Introduction: Creating new worlds out of old texts

Despite initial expectations that globalization would eradicate the need for geographical space and distance, "maps matter" today in ways that were unimaginable a mere two decades ago. Technological advances have brought to the fore an entirely new set of methods for representing and interacting with spatial formations, while the ever-increasing mobility of ideas, capital, and people has created a world in which urban and regional inequalities are being heightened at an accelerating pace. As a result, the ability of any given place to reap the benefits of global socio-technical flows mainly hinges on the forging of connections that can transcend the limits of its material location. In contrast to the traditional "topographic" perspective, the territorial extent of economic and political realms is being increasingly conceived through a "topological" lens: as a set of overlapping reticulations in which the nature and frequency of links among different sites matter more than the physical distances between them. At the same time, a parallel stream of innovation has revolutionized the understanding of space in disciplines such as history, archaeology, classics, and linguistics. Much of this work has been concentrated in the burgeoning field of the "digital humanities", which has been persistently breaking new ground in the conceptualization of past and present places. When seen in the context of globalization-induced dynamics, such developments emphasize the need for developing cartographic approaches that can bring out the inherently networked structure of social space via a lens that is both theoretically integrative and heuristically sharp. We have decided to respond to these analytical and methodological challenges by focusing on ancient Greek literature: a corpus of work that has often been characterized as being free of the constraints imposed by post-Enlightenment cartography, despite setting the foundations of many contemporary map-making methods. In the 12 chapters that follow, we highlight the rich array of representational devices employed by authors from this era, whose narrative depictions of spatial relations defy the logic of images and surfaces that dominates contemporary cartographic thought. There is a particular focus on Herodotus' Histories - a text that is increasingly taken up by classicists as the example of how ancient perceptions of space may have been rather different to the cartographic view that we tend to assume. But this volume also considers the spatial imaginary through the lens of other authors (e.g. Aristotle), genres (e.g. hymns), cultural contexts (e.g. Babylon), and disciplines (e.g. archaeology), with a view to stimulating a broad-based discussion among readers and critics of Herodotus and ancient Greek literature and culture more generally. In fact, many of the disciplinary and conceptual perspectives explored here are at their inception, and have a more general relevance for the wider community of humanities and social science researchers interested in novel mapping techniques. The resulting juxtaposition of more "traditional", philological discussions of space with chapters dedicated to the exploration of new technologies may jar or appear uneven, especially since we have not set out to privilege one method over another. But it is through viewing these different approaches in the round and reading them alongside each other that, we maintain, we can best disrupt customary ways of thinking (and writing) about space and catch a glimpse of new possibilities

PAGING THE ORACLE: INTERPRETATION, IDENTITY AND PERFORMANCE IN HERODOTUS' HISTORY

Herodotus begins his inquiry (‘historia’) into why Greeks and Persians came into conflict with the figure of Croesus, ‘the first man whom we know enslaved Greeks’ – the archetypal eastern despot. In the subsequent narrative of his reign, Herodotus explores the reasons behind Croesus’s actions, and the consequences following on from them, through a series of consultations that Croesus seeks with the Delphic oracle, which he tries to enlist in support of his imperial project. This paper argues that Herodotus frames these consultations in such a way that not only challenges the king’s power but also puts the oracle’s famed ambiguity to service in a way that obstructs complacent reading of his narrative. From the beginning of Herodotus’ narrative, the oracle is represented as a key site in and over which the competing claims of knowledge and power are played out. Croesus courts the oracle with a display of riches beyond measure, but fails to interpret correctly its responses, which raises several important issues. First, it shows that the oracle cannot be put at the personal service of a powerful individual, who, by showering the god with gifts, had expected a simple transaction of knowledge. Second, it undermines the power of that individual, whose downfall is expressly precipitated by virtue of having got the oracle wrong. Third, it raises the possibility that the reason for the failure of interpretation is institutional: because Croesus is solely responsible for posing the question and interpreting the response, the likelihood of him getting it wrong is greatly increased. By leading its readers through a process of interpreting the oracle Herodotus’s narrative presents itself as an alternative venue for political decision-making. In this way, readers not only learn about the limits of authority and what it means to be free, but in doing so enact their difference as an independent, free-thinking agents

