(Workshop) The Future of the Past: Classics & Technology with Dr. Stephen Sansom

Homeric philology presents challenges--and opportunities--to recent developments in computational literary studies. Although the epic corpus is meager in comparison to the massive amount of modern literature, quantitative approaches to hexameter poetry from the early 20th century onward provide promising ways to leverage stylistic data for close reading Archaic, Hellenistic, and Imperial Greek epic. This talk demonstrates how metrical data, particularly the sedes of lemmata, uncovers intertexts, enhances interpretation, and enriches perspectives on style, formula, and narrative.

About the Speaker: Dr. Sansom is a Hellenist specializing in early Greek poetry and its reception, especially epic, aesthetics, and digital humanities. He received his PhD in Classics from Stanford University in 2018 before joining Cornell's Department of Classics as a Postdoctoral Associate and fellow in the Active Learning Initiative. His research focuses on how early Greek poetry represents lived experience and how we can model its work. His second book, provisionally titled Where Words Belong: Meter and Meaning in Greek Hexameter, uses data science and close reading to explore the meanings generated by the metrical position of words over the thousand-year history of Greek hexameter poetry. He is also archivist and researcher for an ongoing ethnopoetic project on oral poets of rural Crete and is currently analyzing live recordings of Cretan singers gathered in 2005 by a team of US and Greek scholars.