As I near the end of my graduate education, I’ve put together a list of resources that have been helpful over the last several years. I’ve included some websites for searching Latin and Greek corpora (not just Perseus!), some good Unicode fonts that can render Greek well, a tool for running OCR on scans of Latin texts, and a dictionary of modern English terms translated into Latin.
If you have another resource in mind that belongs on this list, please e-mail me!
Like many other academics, I’m writing my dissertation using LaTeX. It’s great software to use for preparing large documents with complex citations. My impression is that most academics who use LaTeX work in the sciences or mathematics, but I know I lot of people in humanities departments (especially philosophy) who use it, too.
Columbia (like most universities) requires dissertations to follow very particular formatting guidelines, and it can be tricky to get LaTeX to do exactly what you want regarding formatting. (In fact, one of the great advantages of using LaTeX is that it automatically formats your documents really well.) I wrote a template to meet the guidelines for dissertations at Columbia, and I’ve posted the template here at GitHub. The template should be really helpful for anyone writing a dissertation here. Even if you study at a different university, the template could be useful just to get your formatting on the right track.
The template includes some extra features on top of fulfilling these formatting guidelines. It sets up Unicode support, it provides a folder structure to keep your chapters organized, and it sets up a citation style (using biblatex) that should be especially helpful for students in the humanities.
The college class that exerts the most influence on my day-to-day life is Music 51: Theory and Composition. Influence at least construed as whistling repertoire. Leading tones and parallel fifths aren’t really relevant to my job as a Latinist, except maybe when looking at a manuscript like the example above from The Cloisters.
Anyhow, last night I was digging through some old course materials, and I found a piano transcription/adaptation of Stravinsky’s Grand Choral from his suite L’histoire du soldat. It’s a really remarkable piece especially if you’ve ever looked at baroque chorales. The original suite, written for septet, is based on an old Russian parable, and performances often include narration. It sounds like a modernist version of Peter and the Wolf written by Bach.
I’ve uploaded a copy of the music here, and you can find the full-size .jpg linked below. If anyone is really good at typesetting sheet music with MuseScore, it would be great to have a smaller non-image version for transposing and making PDFs.
You can listen to the original version (including narration) here. And many thanks to the stranger who first made this transcription of such a great piece of music!
