Have you noticed the GIS button on our main page? It will lead you to gis.periegesis.org – our very own ArcGIS Hub Site.
“An ArcGIS what?” or “a what Hub Site?”, I can almost hear some of you say! Let me clarify…
A Hub Site is a platform to share the content that we have created through ArcGIS, the leading collection of various GIS software and applications. On our Hub, we currently provide a StoryMap application of our progress with spatial, temporal and social digitalization and visualizations of Pausanias’s Periegesis Hellados. The StoryMap describes our journey starting from the semantic analyses in Recogito to post-Recogito outputs created on ArcGIS and other different platforms such as Gephi, Google, DARIAH Geobrowser and Palladio. Additionally, the 2D and the 3D ArcGIS Web App prototypes embedded in the StoryMap are presented separately on the Hub.
In the near future, we will add more of our new and updated contents on the Hub, including but not limited to our custom symbologies and the quest for integrating Intelligence tools into seamless spatiotemporal-social visualizations as well as an Augmented Reality application. We will also keep on discovering the complementary and competing uses in other platforms such as knight lab and QGIS. Keep an eye on our updates by clicking the GIS button!
As covered in last week’s post, annotating Pausanias’ references on Delos in Recogito enables us to visualize the many places with which the sanctuary-island was connected. But our digital venture doesn’t stop there. Beyond linking every place mentioned in the ancient text with a static point on a map, we are now also marking the relations between places, and between people who are used as proxy for places.
Through the tagging of relations, our digital map is coming to life with a human dimension, one of movement and exchanges. Those relations are what make our project truly original.
A place like Delos is an excellent example to better understand how our digital mapping comes to life. Indeed, while only mentioned in few passages of Pausanias’ complete works, Delos quickly appeared as one of the richest places to explore when it comes to relations with other places. Our annotations revealed that this tiny floating rock in the middle of the Aegean was an extremely busy hub, as it functioned as a sanctuary but also as a market. While a few settled there, most people present on the island at any point are visitors, pilgrims who come to worship Apollo, merchants who visited the market or travelers who are transiting through the sanctuary on their way between the mainland and exotic destinations, as Theseus did on his way back from Crete.
In most of the Periegesis, the tags “contains” and “proximity” are most recurrent, and they serve to indicate how the monuments are set in relation to one another, but the Delian dynamic is different: here, “transit” and “analogic” are the predominant relation tags. Indeed, the island functions as a meeting place for the Greeks, and therefore many of the sanctuary’s elements are imported from the various people who constitute the social fabric of the place.
Pausanias can therefore draw parallels between these elements and those found in various other Greek sanctuaries. For instance, when Pausanias considers the most ancient sacred trees, the olive-tree in Delos the olive tree in the Acropolis in Athens, as well as the withy of the Heraion of Samos, the oak in Dodona and a bay-tree in Syria.
caption 1: Tagging analogies between the olive-tree in Delos and other prominent old sanctuary-trees.
The “transit” tag can give us a very lively image of movements between the various points of our digital map. For example, Pausanias tells us of the comings and goings of the sybil Herophile, neochoros of the temple of Apollo Smitheos, who, although she resided most of her life in Samos, visited several famous Apollonian sanctuaries: Delos, but also Delphi and Claros. Visualizing her points of transit brings us closer to imagining her physical but also spiritual journey.
Caption 2: The peregrinations of Herophile, sybil of Apollo.
Annotating relations is therefore an essential dimension of our digital map: it enables us to give life and colour to our annotation of Delos, revealing the island as an intricate social hub. We are looking forward to discovering the complete network of relations at play in Pausanias’ Periegesis… stay tuned for more!
Mapping historical cultures dates before the term digital humanities became established, most notably through the method of cartography, the practice of drawing and studying maps. Traditional print cartography for research and educational purposes is currently being transformed by digital multi-layered, ‘deep’ maps. The application of digital cartography has further expanded historical understandings of place, culture, and society as geographical networks. While traditional print cartography can only visualize place as static geometries on a map, digital platforms provide a capacity for updates, different mapping tiles and interactivity. Digital maps can therefore display the dynamics of space and time within texts and other data sources.
Within the Digital Periegesis project we took a small case- study, everything that Pausanias refers to when it comes to Delos, a small island in the middle of the Aegean, right below Mykonos.
Caption 1: Google maps, displaying Delos
We have visited the island upon acquiring the project
grant to see how its cultural heritage monuments is represented. The island is
not inhabited, but is indeed an archaeological site, with excavations and guide
tours conducted by the Greek government and the French Archaeological School in
Athens.
