Not on Livy, but my 1996 PhD on Heliodorus (Eroticus) made heavy use of
TLG in an attempt to date vocabulary (counting words not otherwise
attested before fourth century, to contribute to the debate about
whether the composition was third or fourth cent.). One of the Ibycus
http://www.tlg.uci.edu/about/ibycus.php microcomputers developed by
Packard sat in the corner of the Bodleian, another in the Joint Library.
Searching the entire TLG could take around 40 minutes. However, there
was a user-friendly interface: provided you had access to one of those
machines, there was no need to do computer-literate things with regular
expressions and command line 'grep' searches.
John
On 05/08/2015 10:57, Jason Davies wrote:
> On 4 Aug 2015, at 23:43, Jim O'Donnell wrote:
>
>> I would be especially glad to hear reports of the work being put to
>> use in
>> a scholarly way, viz., as a unique source of information about Livy
>> and his
>> language
>
> I don't honestly remember the precise source as I had more than one
> but my late 1990s PhD on Livy, Tacitus and Ammianus (which became
> 'Rome's Religious History') depended completely on being able to
> search the texts across multiple files with wildcards (aka GREP, aka
> Regex). In other words I could search almost instantly for every
> instance of a word irrespective of inflection by saying 'search for:
>
> seru then any of 'um o i' (and further refinements to weed out false
> positives.)
>
> I was literally laughed at by some scholars for this infantile
> new-fangledness (as well as my silly 'doomed' Apple laptop), all of
> whom eventually came to me to search an author's texts for a
> particular hard-to-find reference (eg combinations of words);)
>
> I thanked the software company in the abstract (Bare Bones, for
> BBEdit) for all their help getting what became pretty arcane searches
> to work.
>
> I didn't know of anyone else doing it at the time but I imagine now
> it's virtually standard (?)
>
> cheers
>
> Jason
>
|