Visualizing Pausanias’s <i>Description of Greece</i> with contemporary GIS

This progress article focuses on an overview of the potential and challenges of using contemporary Geographic Information System (GIS) applications for the visual rendering and analysis of textual spatial data. The case study is an ancient traveling narrative, Pausanias’s Description of Greece (Periegesis Hellados) which was written in the second century CE. First, we describe the process of converting the volumes to spatial data using a customized version of the open-source digital semantic annotation platform Recogito. Then the focus shifts to the implementation of collected and organized spatial data to a number of GIS applications: namely Google Maps, DARIAH Geo-Browser, Gephi, Palladio and ArcGIS. Through empirical experimentation with spatial data and their implementation in different platforms, our paper charts the ways in which contemporary GIS applications may be implemented to cast new light on ancient understandings of identity, space, and place

A Digital Periegesis: Implementing Spatial Research Infrastructures for Classical History and Archaeology

Over the past ten years the spatial turn in the humanities in Scandinavia has resulted in a growing number of infrastructural projects aimed at facilitating interdisciplinary research into spatial aspects of a rich variety of materials, place-names, early modern inventories and cadastral maps, medieval literature and art, as well as Viking-Age and medieval runic inscriptions, to name just a few. This intensive development has brought about a number of challenges, as these projects differ with regard to their agendas, setups, and customized approaches to data, theories, and methods. This volume provides the research community with an opportunity to revisit traditional research questions in the context of new infrastructural environments. Although primarily aimed at medievalists and scholars of the early modern period, the volume offers a broader spatial and temporal scope with a contribution from classical studies. The classics have in many ways pioneered the application of digital methods to narrative spatial analysis and developed strong collaborative engagement with infrastructure, producing Pelagios, an ever-growing platform for a plethora of spatial databases and gazetteers, as well as Recogito, a digital annotation tool. These two successful examples show a pressing need for community building around SRIs for early modern and medieval Scandinavia to ensure sustainable design, long-term preservation, and further collaborative developmen

Heritage metadata: a digital <i>Periegesis</i>

This chapter aims to review the state-of-field for using digital heritage metadata in the context of GIS mapping and LOD and to identify key chal- lenges from both theoretical and practical perspectives. The chapter illus- trates these challenges and how they can be dealt with a case study of a project using cutting-edge methodologies, the Digital Periegesis project. This allows us to answer research questions about how to organise and link textual data in relation to archaeological material culture, generally, and with regard to Pausanias’s Description of Greece and places mentioned by him, specifically. This endeavour makes it possible to approach an overarching purpose and address larger issues related to information organisation from epistemological and technical perspective

A Study on Manual and Automatic Evaluation Procedures and Production of Automatic Post-editing Rules for Persian Machine Translation

Evaluation of machine translation is an important step towards improving MT. One way to evaluate the output of MT is to focus on different types of errors occurring in the translation hypotheses, and to think of possible solutions to fix those errors. An error categorization is a rather beneficent tool that makes it easy to analyze the translation errors and can also be utilized to manually generate post-editing rules to be applied automatically to the product of machine translation. In this work, we define a categorization for the errors occurring in Swedish--Persian machine translation by analyzing the errors that occur in three data-sets from two websites: 1177.se, and Linköping municipality. We define three types of monolingual reference free evaluation (MRF), and use two automatic metrics BLEU and TER, to conduct a bilingual evaluation for Swedish-Persian translation. Later on, based on the experience of working with the errors that occur in the corpora, we manually generate automatic post-editing (APE) rules and apply them to the product of machine translation. Three different sets of results are obtained: (1) The results of analyzing MT errors show that the three most common types of errors that occur in the translation hypotheses are mistranslated words, wrong word order, and extra prepositions. These types of errors are placed in semantic and syntactic categories respectively. (2) The results of comparing the correlation between the automatic and manual evaluation show a low correlation between the two evaluations. (3) Lastly, applying the APE rules to the product of machine translation gives an increase in BLEU score on the largest data-set while remaining almost unchanged on the other two data-sets. The results for TER show a better score on one data-set, while the scores on the two other data-sets remain unchanged

A Digital Periegesis : Implementing Spatial Research Infrastructures for Classical History and Archaeology

The classics have in many ways pioneered the application of digital methods to narrative spatial analysis and developed strong collaborative engagement with infrastructure, producing Pelagios, an ever-growing platform for a plethora of spatial databases and gazetteers, as well as Recogito a digital annotation tool. These two successful examples show a pressing need for community building around SRIs for early modern and medieval Scandinavia to ensure sustainable design, long-term preservation, and further collaborative development. This article discusses this development in the context of the digital periegesis project and the resources used for Pausanias's description of Greece

A Digital Periegesis : Implementing Spatial Research Infrastructures for Classical History and Archaeology

The classics have in many ways pioneered the application of digital methods to narrative spatial analysis and developed strong collaborative engagement with infrastructure, producing Pelagios, an ever-growing platform for a plethora of spatial databases and gazetteers, as well as Recogito a digital annotation tool. These two successful examples show a pressing need for community building around SRIs for early modern and medieval Scandinavia to ensure sustainable design, long-term preservation, and further collaborative development. This article discusses this development in the context of the digital periegesis project and the resources used for Pausanias's description of Greece

Mapping Ancient Heritage Narratives with Digital Tools

How does ‘digital’ apply to ancient pasts? Digital methods, especially methods relating to identifying, visualizing, and analysing spatial data, have become increasingly important within the fields of classical literature, archaeology, and heritage. On the one hand, literary narratives offer potentially different ways of representing space and place than the usual cartographic maps to which we have become accustomed. On the other hand, by virtue of being able to locate cultural artefacts in space – where they were found, through whose hands they have passed, where they reside now, where they were produced and circulated – it becomes possible to construct biographies or even itineraries of objects that offer richer ways of understanding their use and agency. Unique in all classical literature, Pausanias’s second-century CE Periegesis Hellados presents an example of both types of spatial representation – a narrative that describes places of interest in the Greek landscape as well as the notable objects found there. This chapter discusses some of the ways in which Pausanias’s narrative of Greek heritage is good to consider when attempting to use digital methods for analysing the entanglements of place, people, and objects in a textual geography

Heritage Metadata : A Digital Periegesis

Over the past decades the extraordinary growth of new technologies has made it possible to extract data from literary texts and analyse them using digital tools. This chapter focuses on the process of creating an enriched digital edition of Pausanias's Periegesis Hellados or Description of Greece. The purpose of this research is twofold: to identify ‘heritage data’ in Pausanias and to describe the technical and epistemological parameters of their aggregation and organisation. In answering the essentially digital humanities research question “how Pausanias's literary heritage information can be best organised and connected to the archaeological record on the ground”, the Digital Periegesis project is charting and analysing the relevant digital tools and methods by which extensive semantic annotation and Linked Open Data (LOD) can facilitate the organisation of heritage information in Pausanias's text and its connection to actual archaeological finds. This chapter discusses the potential application of Geographic Information Science (GISc) and Geographic Information System (GIS) for such complex pre-cartesian narrative analysis. Finally, it emphasises the importance of building geo-spatially enriched digital editions collaboratively, involving discipline specialist researchers and information organisation experts, with the aim of interpreting histories of “place”.A Digital Periegesis, Marcus and Amalia Wallenber