LSJ.js

A Javascript-only implementation of the LSJ Greek-English lexicon.

This is an implementation of a web-application for consulting A Greek-English Lexicon, edited by Liddell, Scott, & Jones. It is written entirely in Javascript, with as dependencies as possible. It is the successor to earlier versions, one written in Julia with the Dash framework, and another, written in ScalaJS. (See this blog post about that earlier version, and the data behind it.)

Why This Rewrite?

I wanted a lexicon that depended as little as possible on fragile build-systems with innumerable dependencies. Both the Julia and Scala versions were laborious to update and keep online. This application uses jQuery and Marked.js, which can be hosted locally.

This version can be run entirely offline from a personal machine.

Running LSJ.js on Your Machine

1. Clone this repository.
2. Put it somewhere, e.g. /Users/your_user_name/Desktop/LSJ.js.
3. You might be able to run it by double-clicking on index.html. But your browser probably has security measures in place to prevent this.
4. So you need to "serve" the files by running a little local web-server.
   • You can try SimpleWebServer. Follow the instructions to have it load …/LSJ.js/index.html by default.
   • If you have Python installed, you can use it to run a simple server..
   • Either way, start the server and aim your browser at the address you were given. It will be something like localhost:8081/.

There is a Help File linked from the application, once you get it running.

The Data

I describe the work to transform the LSJ data from openly licensed sources here. There is a link in the application for downloading the raw lexicon file, lexicon.cex. This is a self-describing data-collection in the form of a single plain-text file, based on the CITE Architecture. That files is in the /data/ directory of this Git archive.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the Perseus Digital Library, Gregory Crane, Helma Dik, and Giuseppe Celano for creating and improving the LSJ data. All of the concepts behing this application are the result of a long and fruitful collaboration with Neel Smith.