In our paper we would like to discuss in detail the present status of our three-dimensional virtual library model (3DVLM) built on the hierarchical scheme of the ancient Library of Alexandria worked out in the socalled Pinakes by Callimachus in the 3rd century BC. The full content of the model, once completed, would provide a comprehensive overview of the classical heritage our culture is originated from. In this tradition Callimachus is considered to be one of the most talented Hellenistic scholar-poets. His brief epigrams were outstanding which reflected his allusive mind and erudition. In general, it is a great challenge for us to deliver the message of ancient times to the present-day culture, but it seems to be very dificult to convey this highly sophisticated content to the members of the young (and especially the y and z) generations of our times who have been brought up and educated in a completely diferent social and cultural environment. Our basic idea is that language learning can serve as a common basis to transform and ofer the ancient knowledge for the young generations of the internet era. Moreover, we are aware that nowadays one of the preferred sources of information is Wikipedia. So we chose and carefully preprocessed some Wikipedia texts (in English) about Callimachus' life and works for the 3DVLM to assist our users in language learning and, at the same time, provide them short but valuable texts which are worth learning and memorizing. In order that the selected texts could be easily understood and memorized we provided additional items which are necessary for language learners (e.g. vocabulary and thesaurus of rare or special words, expressions and idioms,
images and illustrations, selected concordances and quotations, encyclopedia entries, referred texts etc.).Because the organization of the primary texts and their relationships with the associated items are of great significance in the learning process, we tried to fully exploit the advantages and special features of the 3D environment of the MaxWhere Seminar System, visualizing and mapping the compiled material using various colors and typography, block elements, images, lists etc. on the one hand, and exploring the co-reference and intertextual relationships by maps and the spatial arrangement of the material, tables, hypertext links between the primary texts and the additional items etc. on the other hand. Since self-check and practice is inevitable in the learning process, we elaborated exercise materials related to the preprocessed library content by providing various exercises, questions, drills, tests, quizzes, puzzles etc. for our users.
We intend to achieve two main objectives using the 3DVLM. First, we
would like to support and motivate our users to acquire in-depth knowledge
of the ancient Alexandrian times. The learning philosophy of the model is to
help its users understand and interpret the compiled material ‘at once’,
supplying them with the necessary background and linguistic knowledge. Second,
we firmly hope that our users will gradually improve their English
linguistic competence in the course of reading, understanding and memorizing the
preprocessed material provided by our virtual library.
MSC: 68U05; 68U35; 91E10; 91E40
1. The Great Library of Alexandria and its mission
The Museion (Mouseion, Musaeum)1 and its organic element, the Great Library
resulted in a tradition by which the Ptolemies2 provided more financial assistance
to Greek culture in Alexandria3. This city is known to have been a novel,
dominant cultural and learning center for the Greek East for centuries. The notable
antecedents of the Museion research institution were those temples where manuscripts
of diferent types were housed in great number for preservation and access. The
Ptolemies rulers obtained the authentic texts of authors by purchase and the famous
scholars who lived in the Museion carried out critical analysis on them and then
entered these masterpieces onto the oficial canon of Greek literary works. Seneca
says that the Ptolemies collected papyrus rolls to show their magnificent power
to the world and by these eforts they intended to gain the cultural supremacy in
Egypt [
The Library of Alexandria4 was founded in the 3rd century BC for Ptolemy I
Soter’s initiative. No contemporary historical writings were left on its creation and
1https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musaeum (2020-01-12)
2https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ptolemaic_Kingdom (2020-01-06)
3https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandria (2020-01-08)
4https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria (2020-01-07)
nobody is aware of its exact location in Alexandria [
Pinakes
Callimachus6 was born in Cyrene7 in Libya between 305 and 240 BC. He is
considered to be as one of the most talented and celebrated scholar poets of the
Alexandrian period. He spent the great part of his life in Alexandria and his royal patrons
were Ptolemy II Philadelphus and Ptolemy III. A commentator to Plautus reports
that he was employed as a librarian in the Library of Alexandria. Only 6 hymns,
about 60 epigrams and some fragments remained from his works. His brief poems
reflected that he acquired successfully the practice of perfect virtuosity and literary
craftmanship. He wrote his poems in a sophisticated style and applied allusions
very often in his poetic texts by expressing his erudition [
Concerning Callimachus’ remarkable achievements we have to emphasize his
immense bibliographical work which focused on arranging all the Greek literary
works, once available in the holdings of the Alexandrian Library, into a
comprehensive catalogue, the Pinakes8. Zenodotus of Ephesus as a head librarian provided
