Ancient Web: Cora Sowa Preserved 1969 Punch-Card Classics and Railroad Memories

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Before anyone could search a Greek poem on a phone, Cora Angier Sowa was typing classical texts onto IBM punch cards. Her website now preserves the story alongside railroad photographs, literary studies, and a collection of quotations.

Visit Minerva Systems.

Sowa describes the site as the meeting place of her interests in classical literature, computing, architecture, music, and engineering. The name invokes Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom and technical crafts. Rather than hiding the connection between those disciplines, its homepage makes that connection its purpose.

A digital humanities project from the punch-card age

One major item is the 1969 Summer Institute report, published on the site in HTML and two PDF formats. Sowa explains that she attended the American Philological Association's computer-applications institute at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

She recalls personally punching the complete Homeric Hymns and works of Hesiod into IBM cards, using capital letters without accents because of the technology's limitations. Participants studied programming languages such as FORTRAN, PL/I, and SNOBOL, and considered statistical ways of analyzing text. In the middle of it all, they watched the July 20, 1969 Moon landing with the university community.

The website also contains images from demonstrations of the MINERVA research system in 2006, 2007, and 2008, plus essays about Hesiod, Homeric traditions, and early Greek literature. A chapter from The Loom of Minerva describes computer projects for literary scholars.

Then the railroad appears. In Cora Sowa's Right-of-Way, she writes about growing up above Los Angeles rail yards and having a father employed by Southern Pacific. Photographs and recollections connect her family to engineering history, while the main site compares railway space to an alternate world running alongside ordinary streets.

An archive of classical quotations dates back to September 2004. The month-by-month feature is another distinctly personal form of scholarship, with original translations and comments tied to contemporary events.

The site has clearly been updated over years; the 1969 research happened decades before the pages were published online. That distinction is precisely what makes this a useful historical bridge between generations of computing.

Explore the original Minerva Systems homepage and its documents.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.