Who are we?

The Alpheios Project, Ltd. is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. Our mission is to build evidence-based, open-source software that enables and facilitates the study and reading of ancient texts. Our tools empower self-directed learning by providing access to linguistic resources directly from within an existing online text, thereby enabling self-initiated exploration of word meanings, usages, inflections, grammatical constructions and more. We aim to encourage inquisitiveness about language.

Our partners and advisory board include technologists, scholars, teachers and professors from around the world who work in the fields of classics and second language acquisition. Our users fall into a wide range of categories, including secondary and university students studying in classrooms, scholars working deeply with text, and individuals just wishing to read and enjoy an ancient text in its original language.

We have full support for Latin and Ancient Greek, basic support for Arabic and Persian, and experimental support for Chinese and Syriac. Alpheios’ tools include Browser Extensions for Chrome, Firefox and Safari; an online mobile-friendly reader with open source texts; a javascript library that can be used to embed Alpheios in any website; and linguistic annotation tools.

Why sponsor?

The Alpheios software is free to use and helps anyone who has a need or a desire to read ancient texts and/or learn one of the world’s classical languages. This includes students studying Latin for the first time in middle school or high school, undergraduate or graduate students working to master a language, and individuals just wanting to enjoy a bit of poetry or philosophy. Teachers use Alpheios to enhance their students’ remote learning activities. Scholars use Alpheios to help them publish their research.

Your sponsorship supports the team that is developing the Alpheios software so that we can continue to build and maintain these free tools. For users who have made websites that include Alpheios, this support helps ensure that the features Alpheios adds to those sites continue to be available. For users who rely upon Alpheios to keep track of the words they need to study, this helps us scale to accommodate as many words as they need. For all of our users, it means we will be able to adapt and update our tools as needed when browser and technology changes occur. And it will allow us to contribute time and talent to the various open source libraries and open access data sources upon which we ourselves depend.

With more sponsorships, we will be able to expand the languages we support, link to more resources, and add new features to allow users to engage with text and language in new ways, including saving annotations, commentary and aligned translations. Each feature we can add will bring us closer to our ultimate goals of providing individually adaptive tools that help us to shed light on human literacy and response to language and literature.

How to find out more about Alpheios?

Check out the Alpheios website.