https://grafemas.net/ Recent content in Grafemas on Γραφεμας Hugo -- gohugo.io en Sat, 27 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://grafemas.net/blog/race/said-hall/ Sat, 27 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://grafemas.net/blog/race/said-hall/ Edith Hall’s Inventing the Barbarian (1989) and Suzanne Saïd’s chapter “Greeks and Barbarians in Euripides' Tragedies: The End of Differences?” (1984) share the same object of study: the representation of non-Greek peoples in fifth-century Athenian tragedy. However, they significantly differ in their conclusions. Reading them together is a clarifying exercise in how racializing discourse operates in ancient texts. They disagreement is not about the evidence but about the modality of the discourse that the authors perceived. https://grafemas.net/projects/race-antiquity/ Wed, 18 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://grafemas.net/projects/race-antiquity/ Ancient Greek authors did not simply describe foreign peoples — they constructed them. Through the accumulation of claims about bodies, customs, intelligence, and moral character, texts from Homer to the Hellenistic period produced and reproduced hierarchical distinctions between Greeks and non-Greeks that bear a structural resemblance to what we now call racial thinking. This project examines that process computationally and qualitatively. Working from TEI-encoded Greek texts, a pipeline of NLP tools and large language models pre-annotates passages containing ethnonyms according to a four-tier scheme — gate, domain, register, valence — which is then validated through close reading. https://grafemas.net/blog/race/mccoskey/ Wed, 18 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://grafemas.net/blog/race/mccoskey/ This is an interesting book which primarily focuses on Hellenistic and Roman texts. It also detaches the concept of race from phenotypical appearance distancing itself from current usages of the concept. The two issues pose a clear problem. First, focusing on two imperial periods without looking at what preceded allows the writer to overlook the relationship between empire and forms of ethnic discrimination. Second, by detaching race from forms of discrimination based on perceptions of phenotypes, the book closes the door to the examination of other forms of identity building through contrast with others which do not use the social construct of race. https://grafemas.net/courses/120-race-antiquity/ Mon, 23 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://grafemas.net/courses/120-race-antiquity/ Race & Antiquity This class, which fulfills the university’s DEI requirement, explores how race and ethnicity were imagined in the ancient world and how those ideas were later used (and misused) in the Americas from colonial times to today. We’ll look at texts and artifacts to see how people defined themselves and others, and how those definitions have been reclaimed or challenged in modern struggles over identity. https://grafemas.net/projects/2025-06-23-migration-and-emotion-in-the-ancient-world/ Mon, 23 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://grafemas.net/projects/2025-06-23-migration-and-emotion-in-the-ancient-world/ A planned project that did not receive funding but that is still going on; more soon. https://grafemas.net/blog/social-semantics/karatani-isonomia/ Sun, 22 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://grafemas.net/blog/social-semantics/karatani-isonomia/ In Isonomia and the Origins of Philosophy, Kōjin Karatani offers a powerful corrective to Athenocentric narratives of philosophy’s birth by relocating its emergence within the distinct social structures of the Ionian polis. His central claim—that philosophy arose in tandem with the political condition of isonomia (equality without rule)—grounds intellectual history in material social forms, particularly the dissolution of tribal affiliation and the rise of voluntary association in colonial settlements. By shifting from a Marxist focus on modes of production to modes of exchange, Karatani develops a flexible yet rigorously systematic account of how transformations in political and economic organization generate shifts in cultural consciousness. https://grafemas.net/blog/social-semantics/modeling/ Sun, 22 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://grafemas.net/blog/social-semantics/modeling/ There is a strong tendency in the humanities towards positivism. This occurs even among the more critical speculative literary critics who claim to opose positivism. For example , many books on classical author like Homer, Plato, etc, promise to deliver a new and final reading of such authors. Lack of metadiscursive reflection. Answers instead of questions. Some set to out to prove before wondering. Prefering difficutl questions to answers… It is better to produce models than explanations. https://grafemas.net/about/ Sun, 06 Mar 2022 17:53:47 -0800 https://grafemas.net/about/ Prof. Myerston I am a philologist—someone deeply engaged in the study of languages and their role in shaping human experience. My work explores how language both reflects and structures the ways ancient societies understood the world. Geographically and intellectually, I focus on two major centers of ancient cultural production: Ancient Greece and Mesopotamia. In my book Language and Cosmos in Greece and Mesopotamia, I examine how ancient thinkers conceived the relationship between language and the universe. https://grafemas.net/blog/social-semantics/word-vectors/ Fri, 18 Feb 2022 22:01:06 -0800 https://grafemas.net/blog/social-semantics/word-vectors/ Word vectors are a particularly useful tool for the investigation of ancient discourses. They allow us to explore associations of concepts that pervade either an entire culture or a group of people. Recently, Kozlowski, Taddy, and Evans (2019) used word vectors and embedding to study the semantics of class structure in 20th-century American cultures, a publication that shows exciting results. Using diachronic word embeddings trained on large corpora of books, the authors traced how the semantic associations of class-related terms (like “rich,” “poor,” “working class,” or “elite”) evolved over time, revealing shifting ideological alignments in American discourse. https://grafemas.net/license/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://grafemas.net/license/ My blog posts are released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.