TLG Online - Thesaurus Linguae Graecae

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

Any computer connected to the campus network can access our TLG web-based subscription.  A UWA site license is now in operation.  Your web browser may have some options, or preferences which can be fine-tuned to handle Unicode fonts (see below) and if you are using one of our lab computers, or generally Mac OS X, you may want to read the next section about how to set up Safari.

Faculty Computing

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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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