Honey-smiling Sappho: a word on women in Greece.

I've been thinking a lot about the perception of women, mostly in a modern context. But, once again, I realize that whatever modern thing I'm thinking about inevitably has deep seated roots. Doing research on Sappho this week, I was pretty dismayed by the scholarship and disappointed in the oblique sexism both from her contemporaries and modern commentators. 

Sappho, the most famous Greek poetess (which is not to say she was the only one), lived on the island of Lesbos from around 630 BCE to her death in 570 BCE, with a brief time of exile during a tumultuous political climate. Very little of her poetry survives, but that which does is incredibly beautiful. The Alexandrians considered her one of the nine great lyric poets; unsurprisingly, she is the only woman on the list. However, she is most famous for her sexual preferences, which have been sensationalized. Perhaps this is due to the dearth of her original text that survives, but I think there's more to it than that. 

Sappho was apparently ugly according to Greek standards. As far as I can tell, 'ugly' means 'dark'. Another more complimentary contemporary called her "violet-haired", so we can assume she is at minimum not golden-haired or pale-skinned. She was also small, another apparent strike against her. But an epithet that was attributed to her by the same friend who called her "violet-haired" was mellichomeide - "honey-smiling".

I think this is a beautiful word and a beautiful concept, but there is also an undertone of male condescension that makes me deeply sad. Men are allowed to be diverse in their descriptors: strong, brilliant, kind, wise, a great poet. But Sappho? Well, she isn't pretty, but at least she's sweet. Beauty and kindness, while good enough things, should not be what Sappho is reduced to because she's a woman. Back to modern times, girls and women are frequently told that "they're prettier when they smile". That's not cool. You don't have the right to try and dictate my happiness or my emotions, or try to make me fake a smile because it makes me more visually appealing. I have thoughts, and sometimes these thoughts do not make me smile, and forcing me or anyone else to create some facsimile of happiness is not your right.

Honey-smiling Sappho may have been sweet, but that is not all she was. Sappho was a powerful writer who captured love, companionship, and life, regardless of who she slept with. And so, I end with this. 

Sappho,  fragment 58 (trans Mary Barnard)

Pain penetrates
me drop
by drop

A lot has been done physically on the website this week, which is exciting. Accepting the caveat that it most places on the site are inaccessible to viewers at this time, here is the link. Please please PLEASE let me know if there's something that jumps out at you as a. wrong, or b. unergonomic. We really want this to be sleek and easy to use.

http://www.antiquityinireland.org 

Thank you in advance for any advice! 

Digital Humanities and Yeats Poems and Classics, OH MY!

Okay. I'm a terrible blogger. I'm radically inconsistent and very rarely am I insightful. But I'm finally doing something that's pretty cool and I'm very excited about and hopefully will be a long range project.

The basic story arc begins with an email I received over Presidents' Day weekend in February. I was at the Museum of Science with my visiting family, messing around on my phone, when a Classics professor sent out a message to me and a few other undergrads about a digital humanities summer research project with the Classics Dept. and the Irish Studies Dept. I promptly frothed at the mouth and sent back an email roughly equivalent to, "Oh my god yes please I want to please please yes", and began the research application.

BU has a really great summer program called UROP that encourages and pays undergrads to do research. I, like many others, was aware of UROP, but dismissed it as a scientific/lab based program, which it mostly is, to be fair. (Example: my brilliant roommate for the past year did UROP last year working with baby rat heart cells to figure out what makes them die. Lots of science involved. I know she had to pipette a lot of things and dissect a lot of rats.) Humanities Research, while certainly very real, didn't seem like a UROP concern.

But, lo and behold, another classics major and I applied for a digital humanities project and were accepted together. Our basic premise is to create a compiled online academic resource on classical allusions in Irish literature. (No small task, we know.) Sarah, my partner in crime, is specializing in James Joyce, while I'm working on the poetry of W.B. Yeats. We want our website to be a dialogue between the reader and the text, with additional insights and comments added by scholars around the world.

The "digital" part of the digital humanities has been an adventure thus far. The Digital Humanities movement, for lack of a better term, is really cool. It's all about integrating technology with the stereotypically technologically stunted fields of the humanities. This can be anything from databases, archives, digitizing important documents to make them accessible all around the world. The focus is really on making various texts, pictures, and other media available to scholars who can learn from and interact with them.

Knowing basically very little about computer programming and website design, we started two weeks ago from the ground up. We were initially using a database site called Omeka, which is a wonderful platform that is great for creating digital archives of pictures and other media. The problem with Omeka for us, though, was that we are primarily working with texts rather than images. Sure, we want to get manuscript images involved (if copyright allows, which has been a thorny beast thus far), but our primary sources and our own analysis are made of words rather than images.

We're now working on setting up a Wordpress hosted site, which will give us the ability to get into the guts of the website and redesign it with our growing knowledge of HTML, CSS, and tiny bits of Javascript. We really want the site to be useful and informational, but also beautiful. The annotations that we make will pop up as mouseover text, noting that Yeats references Helen and Menelaus in such-and-such poem, and that he uses Irish mythology as a framework for his early works, and so on.

It's exciting. It's confusing. And we're working really hard to make an ergonomic and insightful,  analytical and digital piece of work. Wish us luck. More to come.