will be taken
to a welcome page with two options: enter option A, as you will
be using Unicode (see below for the possibility of using option
B).
From there, most of the site is pretty self-explanatory, or else
well explained by clicking on hyperlinks. There are many features
which you can check out either from our subscription machine or
else by using the Abridged TLG from your own computer (see
below). The first page gives you the option of searching part of
the corpus (by individual author, by date, by genre, or by
geography), or else the whole corpus (which is very fast indeed).
From this first page you can also go into browse mode, which is
useful for checking a particular passage from an author: type the
author's name and click 'search'; on the next screen click the
'show works' link, and the following page will show you all the
author's works with a 'browse' link for each one. A browse link
is also available for every occurrence of a word that the search
function finds, so that you can look at the larger context of a
particular passage.
Something needs to be said about Greek input in the 'Search for'
box. When you are ready to search, first click in the box to make
it active. Then click on the keyboard icon (it will probably
appear initially as an Australian flag) on the right of the menu
bar, and from the drop down menu select 'Greek polytonic': the
icon now becomes the Greek flag and temple, and anything you type
now will be in Greek. Most of the letters are what you would
expect (a=alpha, b=beta, etc.) but the diacritics are done
idiosyncratically and differently from the Graeca/SuperGreek
system some of us are still using elsewhere: note especially that
accents and breathings are typed BEFORE rather than after the
vowels they will stand over. For a full template of the Greek
polytonic keyboard click on the keyboard icon and select 'Show
keyboard viewer'.
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Links to
Perseus
A great feature of the online TLG is its integration with the
Perseus website and its parsing and lexicographic tools. The
'links to Perseus' feature is off by default, but turning it on
(via the control in the left-hand column) will make every word
turned up by searches or in browse mode a hyperlink to its
parsing, as well as its meaning given in the online versions of
the fullest Greek-English dictionary, Liddell-Scott-Jones, and
its abridged version (the 'middle Liddell'). In the browse mode
there is also a link for many texts to their online translations.
(Note that using these links will take you outside the TLG
website, and that you may get a dialogue box, requesting your
user name and password; you need to enter these from your Email
account, and they may not be the same as the username and
password you used to log on to the computer originally.)
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Unicode and legacy
systems (e.g. Graeca)
The advice above is based on the assumption that you will be
using the one of the Unicode fonts which comes with OS X.
Unicode, a cross-platform system of encoding letters which
assigns to each sign in every writing system of the world a
unique number, is clearly the future for people who have to use
non-Roman writing systems, and it has been well-integrated into
the new Mac OS. The output from TLG, obtained as outlined here,
can be printed off, or exported seamlessly to free applications
which come with OS X such as TextEdit. The current version (2004)
of Word for Macintosh also offers basic Unicode support (as does
its Windows equivalent), but you will find the technology better
implemented in e.g. Nisus Writer Express (www.nisus.com), a word
processor which has the advantage of being compatible with the
depressingly ubiquitous Word while being a much more pleasant
application to use IMHO.
However, the TLG online does not require Unicode input, and can
output results in a number of formats, including the
LaserGreek/Graeca style with which most of us are familiar.
However, this option is not recommended, as Unicode offers
clearly superior technology, and everything needed for it is
built into the current Macintosh operating system. Furthermore,
the use of the LaserGreek/Graeca format not only requires a
special Greek font (e.g. Graeca) to be installed in the computer
displaying the Greek (Graeca has not been installed in computer
#23 in lab 1.54), but input can only be made through various
forms of transliteration, not directly in Greek. If you must make
use of this option, choose alternative B at the Welcome page (see
above), selecting LaserGreek as your Greek display font. Once you
reach the page with the 'Search for' text box, to help with
transliteration you will find an icon in the shape of a keyboard
which opens a program which will do the conversion from Greek for
you.
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Further
information
Web-based TLG access has seen the demise of TLG CD-ROMs, and no
new CD-ROM licences are being issued. There is a web-based
subscription for individuals available which is based on a
password and accessible from any computer connected to the
internet and, at a very reasonable price (see the website for
details), is something that individual members of staff and
students may wish to consider buying. You should also be aware
that TLG makes freely available to non-subscribers 34
representative authors from its corpus, and you can use these to
familiarise yourself with the system from any computer - just go
follow the 'Abridged Online TLG' link from the home page (but
bear in mind that the instructions given above may not all be
relevant to the computer and OS you are using).
The TLG materials contain only Greek literary texts, but we are
now also able to offer similar access to an extensive range of
Latin texts as well as Greek inscriptions and documentary papyri;
these are the materials published by the Packard Humanities
Institute, and we are able to access them via the Diogenes
program or else through freely available websites. For details
see our PHI page.
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