Classicists
χαλεπὰ τὰ καλά “Good things are difficult.” So is getting a TEI pipeline to run.
I build software for a living and I studied Latin and Greek in college. Those two things rarely need each other — but when they do, there aren't many people to call. I'm available for hire.
What I can help with
Running models over a corpus, building a search or retrieval layer across texts and commentary, semi-automating collation, translation triage, or first-pass tagging — then checking how much of it you can actually trust. Useful for a dissertation chapter that needs to scale past what you can read by hand.
A project site, a departmental page, a personal academic site, a public-facing home for a corpus or a course. Static, fast, cheap to host, and yours — no monthly platform to babysit. I hand over the keys when it's done.
Getting texts out of PDFs and into something queryable. TEI/XML wrangling, Unicode and polytonic Greek headaches, encoding cleanup, converting a spreadsheet of readings into a searchable apparatus.
Stylometry and word-frequency work, scraping a database that has no API, charts for an article, or a small tool that turns a recurring four-hour chore into a command you run once.
The interesting requests are usually the ones I couldn't have listed here. If it's technical and it touches the ancient world, ask.
Why me and not a generic developer: you won't spend the first three meetings explaining what a critical apparatus is, why the manuscript sigla matter, or that ἐν and ἐν are not the same string when one of them came out of a bad OCR pass. I studied the languages, and I can still read them — slowly, with a lexicon open. I've also shipped production software for years, so the thing I build won't fall over in a semester.
What it costs
Depends on the project, but I keep it simple and I'd rather quote you a number than bill you by surprise. Grad students and small departments get the grad-student treatment — sometimes that number is zero if the problem is fun enough.
Get in touch
Tell me what you're working on and what's in the way. A paragraph is plenty. I'll tell you honestly whether it's something I can help with.
Email me →cjcjameson@gmail.com · usually a reply within a day or two