a job to Callimachus to be his assistant. Therefore he was involved in building the
catalogue of this outstanding Hellenistic collection. His catalogue was separated
into six various parts and included bibliographical information about 120 000
papyrus rolls. His famous Pinakes is thought to be the first bibliographical work of
ancient Greek literary documents. Let us quote the title of his catalogue’ system
which is the following: Pinakes (or Tables) of those who were eminent in every
branch of learning, and what they wrote [
Six years ago we initiated a 3D virtual library project focusing primarily on the field
of Greek literature in the 3rd century BC as well as related texts (e.g. biographies
of some prominent authors, historical and mythological texts etc.) as part of the
CogInfoCom research [
The major concepts of the 3DVLM describe the organization and content of
an abstract virtual library in 3D space. Because the detailed description of the
3DVLM can be found in our former publications [
The 3DVLM provides an abstract framework for a virtual library based on various sources, chiefly from the internet (especially from Wikipedia). The current implementation of the library is focused on the primary and secondary (i.e. virtual) contents about Callimachus. They are arranged according to the ancient classification scheme invented by Callimachus using several categories (described in section 2). In the virtual library there are some dedicated web pages which support the information retrieval of the virtual library content. • The first dedicated page is a category page which contains the list and explanation of the applied classification categories, including the name of some illustrious ancient authors with the title of their most important works for each category. The category page is based on the Wikipedia entry ‘Ancient Greek literature’9. Note that the most important biographical data for each referred author are generally available in the author’s Wikipedia entry the reference to which should be an essential, and therefore explicitly represented, part of the virtual library. More or less the same applies to the works of the authors because the main characteristics of the most important works (e.g. the opening words which had been recorded by Callimachus in the Pinakes) can be supposedly found in their corresponding Wikipedia entries. • The second dedicated page is the index page which contains the main keywords used in the content pages of the virtual library as well as selected concordances of the keywords exploring their textual context. In the index page, the retrieval of the primary and secondary content is supported by links either to the related Wikipedia entries or to the corresponding content pages of the library. • The third dedicated page is the reference page which contains all referred sources used in the virtual library. 4. Implementation of the 3D virtual library model in the MaxWhere system In every available 3D space of the MaxWhere system there are a number of carefully arranged ‘smartboards’ which operate as multiple web browser windows. This unique and very flexible feature of the MaxWhere Seminar System allows webbased (i.e. HTML / CSS / JavaScript) content to be embedded and presented in 3D space, with the definite advantage of representing hypertext and hypermedia (mixed verbal and multimedia content, various colors and typography, links, images, animations, videos, interactive content etc.). Mapping the 3DVLM into the 3D space of the MaxWhere system is based on two simple rules: • a virtual room corresponds to the 3D space itself (in our case, a large room in an ancient castle); • the cabinets and corridors correspond to a group of adjoining smartboards established and arranged according to the architecture and design of the chosen 3D space (in our case, human-sized wooden frames arranged in the virtual room of the castle, see the figures below).
The smallest units (or ‘records’) of the presented virtual library content are located or ‘exhibited’ in designated smartboards representing the cabinets of the 9https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Greek_literature (2020-01-21) 3DVLM in the virtual room. In the current implementation which aims to convey classical heritage for language learners, the content of every cabinet is a carefully prepared English text, selected from the collection of the virtual library. A significant advantage of the MaxWhere 3D environment is that, at least theoretically, no limitation to the size and number of verbal and multimedia texts presented in the smartboards.
From the left and right of every designated smartboard functioning as a cabinet, the two adjoining smartboards represent the left and right corridors providing additional information for the content of the corresponding cabinet. The content of the corridors helps the users of the virtual library to process (i.e. understand, interpret, memorize etc.) the ‘main’ content of the cabinet. Specifically, the content displayed in the smartboard representing the left corridor provides basic vocabulary (or dictionary) knowledge which is necessary to understand the text of the cabinet; in turn, the content displayed in the smartboard representing the right corridor presents encyclopedic (or background) knowledge about important people, mythological characters, places, events, or other details related to the content of the cabinet. Note that those “encyclopedic” entries establish strong intertextual relationships with the text of the cabinet.
The three pillars of the organization of knowledge in the 3DVLM (i.e. the cabinet content, the cabinet walls (see below), and the content of the left and right corridors), are illustrated in Table 1.
