Towards a Graph of Ancient World Geographical Knowledge
Dr. Elton Barker will deliver a speech on 21 Νοεμβρίου 2014 at 11:00 a.m. at Athena R.C.
Abstract
The influence of Ptolemy’s Geographica on spatial thinking is hard to overestimate: its rediscovery and visualization in the Renaissance directly inspired Mercator’s famous world map, a projection that still dominates Western cartographic traditions to the present. Yet, Ptolemy’s text, so far as we can tell, contained no map. Maps are in fact extremely rare in the Greco-Roman world and, even when they are mentioned, they are highly problematic. In his fifth-century BC Histories, for example, Herodotus “laughs at” the maps produced by his Ionian contemporaries that divide the world into two regions of equal size (4.36.2), and later, when a character turns up with “a bronze picture, on which the whole world was engraved” (5.49.1)—arguably the first mention of a historical ‘map’ in literature—Herodotus invites his readers to reflect on how the map is used to argue in favour of conquest and juxtaposes his own discursive representation of the same space (5.50-52). Literary texts, not maps, convey the geographical knowledge of the ancient world.
In this presentation I discuss two projects that together have the potential to transform our understanding of Greco-Roman space through the documents that represent it. Using ideas such as hodology (space as hodos, a “way” or “path”: Janni 1984¬) and topokinesis (space, topos, as conveying “movement”, kinesis: Turnbull 2007), the Hestia project (http://hestia.open.ac.uk/) produces a series of “X-ray” maps that indicate the underlying ways in which space is organised in Herodotus’s Histories rather than according to topographic ‘reality’. As the beginning, not end, of analysis (Moretti 1998: 7), I outline the potential of such network maps to challenge dominant views—such as the east vs. west polarity, through which the Histories are usually read, or the Cartesian geometry, by which we usually perceive the ancient world—as well as discuss some of the limitations to and difficulties of using visualisations such as these to unpick the complex, ambiguous data of literary texts.
Of course, literary texts represent only one type of source for rethinking ancient world space. In the second half of the presentation, I will introduce the infrastructure project Pelagios (http://pelagios-project.blogspot.com/), which is using a global gazetteer service (http://pleiades.stoa.org/) to assign all place names in digital data unique reference codes (Uniform Resource Identifiers), so that different providers can agree on what place is being referred to in any given digital resource. By means of this connectivity through common references, online documents of varied nature can be read in relation to each other—not only literary texts but also inscriptions, archaeological finds or sites, museum objects, photographs, etc.—resources that all provide context for thinking about ancient places, either as a backdrop to the information that can be extracted from literary texts or else in dialogue with them. But, as Andrew Prescott has recently written: ‘Scholarship is much harder than [the ability to link]: we need to be clear about why we are linking data, what sort of data we are linking, and our aim in doing so’ (http://digitalriffs.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/the-deceptions-of-data.html). This paper outlines some of the exciting potential for Linked Open Data practices to reveal previously unknown connections between different documents (texts, databases, maps, etc.), while also considering the tools and methods that need to be developed for aggregating, comparing and analysing of heterogeneous online datasets.