What would Indy do? Resisting post-truth through the practice of annotation

Perhaps due to its fragmentary nature, the study of the ancient world has always been open to a holistic approach that has read archaeology through a historiographical lens and vice versa. At the same time, the growing professionalization of academia, as well as the exponential growth in scholarly output, has resulted in ever more specialized fields of research and ever-sharper disciplinary boundaries being drawn. New digital technologies carry an even greater risk of fragmentation, since the different models and standards used to structure and represent digital data present substantial challenges to their discoverability, accessibility, and (re)usability. And yet, not only can the Web be a powerful means of bringing disparate data together for both visualization and analysis; archaeologists now have a vital role to play in informing the public through this medium. Using the linking potential of the Web, Pelagios (http://pelagios.org/) has been pioneering a means of ‘mutual contextualization’, whereby any online document—be it a text, image, or database—can be connected to another simply by virtue of having something in common with it. In Pelagios this linking is achieved through the method of annotating places. From having originally been seeded in collaboration with partners who already curated data and had the technical know-how to align datasets, Pelagios now offers any researcher a simple, intuitive means to encode place information in their work. This presentation will set out and explain this annotation process through Pelagios's Web-based, Open Source platform, Recogito (http://recogito.pelagios.org/). It also considers the potential uses of this kind of semantic annotation, including the repurposing of data in other systems (such as GIS), and the linking to other resources (e.g. in our prototype search http://peripleo.pelagios.org/). Throughout, there will be a concern to identify challenges and opportunities related not only to technical production but also to the conceptualization of place as well as the development of an online Commons. Thus, contrary to much current thinking, this presentation hopes to show how digital tools can enhance the close reading of data and facilitate a more nuanced understanding of place as represented both in our historical sources and through the evidence on the ground

Oedipus of many pains: Strategies of contest in Homeric poetry

In this paper we analyse Oedipus’ appearance during Odysseus’ tale in book 11 of Homer’s Odyssey in order to outline and test a methodology for appreciating the poetic and thematic implications of moments when ‘extraneous’ narratives or traditions appear in the Homeric poems. Our analysis, which draws on oral-formulaic theory, is offered partly as a re-evaluation of standard scholarly approaches that tend to over-rely on the assumed pre-eminence of Homeric narratives over other traditions in their original contexts or approaches that reduce such moments to instances of allusions to or parallels with fixed texts. In conjunction with perspectives grounded in orality, we emphasise the agonistic character of Greek poetry to explore the ways in which Odysseus’ articulation of his Oedipus narrative exemplifies an attempt to appropriate and manipulate a rival tradition in the service of a particular narrative’s ends. We focus specifically on the resonance of the phrases algea polla and mega ergon used by Odysseus as a narrator to draw a web of interconnections throughout Homeric and Archaic Greek poetry. Such an approach, in turn, suggests to what extent the Homeric Oedipus passage speaks to the themes and concerns of Homeric poetry rather than some lost Oedipal epic tradition and illustrates the importance of recognizing the deeply competitive nature of Homeric narratives vis-à-vis other narrative traditions

Mapping an ancient historian in a digital age: the Herodotus Encoded Space-Text-Image Archive (HESTIA)

HESTIA (the Herodotus Encoded Space-Text-Imaging Archive) employs the latest digital technology to develop an innovative methodology to the study of spatial data in Herodotus' Histories. Using a digital text of Herodotus, freely available from the Perseus on-line library, to capture all the place-names mentioned in the narrative, we construct a database to house that information and represent it in a series of mapping applications, such as GIS, GoogleEarth and GoogleMap Timeline. As a collaboration of academics from the disciplines of Classics, Geography, and Archaeological Computing, HESTIA has the twin aim of investigating the ways geography is represented in the Histories and of bringing Herodotus' world into people's homes

Writing space, living space: time, agency and place relations in Herodotus’s Histories

