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Il Laboratorio di Scienze dell’ Antichità

Sezione Informatica per le Lingue Antiche

coordinated by Antonella Russo and Anna Santoni

SNS-Greek & Latin

History of the SNS-Greek & Latin Project

The first two versions of SNS-Greek, 1.0 and 2.0, were working on a Digital VAX. Macintosh personal computers were merely used as terminals and allowed the user to search the texts in the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG) stored on some tapes in the VAX. These two versions were only used by the researchers and the students at the Scuola Normale.
When the TLG texts became available on the CD-ROMs, we decided to support the application on Macintosh personal computers by exploiting their active computing power rather than by using them to emulate the VAX terminals. SNS-Greek 3.0 was the first prototype for personal computers to make the TLG texts available in the Macintosh environment.
The two versions of SNS-Greek working on a VAX and the prototype for Macintosh were realized by Enrico Sonno, all other releases were realized by Antonella Russo.
SNS-Greek 3.1, released in May 1990, was the first fully-tested version of the application distributed to several researchers and the institutions. It was a user-friendly searching tool for the Greek texts in the TLG CD-ROM version C.
In February 1991, the upgrade SNS-Greek 3.2 was released. It allowed the user to search also the documentary papyri and inscriptions in CD PHI #2. The user was given more possibilities of specifying the patterns to search for by means of accents, breathings, iota and apostrophe. The creation of indexes and concordances was another peculiarity of this release: all the works in the TLG CD-ROM could be indexed and the results could be exported in a Microsoft Word format (RTF).
In February 1992, the prototype of SNS-Greek 3.3 was realized to speed up the search in the entire CD-ROM TLG by using the TLG indexes stored in it.
When the two CD-ROMs PHI #5.3 and PHI #6 by Packard Humanities Institute were released, we decided to extend our application and let the user search respectively Greek texts in TLG, Greek inscriptions in PHI #6, and Latin texts in PHI #5.3. The name of our application was therefore changed to SNS-Greek & Latin. Its first release 1.0, dated September 1992, allowed the user to read the texts in CD-ROM PHI #5.3 and its subsequent release 2.0, dated May 1993, permitted to search the Greek inscriptions contained in the PHI #6 CD-ROM. As for the latter CD-ROM, all the new citation levels (e.g. location, date, bibliography and so on) were decoded and displayed together with the texts .
After that the CD-ROM TLG version 'D' was released, we aimed at making the searches and the indexing procedures work on this new CD by means of version 3.0 (November 1993). The TLG indexes for speeding up the search were then used in version 3.1 (May 1994).
The main feature of SNS-Greek & Latin 4.0 (March 1997) and 4.1 (July 1998) was the possibility to use a new kind of TLG indexes created in our LILA laboratory. The searching time for the entire TLG was comparable to the one required to just lookup an item in the printed index of a single work!
SNS-Greek & Latin 5.1, released in Novembre 2000, allowed to use the new TLG 'E', to search the Greek and Coptic texts in PHI #5.3 and the Latin and Coptic texts in PHI #7. The search on the entire TLG data bank was considerably speeded up using the SNS-E indexes. The texts could be exported also in the Greekkeys fonts, besides the LaserGreek and LaserGreek II packages.
Starting from March 2004 SNS-Greek & Latin 1.0 for Windows was distributed. It allows to perform multiple parallel searches even on different data banks and has a completely renewed user interface, besides many other improvements. This application was realized by Davide Merlitti and Antonella Russo.
In January 2007 the new SNS-Greek & Latin 6.0 for Mac OSX and SNS-Greek & Latin 2.0 for Windows were released. Among the new features there is the user interface, the search for three patterns and the Unicode support. The currently distributed versions are 6.1 for Macintosh and 2.1 for Windows. A brief description of version 6.1 can be found here; the main festures of version 2.1 for Windows can be found here.

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