resources
access
Academia in general (and classics specifically) can be pretty inaccessible for a wide variety of reasons. Here are some resources that help to alleviate that:
- The Catherine Project: free reading discussion groups and subject tutorials, including introductory and intermediate classical language courses.
- Internet Archive: an online library which offers millions of books, movies, and audio files.
- JSTOR: even if you don't have institutional access (some public libraries offer access—check with yours!), you can sign up for a free account which gets you 100 articles per month.
- The Sportula: microgrants of $300 or less for classics students, no questions asked.
- Women's Classical Caucus: an affiliate of the Society for Classical Studies which has mentorship programs, workshops, and a very useful listserv. (People of all genders welcome.)
- WorldCat: find the nearest library that has the book you need.
used books
- AbeBooks: my usual go-to.
- BookFinder: a search engine that compares prices across various used book sites.
reading
In English
- Loeb Classical Library: Greek/Latin texts with facing translations. The series is old enough that some of the first versions published are already out of copyright, and thus freely available on the Internet Archive.
- Oxford World's Classics: Not quite as ubiquitous or extensive as Penguin Classics, but I generally prefer the translations and endnotes.
- Project Gutenberg: free out-of-copyright texts for download as eBooks or viewing online, including translations.
- WikiSource: free out-of-copyright texts as webpages, including translations (some of which are collaboratively done by WikiSource editors).
In Greek and Latin
- Dickinson College Commentaries: free commentaries on Greek and Latin texts, plus core vocabulary lists and online versions of reference texts (including Allen and Greenough).
- Diogenes: a reading app that's something like an offline Perseus (bring your own databases, though) and which can be used for corpus searchess.
vocabulary
- Anki: a free and open-source flash card app, which works on the principle of spaced repetition (basically, guessing when you'll forget something and trying to remind you of it just before you do).
- Haverford Bridge: generates vocabulary lists from Greek and Latin texts. You can generate a list from only a given section of a text, exclude words that also appear in another text (say, in the DCC core list or the textbook you used), and export chosen data as a CSV file (which can then be uploaded into Anki or the digital flash card app of your choice). Post on my method here.
- Logeion: my preferred online Latin and Greek dictionary.
research
- Oxford Bibliographies: annotated bibliographies compiled by area specialists. I've had some real success with these.
- Oxford Handbooks: a great place to start your research. The chapters tend to be short-ish overviews with extensive bibliographies.
- Routledge New Critical Idiom: a series of books which serve as a great resource for learning about a new area of critical theory. Like the Oxford Handbooks, the bibliographies are extensive; unlike Oxford Handbooks, they're fairly short and twenty-ish dollars a piece.
- Zotero: I write my citations by hand so I thought I didn't need a citation manager, but Zotero can also serve as a personal database, keeping all your downloaded articles organized and easily searchable by metadata like author, date, or tag. It's much better than having a couple gigabytes of articles hanging around in a folder on your desktop (not that I'd know anything about that).