Rome Wasn't Digitized in a Day - Council on Library and Information ...

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The development of this time l<strong>in</strong>e and read<strong>in</strong>g tools to support its use demonstrates how digital
technologies offer new ways of read<strong>in</strong>g a text.
HESTIA has also produced a number of automatic network maps to analyze how the narrative of
Herodotus organized space and relations between places. Barker et al. cautioned, however, that as
accurate as such maps may appear <strong>in</strong> GoogleEarth, they can never truly be objective, for “the form
chosen to represent space <strong>in</strong>evitably affects its understand<strong>in</strong>g and is <strong>in</strong> itself framed by certa<strong>in</strong>
epistemological assumptions” (Barker et al. 2010). This warn<strong>in</strong>g cogently echoes the fears articulated
earlier by scholars who created digital reconstructions of archaeological monuments (Beacham and
Denard 2003), that users of such visualizations and maps must always be cognizant of the theoretical
and <strong>in</strong>terpretative arguments <strong>in</strong>herent <strong>in</strong> such constructions. Nonetheless, the HESTIA project created
network maps as a way to better analyze connections made between places <strong>in</strong> the narrative of
Herodotus, and they focused on topological (l<strong>in</strong>ks created by human agents) rather than topographic
connections (two-dimensional maps). As they put it, “In other words, we are <strong>in</strong>terested <strong>in</strong> captur<strong>in</strong>g
and evaluat<strong>in</strong>g the mental image (or, better, images) of the world conta<strong>in</strong>ed with<strong>in</strong> Herodotus’
narrative, not any supposed objective representation” (Barker et al. 2010).
The creators of HESTIA expla<strong>in</strong>ed that the creation of automated network maps was <strong>in</strong> large part
designed to <strong>in</strong>crease the impact of the project or to br<strong>in</strong>g Herodotus to new readers on the web. At the
same time, the queries and the maps they generated are <strong>in</strong>tended to prompt new questions and analysis
rather than provide def<strong>in</strong>itive answers, or, as Barker et al. (2010) accentuated, they “should be regarded
as complement<strong>in</strong>g rather than replac<strong>in</strong>g close textual analysis.” In fact, the automated network maps
faced a variety of problems with spatial data <strong>in</strong>herited from the Perseus English text as well as the far
greater issue that many place names <strong>in</strong> the English translation, and thus <strong>in</strong> the database, are not found
<strong>in</strong> the Greek text. As Barker et al. (2010) expla<strong>in</strong>ed, one fundamental difference between Greek and
English is that often what was conceptualized of as a “named geographical concept” <strong>in</strong> English was
represented <strong>in</strong> Greek as the people who lived <strong>in</strong> that place. For future work, 313 Barker et al. (2010)
posited that they would need to further nuance their quantitative approach with qualitative approaches
that m<strong>in</strong>e the textual narrative. In sum, this project illustrates not only how the digital objects of other
projects can be repurposed <strong>in</strong> new ways but also how a traditional research question <strong>in</strong> classics can be
reconceived <strong>in</strong> a digital environment.
One of the pr<strong>in</strong>cipal researchers of the HESTIA Project has published other work <strong>in</strong>to the use of
technologies such as GIS and network analysis to research questions <strong>in</strong> classical geography (Isaksen
2008). Leif Isaksen’s 314 research <strong>in</strong>to the Roman Baetica <strong>in</strong>tegrates the archaeological and
documentary record (Anton<strong>in</strong>e It<strong>in</strong>eraries, Ravenna Cosmography) and demonstrates the potential of
us<strong>in</strong>g new technologies to revisit arguments about transportation networks and the Roman Empire.
313 In July 2010, Google announced a number of digital humanities grant awards, one of which was made to Elton Barker of the HESTIA project and to
Eric Kansa of OpenContext for the “Google Ancient Places (GAP)” project. Accord<strong>in</strong>g to the project blog,
(http://googleancientplaces.wordpress.com/2010/10/13/tak<strong>in</strong>g-a-gap-year/), GAP plans to m<strong>in</strong>e the Google Books corpus for locations and place names
associated with the ancient world and then provide a variety of ways for scholars to visualize the results (e.g., <strong>in</strong> GoogleEarth or with Google Maps). ).
The GAP project is also participat<strong>in</strong>g <strong>in</strong> the PELAGIOS (Pelagios: Enable L<strong>in</strong>ked Ancient Geodata In Open Systems) project (http://pelagiosproject.blogspot.com/p/about.html)
along with Pleiades, the Perseus Digital Library, Open Context and several other prom<strong>in</strong>ent projects to <strong>in</strong>troduce
L<strong>in</strong>ked Open Data <strong>in</strong>to “onl<strong>in</strong>e resources that refer to places <strong>in</strong> the Ancient World.”
314 Leif Isaksen (2010) also recently presented <strong>in</strong>itial work <strong>in</strong> us<strong>in</strong>g digital methods to analyze the Geographia of Claudius Ptolemy.