Overview

Myths are a kind of traditional tale. Like any traditional story, they are multiform: there is no single, “correct” version. We can think of a mythology as the collection of myths that relates all of the (potentially contradictory) versions of many stories.

In this course we’ll explore large collections of myths preserved in ancient handbooks of mythology and in scholarly commentaries on the major Greek epic, the Iliad. We will learn how to use digital methods to explore questions about Greek myth that we could not answer from close reading alone. The course will emphasize both content and methodology. To the course title “Digital Mythology,” you may add either of two subtitles: “Reading Greek mythology using data science” or “A first encounter with data science through Greek mythology.”