The Question
The Spiritual Meadow is a 7th-century Greek collection of stories about desert monks, vivid, strange, full of named saints and named places, set across a Mediterranean monastic world that no longer exists. It has never received serious computational attention. There is no clean digital edition. No one has mapped where the stories take place. No one has surfaced the patterns that emerge when you can ask the whole text at once. Dr. Sanders' question: what does this text reveal when you can finally read it as a system, not just one chapter at a time?
What Students Build
Over five weeks, students take scanned pages of the Spiritual Meadow and produce three things that did not exist before. First, a clean machine-readable version of the Greek text, built using AI tools that can read scanned pages of Ancient Greek, then carefully proofread by the student. Second, a list of every saint, every place name, and every figure mentioned across the stories, extracted from the cleaned text and matched against a major database of ancient world geography. Third, a working map showing where in the ancient world these monastic stories take place, with patterns that close reading alone could not surface.
The deliverables are real artifacts. Dr. Sanders has identified scholarly venues where this kind of work belongs, including digital humanities workshops at major academic conferences.
The Mentors
Dr. Kyle Sanders is a classicist who works on the strange, underexamined ancient texts that reveal what more famous ones do not. He has spent his career trying to make them accessible to anyone curious enough to read them. This summer that work meets a new tool: his students will take the Spiritual Meadow, a 7th-century Greek collection of stories about desert monks, and use AI to turn scanned pages into machine-readable text, extract the saints and places named across its stories, and map where in the ancient world these monastic encounters took place.
Who This Is For
Reading knowledge of Ancient Greek is required. Students need to be able to look at a sentence and tell whether it makes sense as Greek. Comfort with Python, basic scripting, running tools, is helpful but not strictly required. The Academy mentor will scaffold the engineering side. Students who care about the humanities, who like puzzles where the answer isn't yet known, and who are willing to spend a summer with a text most of their friends have never heard of will thrive here. Students looking for fast feedback loops will struggle. This is patient work.
Logistics
Five weeks. Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, 11:00 AM to 12:15 PM ET. Friday sessions extend to 1:00 PM for Demo Day. Cohorts of 3 to 4 students per mentor. $4,500. Apply by May 11, 2026.
Beyond the live sessions, students work on their own, and they are not alone when they do. The lab is supported by a 24/7 Slack channel and a team of scholars and practitioners at the Academy. Students also work alongside SeqHub's AI co-teacher, which helps them think through problems on off days without doing the work for them. Plan for 10 to 12 hours per week, with 4.5 hours in live sessions and the rest on independent work.