For our first post, I would like to outline some of the basic goals and procedures of our new blog. Our main goal is to disseminate information concerning the digital resources available for the practicing scholar in Classics. The blog should be a practical guide, something that can immediately link a researcher with new tools and fundamental applications and also demonstrate, at least to some extent, how to implement them. We also want to link to the wider community of other websites like ours that catalog the hundreds of archives, databases, dictionaries, bibliographies, and assorted websites for Classicists and other scholars in the humanities -- this will be accomplished through our 'Online Classics' project.

There are many, many add-ons available for Firefox, and it is more than worth the time to explore them. One I'll point out in this post is Zotero. Zotero is a tool for Firefox that allows you to easily collect bibliographical information from Google Books, Google Scholar, JStor, online library catalogs, and more. It stores them in an extremely user-friendly and convenient format until you can literally build up your bibliography into hundreds or thousands of books and articles on any given topic. It also lets you export the information into various file formats for OpenOffice (or Word), LaTeX (more on LaTeX later), etc. Zotero, combined with one of these other programs and a willingness to search for citations online, can completely update and revolutionize your bibliography.

While there are thousands of LaTeX commands out there, I use only four with any regularity.

They are:
Italics: \emph{}
Footnotes: \footnote{}
Quotation: \begin{quote} … \end{quote}
Quotation marks: ``…'' (That is, two marks of the thing that's on the same key as the tilde in the upper–left hand corner of the keyboard and two single quotation marks.)

For an example text, try typesetting this from Melville, which I have (inexcusably) contorted in order to demonstrate how these work. Copy and paste these lines into an editor, such as TeXShop on the Mac, and run.

\documentclass{article}

\title{\emph{Moby Dick}, Chapter 49: The Hyena}
\author{Herman Melville}
\date{July 22, 1851}

\begin{document}
\maketitle

There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when \emph{a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke}, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own. \footnote{However, nothing dispirits, and nothing seems worth while disputing. He bolts down all events, all creeds, and beliefs, and persuasions, all hard things visible and invisible, never mind how knobby; as an ostrich of potent digestion gobbles down bullets and gun flints.} And as for small difficulties and worryings, prospects of sudden disaster, peril of life and limb; all these, and death itself, seem to him only sly, good-natured hits, and jolly punches in the side bestowed by the unseen and unaccountable old joker.
\begin{quote}
That odd sort of wayward mood I am speaking of, comes over a man
only in some time of extreme tribulation; it comes in the very midst of his earnestness, so that what just before might have seemed to him a thing most momentous, now seems but a part of the general joke.
\end{quote}
There is nothing like the perils of whaling to breed this free and easy sort of genial, desperado philosophy; and with it I now regarded this whole voyage of the Pequod, and the great White Whale its object.

``Queequeg,'' said I, when they had dragged me, the last man, to the deck, and I was still shaking myself in my jacket to fling off the water; ``Queequeg, my fine friend, does this sort of thing often happen?'' Without much emotion, though soaked through just like me, he gave me to understand that such things did often happen.

\end{document}

As Classicists, we are a unique set of professional writers with need of special tools for writing term papers, handouts, curricula vitae, articles, critical editions, translations, and scholarly books. Amid the ubiquity of Microsoft Word, however, alternatives more fitting to the Classicist are often not considered. One such alternative, and a particularly powerful at that, is LaTeX (pronounced "lay–tek").

There are numerous detailed resources to get one up and running with this system and I will not be replicating them here. Instead, my idea is to give extremely simplified instructions tailored for a specific audience, so that the learning curve for this system will be quite easy. I now describe the bare necessities for getting LaTeX up and running on Mac OS X (Windows people should try MikTeX). In future posts, I will discuss the other basic aspects of LaTeX necessary for Classicists, including basic commands, unicode (with XeLaTeX), bibliography management and implementation, apparatus critici, facing parallel texts, hyphenation of Greek and Latin, and outputting in other formats (like .rtf, .html, or .doc).

1. Download the MacTeX .dmg file here (744 MB). Open it and install. Bundled together here is everything you need.
2. MacTeX made a folder in your Applications folder called TeX. Look in here and open TeXShop. This is the most important program, the one in which you will compose your writing, compile documents, and view them.
3. To try it out, choose an example from the bar in the upper–right hand corner named Templates. Then, click the Typeset button and behold your creation!

• LaTeX Your Document, from Reed College (my alma mater): http://web.reed.edu/cis/help/latex/
• LaTeX for Word Processor Users, by Guido Gonzato: http://www.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/info/latex4wp/latex4wp.pdf
• The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX2e, by Tobias Oetiker: http://www.eng.cam.ac.uk/help/tpl/textprocessing/latex_guide.dvi
• comp.text.tex, a Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.text.tex/

Before continuing my series on the uses of LaTeX and unicode–enabled XeTeX, I should briefly cover how to input unicode characters on a Mac or Microsoft. (It should be noted that netiher of these options are neither free nor open.) On a Mac, the easiest and best program is SophoKeys. Download and follow instructions. I have used Windows XP's embedded support to somewhat satisfactory ends. Vista has something similar, though I have not used it. In future postings I will detail input on a Linux systems, in a how–to series for Classicists and Linux.

For a free and open font, I recommend starting with Gentium, which has an incredibly wide range of characters.