Upon arrival, we were handed a paper guide that served as a map of the site.
Captions 2 and 3: A digital scan copy of the map that was created as a catalogue of the island in Delos by the Greek ministry of Culture and Tourism.
Overall, the map guide concentrates on what is on the
island of Delos visually, while using a narrative analysis of the relation of
delos to other places.
After annotating all Pausanias’s references in Delos in Recogito, following a simple annotation scheme that concentrates on place and people as place (proxies) we were able to see the relation of the island to other places in the Mediterranean. Using QGIS, we were able to visualize all the other places that Delos is connected to as static points on a map.
Caption 4: A QGIS rendering of Delos and associated places.
We had to make some creative adjustments, for example,
we mapped the mythical Hyperborians by analogy somewhere up north… above
Britain in the ‘Hyperborean Ocean’
Also note that a lot of our relations have to do with war and conflict but also with religion, as Delos is the island that during the classical times was connected to Apollo’s cult, alongside Delphi and Didyma, but also connected to Kalaureia, Poros, which according to Pausanias used to be a cult site for Apollo as Delos was Poseidon’s in the mythical past.
Caption 5: a simple recogito visualization of our tags of Delos.
Next, we will annotate the relations of those places to Delos, using Gephi, a social visualization network- more anon!
Annotating
the surviving text of the intrepid 2nd century traveler Pausanias is a
delicate task: weighing 223,000-odd words in ancient Greek and tagging
people, places, events, and their relationships.
The overarching goal is using the new and improved Recogito tool to
generate from Pausanias a pile of open-access data that any user can use
to pry loose fresh insights into ancient Greek society, religion,
history, and culture. The fun part, however, is mapping
Pausanias’ travels in southern and central Greece as he described them. A
temple of Zeus is easy, a dot on the map (soon to be a polygon). Tag it
“Paus” to say Pausanias was present at this part of his narration.
String those dots together in the right way
and we have Pausanias’ travels. But not every place name is a location
we should map as if Pausanias were necessarily ever there. The statue of
the god is made of stone from Paros or Mt. Pentele, the columns of
stone from Phrygia or Libya or the quarries at
Krokeai south of Sparta. Or simple “local” (ἐπιχώριον) stone, every
instance of the term a different blur on the map. A statue can be,
Pausanias opines, of Aiginetan workmanship (ἐργασία), whatever that
means. A tune is in the Lydian mode. And let’s leave out
for now the question whether a mythical but rapidly moving and dangerous
Calydonian boar is usefully represented via the dot on the map our
Pleiades/DARE-based gazetteer calls ancient Calydon.
An
annotator’s existential crisis of the evening: At the great temple of
Zeus at Olympia there is a curtain (object, parapetasma) decorated with
Assyrian weaving (ὑφάσμασιν Ἀσσυρίοις) and dyed
with Phoenician purple (βαφῇ πορφύρας τῆς Φοινίκων). This curtain, an
offering to Zeus by King Antiochos, was (when Pausanias saw it anyway)
an object with a location, even vaguely mappable at the front of the
temple. Do we map it as three dots: at the temple
in Olympia, but also in Assyria (presumably a high-flown Romanism for
Syria) and Phoenicia?
We
huddled and decided it was time to deploy a new semantic tag,
“material,” and Recogito’s relationship annotator that we are all still
secretly afraid of.
Thus, four distinct annotations:
1. The Temple of Zeus: built, naos, Olympian Zeus, Paus, Place: Zeus temple (Olympia)
These annotations will result in a relationship tree that shows the temple of Zeus, with the curtain one of its long list of offerings, and Syria and Phoenicia as two of the regions included in Olympia’s religious universe. We are cautiously accumulating enough semantic concepts to do justice to Pausanias’ complex world but not so many as to paralyze our annotation process with delicate ontological/theological distinctions.
Relational annotation in Recogito showing the relationships of materials to a monument
As we have set out in our previous posts, our aim in the Digital Periegesis is to identify and explore the spatial form of, and the forms of space within, Pausanias’s narrative. The challenge of analyzing spatial representation in the Description of Greece—and the reason why we were attracted to the text in the first place—is the “thickness” of that description, whether Pausanias is taking the reader on a tour of a temple precinct, stopping off along a road to take note of a statue, or recalling the mythical stories associated with a simple looking rock.
