Talk:Perseus Project

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The Classicist’s Tantalus! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.82.169.203 (talk) 21:04, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

I've used, or have attempted to use, Perseus for several years and after all this time I can honestly say that it is a failed undertaking, a brilliant concept in throughly clumsy, apathetic and consummately incompetent hands.

There really is no excuse that I, nor any other scholar in the field can really accept for Perseus' largely inoperable and malfunctioning website. If I may liken Perseus, appropriately, to a Classical myth, then it would be Tantalus, whose punishment was to suffer eternal hunger and thirst despite the fact that a bounty of water and food lay before him, only to retreat at his approach.

This is the travesty that is Perseus. A wealth of knowledge, wonderfully laid out with a conscientious approach which lauds both the fields of humanities and web design. However, this is the tantalizing irony - Perseus rarely can make available all of its knowledge due to incessant hardware problems and an apparent inability to handle web traffic.

For the first year or so of using Perseus for various Latin and Greek projects, it might have taken several minutes to access a page, or bring a lexical and/or morphological entry (as it still does, if anything at all comes up), but I sympathized with Perseus' now standard excuses of hardware problems, lack of funding, high volume of traffic, etc.

Well, after so many years, Perseus has been stagnant. The release of Perseus 4.0 was and still is a joke; it still doesn't work properly and is abysmally slow. As a teacher, I use to occasionally recommend Perseus to my students, but seldom so as I didn't want to make my students dependent on Perseus for a variety of reasons (the biggie being that Perseus will let you down, and another being that the "instant answer" approach of Perseus tends to create a dependency of learning, to the detriment of a student's problem solving skills).

By now the excuses have worn thin. I realize the situation of the Perseus staff and the funding situation and what have you, but after so many years, surely someone should have developed some kind of solution. I see Perseus going down in Humanities computing history as the most promising and brilliant project undertaken that could have been, but was squandered and badly handled due to mismanagement, incompetency and a lack of resourcefulness on the part of the Perseus staff.

The Perseus staff needs to take drastic action, sacrifices need to made and risks need to be taken otherwise Perseus will remain a largely useless embarrassment to Humanities computing. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.90.172.95 (talk • contribs) 13 June, 2007

To the academic above, I reply: SO TRUE! Tantalus is pretty close to the right metaphor. When it works, Perseus is great; but that only increases desire, which is thwarted more often than not. Perseus is more like finding a mate who is seemingly perfect over the course of the first week of the relationship, only to find in subsequent weeks that the beloved is unreliable and insane, with brief and occasional glimmers of the perfections that keep one coming back for more abuse. —Preceding unsigned comment added by [[User:|]] ([[User talk:|talk]] • contribs) May, 2008

[edit] bad link

I have changed the link to Perseus because the old one pointed to a page that is almost a year old and makes people think that they have a server down. It also leads to links that require the user to configure their display, which I NEVER could get to work. My link leads to pages that display beautifully and can even be copied and pasted into Word. Have fun. I am. 4.249.198.140 (talk) 01:52, 22 February 2008 (UTC)