The Social World of John Chrysostom

The scholarly web site presented in this paper is a search engine for hundreds of different facets of social life in Antioch and Constantinople during Late Antiquity gleaned from more than 800 ancient Greek homilies, several of them previously unpublished, of the prominent late antique priest and bishop, John Chrysostom (c.350-407 CE). The web site is expected to be of interest both to Patristic scholars and historians of Late Antiquity seeking to mine data on Late Antique social life from this hitherto under-utilized source.

The project is currently funded by the Australian Research Council, with generous assistance from the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG), who have given permission for us to link each entry to up to 10 lines of their electronic Greek text. While, at the time of this presentation not all of the data will have been entered (final entries are expected to run into the 10s of 1,000s), the search engine is complete and sufficient data entered to enable us to demonstrate the functionality of the web site.

In this paper we aim to present a brief history of the project (with attention to the value of data entry via the web for multiple collaborators across different states and countries, the reasons behind the choice to locate the database on the web, and the changes this has necessitated); to discuss the choices behind MySQL and PhP, and the difficulties of representing ancient Greek cross-platform; and to provide a quick demonstration of the database.

The database currently resides at wwcc.bendigo.latrobe.edu.au/acu, but will be shifted to its own URL at the Centre for Early Christian Studies, Australian Catholic University, by the time of the conference (an issue which could stimulate its own debate regarding the control of academic web sites and the politics of IT in the Australian university).