In order to capture sufficient information about those places (or objects in space), it is first helpful to establish a set of concepts and categories when annotating them in Recogito: i.e., how they function within his narrative, and, in turn, how his narrative is constructed through spatial description. With a view to building a method that can help us annotate in a systematic and uniform manner, we have so far developed the following semantic annotation typology based on the entity and tagging feature in Recogito:
1. Entities
Recogito provides three choices of entity: place, people, event. Our primary concern is place: when we identify a place in the text, we mark it and align it to an appropriate gazetteer place entry (if we can find one). However, it is also important to identify people in the text, especially for their role in certain places (or even as proxies for place): for this we use the “people” entity (and both the “place” and “people” entity if considered to be representing a place).
Figure 1: annotating a “place” in Pausanias, by identifying the character string as an entity and then aligning it to a global authority record (the gazetteer DARE or Pleiades).
2. Tags
Recogito also provides a “free” tagging features, which enables users to provide more information about those entities and construct their own schema for labelling them. For instance, for places, we want to identify: is the place human, physical, regional, or mythical; and what type of place is it? (e.g. human place might be a settlement, temple, assembly.) For people: are they mythical or historical; divine or mortal; male or female; Greek or other? Or are they a proxy for a place?
Figure 2: Annotating a “person” in Recogito, by first identifying the character string as an entity and then using tags to further define it.
3.
Relations
Fundamentally, we are interested in capturing the ways in which Pausanias constructs his description of Greece. There are various different kinds of spatial relationships that can be defined in the text, as Pausanias moves through both space and time. So far we have determined the following:
Topographic: a place in space, as Pausanias moves through the landscape,
Chronotopic: a place in time, as Pausanias moves through the history of a particular place/building/statue, or
Analogic: places compared, as Pausanias relates one place to another in a different part of the world.
We use the “event” entity to highlight the sections of the text in which either or these three descriptive modes take place, and use the tagging feature to then specify the mode (topographic, chronotopic, or analogic). We then use an additional relational tagging feature, which is part of the Recogito UI, to further define those relations: e.g. are the topographic relations being described synoptic (a bird’s eye view) or hodologic (movement through space)? A further tag can be used to define focalisation–whether the description is from the narrator’s viewpoint or the perspective of another.
Figure 3: annotating relations in Recogito, using the “event” entity to mark the entire clause of the upper-level spatial category (topographic, chronotopic, or analogic), and then the “relational tagging” feature to mark the individual entities and their precise relationship to each other.
This represents our methodology for annotating the Periegesis at the moment. But, as we have already found, we are modifying and nuancing this typology as we move through Pausanias’s “thick” description. You may also have your thoughts about what to capture and how: we welcome your feedback!
For our latest methodological account, see: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1drDtRMdXTjLkwkDB5SYsxZQmTig8z1dN2YCE1Q-E5L4/edit?usp=sharing
Usability and reach
are the determining factors behind our choice of how to produce a digital Periegesis, though other important
factors like efficiency, sustainability, collaboration and transparency have also
played a role. Too often new digital initiatives devote time and money to
building bespoke new applications that tend to “reinvent the wheel” or at least
duplicate on-going efforts, which also lead to the unwelcome further
stratification of resources. We have taken a contrary approach that puts the
emphasis on the reuse and extension of data and tools that have already been
produced and that have a community around them. Not only does this mean working
closely with other groups; the Digital
Periegesis will, we believe, greatly benefit from being located within a
landscape of like-minded resources, as well as enabling us to concentrate on meeting
the aims of our project.
There are three key
background elements to our digital exploration of Pausanias. First, we use the
text of the Periegesis from the
Perseus Classical Library (specifically from their newly-launched Scaife viewer, recently
reviewed for the Society of Classical Studies here). We use two
forms of the text: its plaintext
format for the English translation, and the TEI
text for the Greek. While the translation of Pausanias is out-dated
and not entirely satisfactory, both of these texts are openly licensed (in
CC-BY) for reuse. For us, the benefits of being able to take the text and
(re)use it as the basis for digital analysis far outweighs other considerations
(such as of accuracy of contemporary English idiom), particularly when we are
focused on analysing specific features within it, i.e. the category of place
and other spatial concepts. (For similar comments on using the Perseus text of
Herodotus, see Barker et al.
2010.)
The second key
element is the platform in and with which we explore the text itself, the
open-source Web-based platform Recogito developed
by Pelagios. Recogito enables
the user to easily upload texts (as well as images and tables), which can then
be marked up with additional information, primarily about the places mentioned.
Using a global network of gazetteers such as Pleiades (which
covers the ancient world), Recogito enables the user to not only identify a
character string such as “A-t-h-e-n-s” as a place, but also then to align that
reference to an appropriate authority file, so that one, for example, can
disambiguate between the “Athens” of Pausanias’s period and “Athens, Georgia”
the hometown of the band REM. This is done by using what are known as Uniform
Resource Identifiers, or URIs, essentially “social security
numbers” for places, which allow them to be disambiguated from each other. The
URI for classical Athens, for example, is 579885, or, giving the full web
address: https://pleiades.stoa.org/places/579885.
