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Jeanna Cook, Egypt through Greek Eyes
This semester I used the annotation tools of text alignment and treebanking to build a unit for intermediate Greek students at the secondary school level. I have been eager to try these tools in my classroom ever since I first started working with them at Tufts. Treebanking and text alignment provide not only a learning opportunity for detailed grammatical, morphological, and lexical analysis, but also a real world application for aspiring scholars in the field of philology.
The unit that I have built, entitled “Egypt through Greek Eyes”, is based on selections from Herodotus Book II. I chose this text for reasons that suit both my students and our curriculum. First of all, my students are always curious about Egypt and they know very little about cultural practices in Egypt beyond mummification. The majority of those who will work on this unit have first been introduced to Egypt in the Classical world through the Cambridge Unit on Alexandria. I find that every time I teach this unit, students are confused by the interaction of ancient peoples in the city of Alexandria. According to the way that they have learned ancient history, the Romans, the Greeks, and the Egyptians exist in distinct "silos" of time and geography. The concept of cultural exchange between the people of the Mediterranean, across the periods of habitation in this region, is unfamiliar for them, but an important understanding that they need to develop. It is my hope that the “Egypt through Greek Eyes” will help my students to gain a better understanding of Egyptian culture, but more importantly, what Greeks like Herodotus thought about Egypt and how the Greek cultural identity is affirmed in the report of Egyptian or “other” culture.
This point of curiosity that inspired the unit overlaps with a number of curricular goals of the course. The unit works well with a larger unit on ethnography that all students in our program work on, in Latin II and Latin III. Most of the students in Greek II have taken Latin at St. Mark’s prior to Greek, so they have worked with the essential questions of the unit before, particularly regarding the Roman depiction of the enemy. I hope that the Herodotus unit pushes my students to think about the bias present in a non-hostile and historical context. Furthermore, this unit ties into larger curricular goals that we emphasize in our department, such as experience with perspective taking and empathy.
Finally, as I have come to understand this semester while working more closely with Herodotus, the level of the prose offers a number of key teaching points for students who are stepping outside of a grammar text for the first time. Herodotus’ syntax is fairly straightforward, but he makes full use of simple subordinate clauses and a range of tenses, voices, and moods. The vocabulary will be largely familiar to my students, with a few new and interesting words providing access to the content of Herodotus’ ethnography. Features of Ionic dialect in Herodotus open up a conversation of morphological and syntactical differences between authors, which will help students acclimate to other genres and styles in the corpus. Finally, Herodotus’ use of particles and coordinating conjunctions, in particular μὲν/δὲ, provides an opportunity for me to work with my students on the nuances of the “little words.”
For the cohesiveness of the unit, I decided to collect my treebanking and text alignment in one place, a Mediakron site. I have been using Mediakron this semester at Boston College and have found it to provide a number of simplified tools for curating a number of digital resources in one place. As the administrator of my Herodotus Mediakron site, I can invite my students to curate resources alongside those that I have already collected. The site remains private for those invited to collaborate until it is ready to be launched publically. Thus far, I have built elements of the unit that I would like the students to have access to when we first start working on it, but I have left gaps for them to fill in as they become more comfortable with the features of Perseids and Mediakron. By the end of the unit, each student will have worked with a classmate to build his or her own “story” for a selection from Herodotus 2.80-85. Conveniently, Mediakron is fully integrated with Canvas, the LMS that we use at St. Mark’s. Included is the link that provides more information about Mediakron.
The various elements of my Mediakron site are as presented below. Please feel free to browse the site to see these features in action.
The unit plan features the essential questions, a description of the features of the site, and the syllabus for the unit. Student assignments will be posted in the unit plan, so that other teachers looking to use this site with their classes will have a better sense for the pacing and products of which a secondary school Greek class is capable.
One of the main reasons why I chose to use Mediakron for this project was the feature of annotated text or “stories” that the site allows me to build for the level of my students. I am always browsing through textbooks taking readings from one book and commentary from another in order to better suit the needs of my class. I have yet to discover the perfect textbook for intermediate Greek, despite the fact that a number of good texts (Eros at the Banquet, Attica) have been published in recent years.
