Organization of the course

There are probably as many definitions myth as there are scholars of Greek myth, but somehow, even if it’s hard to define, we largely agree on what stories are myths. Our approach will strongly emphasize hands-on work with textual content that everyone would consider mythical. We will consider how to organize and approach the study of digital texts, with special emphasis on definition of tests prior to developing code.

Collaborative work is an important part of this work. Both in-class work and assignments outside of class will include a mix of individual and team work. Our 75-minute classes will regularly include time to workshop solutions to practical problems.

Resources, technologies and mechanics of submitting assignments

The following required book is on order from the college book store:

  • R. Scott Smith and Stephen M. Trzaskoma, Apollodorus’ Library and Hyginus’ Fabulae: Two Handbooks of Greek Mythology (Hackett 2007).

In exploring drafts of code we develop, we will use juliahub’s AskAI, a version of ChatGPT trained to generate code in the Julia language.

  • It is available online here. You can use your Holy Cross Google login to get access to it.

We will use a course Google drive to share reading material, and to submit assignments.

  • You submit an assignment by dropping a file into your individual folder. (Other students do not have access to your individual folder.)

We will write code in the Julia language. You will want to install it on your personal computer, or speak with Prof. Smith about access to the Classics Department research lab, where machines have Julia installed.

Classics 199, Digital Mythology. All material on this web site is available under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license CC BY-SA 4.0 on github.