Third, and following
on from this: semantic annotation in Recogito conforms to a Linked Open Data model for
connecting online resources. The two-step process of annotation noted
above—where one asserts that a character string in the document represents a
place entity and then aligns that reference to the global authority gazetteer
on that place—enables the creation of a data format known as RDF, which is
one of the outputs that Recogito produces. This means that by working on
Pausanias in Recogito we will be able to connect our Digital Periegesis to other resources that hold information about
the places referenced in the text. So, for example, if we use the Pleiades URI
for Athens for references to this place in Pausanias, we will then be able to
link to other resources that do the same. (For a prototype application of what
a linked data ecosystem might look like, see Pelagios’s Peripleo search
tool and the report on its use by Chiara Palladino here.) This
will, in turn, enable the comparison of Pausanias’s deep description of various
sites (the Athenian Agora, or Corinth, for example) to the archaeological data
found there and the plans of them produced in modern research.
As part of a growing
community, Recogito currently has c.3,000 regular users, who have produced
c.1.90 million annotations. Having uploaded our different versions of
Pausanias’s ten books to Recogito to work on directly, we are currently creating
semantic annotations to do with place which essentially treats the text itself
as a database of information. If you would like to check on our progress, our
documents are open to read, both the plaintext English
version and the Greek TEI version. Better
still, contact us and get involved!
Such in my opinion are the most famous legends (logoi) and sights (theorêmata) among the Athenians, and from the beginning my narrative has picked out of much material the things that deserve to be recorded.
Sometime over the
course of the 2nd century CE, a certain Pausanias of Magnesia set
out to write a detailed account of a journey (or, better, journeys) through
mainland Greece. The result is the Periegesis
Hellados (Description of Greece), a ten-volume survey of the human
footprint on that landscape, which presents a wealth of information about the
towns, buildings, monuments and artefacts from Attica to Phocis, taking in a
counter-clockwise route through the Peloponnese along the way. Ever since,
Pausanias has been widely used as a guide for interpreting those sites, and, subsequently,
for their archaeology. And yet, as recent scholars such as Will Hutton, Maria
Pretzler and Greta Hawes have shown, Pausanias’s description of place does not map
easily on to the archaeological record, as it is emerging through excavation. For
one thing, as the passage quoted above suggests, Pausanias’s topographical
narrative is shot through with past accounts (logoi) of the places through which he passes and the objects in
space he sees.
The word Periegesis, which derives from the verb
periēgeisthai, “to lead or show
around”, has this double sense of description (of place) and movement (through
space and time). In this project, funded for three years by the Marcus and
Amalia Wallenberg Foundation, we aim to identify, trace, map and explore the
spatial form of, and the forms of space within, Pausanias’s narrative. That is
to say, we are interested in two complementary ideas: the ways in which place
and objects (and peoples) within space are described, and the spatial
organisation of his narrative. (In her recent review of the
edited volume on The Production of Space
in Latin Literature, Carolyn MacDonald notes with approval the method of “simultaneously
exploring both the literary construction of space and the spatial articulation
of the literary”, which is essentially our aim too.) In particular, we want to
analyse the ways in which Pausanias moves through and relates places to each other.
To investigate Pausanias’s
production of a Greek space, we want to address the following questions:
Which locations are particularly “thick” in
description, which are passed over with little or no comment, and what reasons
can we deduce to account for these differences?
What is the relationship between Pausanias’s
movement through space and time? Do particular spaces attract mythological /
historical description? What mythological or historical figures or periods are
particularly prominent or privileged, where, and with what effect?
What are the intersections between the
various ways in which Pausanias relates places and spaces to each other—i.e.
between topographical (movement through space), chronotopic (movement through
time), and analogic (comparison of places)? How does Pausanias construct his
journey(s), both at the macro and micro level? What picture emerges of a
“Greece” from these networked relations, in contrast to our own cartographic
representation of this space?
To conduct our
analysis we are using the latest technology to help us work directly with and
on a digital text of the Periegesis.
Specifically, we are using a semantic annotation platform in order to capture
spatial information in the text in ways that will enable us to visualise and
analyse the spatial form of, and the forms of space within, Pausanias’s
narrative. In our next blog post we will outline this technical environment in
more detail.
We are already
partnering with a number of related initiatives in this space. If you would
like to get involved, please feel free to contact us via our Twitter account, @PeriegesisH,
or by responding to this blog.