This chapter examines lived space in Herodotus’s Histories’ and explores how the picture that emerges differs from abstract depictions of space. Such overly schematic representations we see articulated by the Persians at the very beginning of the Histories, or explicitly challenged by Herodotus when he ‘laughs at’ the maps produced by his Ionian contemporaries that similarly divide the world into two regions of equal size (4.36.2), or more subtly undercut when Aristagoras turns up with just such a map and puts it to service an argument in favour of conquest. In particular, we want to challenge conventional readings of a polarised world of East versus West, which, while grounded in Herodotus’s concern to show how ‘Greeks and barbarians came into conflict with each other’ (1.1), fail to take into account either Herodotus’s implicit rejection of the Persian model of an Asia-Europe divide in favour of an inquiry that recognises that places change over time, or the extent to which Herodotus or his historical agents relate those places to each other. Using key features of lived space—time, agency and relation—, we sketch out the beginnings of a network analysis of book 5, backed up by a close textual study of the book’s opening episode. Both methods help to unpack the idea of the Histories’ lived space that underpins and greatly complicates the historical agents’ own understanding of the world around them

Extracting, investigating and representing geographical concepts in Herodotus: the case of the Black Sea

In a short break from his preparations for the invasion of Scythia, Darius stops off where the Bosporus was bridged and sails to the Dark Rocks, apparently retracing the steps of the Argonauts.1 ‘There’, Herodotus reports, ‘he sat on the headland and viewed the Pontus, a wonderful sight’ (έζόμενος δέ έπί ρίω έθηεĩτο τόν Πόντον έόντα άξιοθέητον 4. 85. 1).2 In this paper, we aim to bring that wonderful sight to life using the latest digital technology, and to set out some of the ways in which the world that Herodotus describes can now be represented. At the same time, however, we will be concerned to show the potential of digital technologies for opening up new lines of enquiry, in particular the investigation of the ‘deep’ topological structures that underpin the Histories. After all, the Persian king is not the only figure to take an interest in the Pontus as a geographical concept: the historian too shows an interest in the Black Sea by extensively mapping the region and its place in the world, both before and after this episode (4. 37-45; 4. 99-101). The way that Herodotus articulates this space himself, which frames, and to a certain extent pre-empts, Darius’ invasion of Scythia, will be the concern of this paper

Linking early geospatial documents, one place at a time: annotation of geographic documents with Recogito

Recogito is an open source tool for the semi-automatic annotation of place references in maps and texts. It was developed as part of the Pelagios 3 research project, which aims to build up a comprehensive directory of places referred to in early maps and geographic writing predating the year 1492. Pelagios 3 focuses specifically on sources from the Classical Latin, Greek and Byzantine periods; on Mappae Mundi and narrative texts from the European Medieval period; on Late Medieval Portolans; and on maps and texts from the early Islamic and early Chinese traditions. Since the start of the project in September 2013, the team has harvested more than 120,000 toponyms, manually verifying almost 60,000 of them. Furthermore, the team held two public annotation workshops supported through the Open Humanities Awards 2014. In these workshops, a mixed audience of students and academics of different backgrounds used Recogito to add several thousand contributions on each workshop day. A number of benefits arise out of this work: on the one hand, the digital identification of places – and the names used for them – makes the documents' contents amenable to information retrieval technology, i.e. documents become more easily search- and discoverable to users than through conventional metadata-based search alone. On the other hand, the documents are opened up to new forms of re-use. For example, it becomes possible to “map” and compare the narrative of texts, and the contents of maps with modern day tools like Web maps and GIS; or to analyze and contrast documents’ geographic properties, toponymy and spatial relationships. Seen in a wider context, we argue that initiatives such as ours contribute to the growing ecosystem of the “Graph of Humanities Data” that is gathering pace in the Digital Humanities (linking data about people, places, events, canonical references, etc.), which has the potential to open up new avenues for computational and quantitative research in a variety of fields including History, Geography, Archaeology, Classics, Genealogy and Modern Languages

Exploring Pelagios: a visual browser for geo-tagged datasets

When dealing with networked information spaces, there are two challenges a data navigation system must address: first, it needs to provide the user with a quick high-level overview of the nature and struc- ture of the data. Second, it must offer mechanisms to easily drill down and navigate to specific detail information. In this demonstration, we present the Pelagios Graph Explorer, a prototype visual exploration tool for place metadata which is derived from ancient world research datasets brought together by the Pelagios Project. Furthermore, we report on ongoing work on the Pelagios API. The API enables external re-use of the Pelagios place metadata, and provides a basis for future development of - and experimentation with - alternative navigation tools for the networked place metadata from the Pelagios project