Exploiting the features of the MaxWhere Seminar System, especially the access
to multiple adjoining smartboards in the 3D space, we introduced a new concept
in the 3DVLM called cabinet wall. As on walls of rooms (or, in general, of
buildings or any larger containers) there can be various pictures, decorations, colored
patterns, grafiti etc., the walls of a cabinet can also contain such things.
Considering the cabinets in the virtual rooms as metaphoric containers of selected contents
from the virtual library, the cabinet walls in the model can have, and in turn
can present, additional linguistic information about certain keywords and
their collocations which occur within the text of the corresponding cabinet. In
our model, the keyword–collocation construction presented in the cabinet wall is
defined by a selected syntactical pattern of certain groups of synonymous keywords
(hereafter called microcontext), where the constituents of the pattern can be
replaced with the semantically related words or phrases (e.g. synonyms, antonyms,
related or contrasted words etc., selected from synonyms dictionaries, thesauri or
any appropriate linguistic corpora from the internet). Because a collocation “often
provides insight into the meaning of a given word” [
Based on a certain microcontext, we can compile rich and valid (i.e. linguistically correct) content for the cabinet walls selecting concordances and/or quotations from various sources (e.g. from the texts of cabinets, monolingual, production, collocations and/or quotations dictionaries, printed and electronic books, linguistic corpora, and various web 2.0 and internet sources including Wikipedia items, authentic web pages etc.) by searching for the given keywords and collocation pattern of the microcontext. (Note that a given microcontext with the compiled concordances and quotations can be applied to more than one cabinets.) In case a selected concordance could not be understood without its broader context (or we just think that the context is really worth being presented), the full text, or a selected passage of it, can also be part of the content of the cabinet walls.
In the MaxWhere environment, the content of the cabinet walls can be
presented, on the one hand, on designated smartboards which are spatially arranged
around the smartboard representing the corresponding cabinet. On the other hand,
the content of the cabinet walls can be linked to the content of the corresponding
cabinet and thus can be presented on the same smartboard where the cabinet text
itself presented.
5. Application of the 3D virtual library model for
presenting selected Wikipedia texts about
Callimachus
In the following we would like to demonstrate the features of the current
implementation of the 3DVLM based on the 3D Castle space of the MaxWhere Seminar
System. The 3D Castle space, designed by Ameda Cool Catz [
In general, the smartboards placed in a given column present the same type of text. In each row, from left to right, • the second and most important (the ‘main’) smartboard represents a cabinet containing the selected library content (in our case selected and preprocessed texts from Wikipedia about Callimachus and related topics), • the first smartboard represents the left corridor of the cabinet of the corresponding row (containing a carefully compiled vocabulary including the pronunciation and definition of some “dificult” words as well as illustrating images, if necessary), • the third smartboard represents the right corridor of the cabinet of the corresponding row (containing short texts, extracted mainly from the corresponding Wikipedia entries, on famous persons, places, mythological characters etc. referred to in the text of the cabinet). • the fourth, fifth and sixth smartboards can, among other things, represent the cabinet walls of the corresponding cabinet, containing selected microcontexts from the ‘main’ smartboard. However, we can present here other types of text as well, for example interactive tests.
Let us see an example of the content and organization of the smartboards in
the 3D space and the corresponding learning process which a motivated language
learner could go through. The main smartboard in the second column of the first
row presents a short text about Callimachus from Wikipedia [
As we declared in our previous publications, the main purpose and mission of our
three dimensional virtual library model are as follows:
“There is a considerable and increasing need for a kind of eficiently
preprocessed, ‘ready-made’ knowledge which is suitable for understanding, learning and/or
memorizing the processed content ‘as is’. Which is, in our case, one of the most
important cultural heritage of the western civilization – to say nothing of other
important ‘side efects’, e.g. the outstanding educational role of the provided
literary texts in language learning. During the development and implementation of
our virtual library model we have been focusing on a kind of ‘read and learn at
once’ strategy which is perfectly supported by the three-dimensional and spatial
representation of the provided knowledge (using both verbal and multimedia texts).”
[
We firmly hope that the virtual library model developed so far along with the excellent and continuously developing features of the 3D environment provided by the MaxWhere Seminar System can guarantee to achieve our goals in the future. Acknowledgement. The results presented in the paper have partially been achieved in the Virtual Reality Laboratory of the Faculty of Informatics of the University of Debrecen, Hungary.