Each section of the text that I will work on with my students has been annotated with commentary on some of the features and content of the text. Annotations are usually accompanied by an image and a more detailed explanation, a quick fix for those moments where a verbal description does not do justice to the person, item, or place described. I have done my best to source the majority of my images from artifacts and ancient art, as I think these annotations will provide an opportunity for further analysis and questions when we use them in class. Vocabulary words, ten per chapter, have been bolded in the text, so that students become familiar can approach them from the context of the passage. Additional lists of vocabulary are provided in the vocabulary section of the site.
“Stories” have not been built for 2.80-85, as one of the final projects of the unit involves students trying their hands at annotating a text for the class to use when we work together. I will expect students to use images, select vocabulary words, and provide commentary on the important features of the text at hand. I will provide available published commentaries for their use, but I will expect them to do some of their own research by accessing secondary source material online and in the library.
The secondary sources used to build the site are listed below:
- Armayor, O. Kimball. 1978. “Did Herodotus Ever Go to Egypt?”. Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt, 15: 59-73.
- Herodotus, Book II, edited by W. G. Waddell, 2nd ed. London: Bristol Classical Press, 1998.
- Lloyd, Alan B. Herodotus Book II: Commentary 1-98, 2nd ed. Leiden: Brill, 1994
To help my students better adjust to their first reading off (text)book, I have collected treebanks and text alignments of the sections that we will read together. Students will first approach a reading by working with the annotated text, but they will be expected to use the treebanks when they have difficulty with the syntax or grammatical structures of a sentence. Morphology and lexical analysis, another feature of the treebank, will help them to better understand difficult forms and unfamiliar words while they pre-read at home. Mercedes Sisk used the Harrington Tagset on her trees, which provides more detailed information on morphological use - a very helpful tool for an intermediate student. Choices in treebanking, such as marking the function of participles as attribute, adverb, subject, will help the students in my class work on some of the details necessary for reading Greek successfully at the next level.
Text alignment, too, provides a means by which students can work with the text effectively as they read on their own prior to a class meeting. I have written my own literal and “fluent” translation of the text in order to give students a sense for the word-to-word comparison of between Greek and English, while also accounting for expressions and details that are better understood in English with a step back from the rigidity of this word-to-word comparison. On the literal translations that I have aligned, I have done my best not to align forms where the morphology or definition is no longer a suitable comparison after translation. I have also included the text alignment of my colleagues, Brian Clark and Mercedes Sisk. Both Brian and Mercedes aligned the published translations of two different authors. With access to four separate translations, I hope that my students will have an abundance of options from which they can better understand the content, but also the choices that a translator must make when carrying over one language into another. Upon the completion of 2.35-36 and 2.50 & 2.52, students will work on their own text alignment of a literal translation (which they will write), and a published translation from their choice of author. They will present their findings, commenting on the choices of the translator before producing their own “fluent” translation of the section.
Finally, maps, vocabulary, and other digital resources that I find as I continue to build out the site will live in the resources tab. I am excited to have access to all of these tools in one place, as I believe that my students will make better use of them on account of their easy accessibility and simple organization. If there are resources that I should consider adding before bring the site into my class I would be appreciative of further recommendations.
- Mediakron: https://mediakron.bc.edu/herodotus/home
- Brian's treebanks: 2.35-2.36 ; 2.50-2.52 ; 2.80-85
- Sadie's treebanks: 2.35 ; 2.36 ; 2.50 ; 2.52 ; 2.80 ; 2.81 ; 2.82 ; 2.83 ; 2.84 ; 2.85
Once the site goes live, it is my hope that other Greek students and Greek classes might find the resource to be of use for their own reading of Herodotus. Text alignment makes it possible for students who do not take Greek to gain a better sense of the quality and interpretation of various translations. I would be interested to work with a History or English class at St. Mark’s to see what students outside of the Classical language curriculum might gain from access to text alignment and treebanking.
Over time, I hope that the site continues to grow and improve with the subsequent additions the collaboration of my students after our unit and further collaborators beyond our classroom. The site provides a welcome opportunity for two or more classes to develop content at the same time, allowing students to compare treebanks and text alignments with students beyond our campus. Finally, I am hopeful that teachers who are looking to teach Herodotus or work with digitial tools in the language classroom might take interest in the site and its features, use it to their benefit, and enrich it with their own contributions.
Thanks to Brian Clark and Mercedes Sisk for their help with my project!