The Project

The second-century CE narrative, the Periegesis Hellados by Pausanias, represents a unique first-hand account from antiquity of the built environment of the ancient Greek mainland. Structuring his narrative in the form of a journey from Athens to Delphi via the Peloponnese, Pausanias takes his reader on a deep dive into some of Greece’s primary cultural sites, describing the sights worth seeing and relating accounts about them (1.39.3). In this way, Pausanias challenges modern ways of viewing by relating places and objects as much as through the stories that bind them as by their topographical proximity. 

To systematically explore the forms of place within, and the spatial form of, Pausanias’s text, the Digital Periegesis project is making use of existing digital tools, as well as building new ones. We are using the Greek TEI text freely available from the Perseus Classical Library, which we are annotating using the free open-source platform Recogito, developed by Pelagios. This is because Recogito enables us to semantically annotate place information (namely, to link place references in Pausanias to Pleiades, the digital gazetteer of the ancient world), which in turn allows us to map the text and publish our annotations as Linked Open Data (LOD). To explore the relations between places, objects and people, we are using Nodegoat, the network environment for humanities research. At the same time, we are providing information about people and events to Wikidata, the machine-readable open knowledge base behind Wikipedia. We are also helping to develop visualisation tools, like Peripleo, to facilitate search and exploration.

In this way, as much as it being a project with specific research questions and aims, the Digital Periegesis is contributing to the Public Humanities, by publishing data that can be openly accessed and reused, developing methods that can be reproducible, and helping to build tools that are open source and interoperable within the broader LOD ecosystem.