DCH Session 5 Gazetteers

Sunoikisis Digital Cultural Heritage, Fall 2019

Session 5. Digital Gazetteers

Thursday Oct 31, 16:00 UK = 17:00 CET

Convenors: Johan Åhlfeldt (Gothenburg), Tom Elliott (New York University), Valeria Vitale (Institute of Classical Studies)

YouTube link: https://youtu.be/Jmy64_CeZwI

Slides: tba

Session outline

This session will give a general introduction to historical gazetteers: collections of geographical information and the digital infrastructure behind Linked Open Data networks. Important issues such as the modeling of places, contributions, data sharing, and issues of granularity and focus will be illustration through two major case studies: the Pleiades Project and the Digital Atlas of the Roman Empire. Finally the semantic annotation tool Recogito will be introduced, which enables users to disabiguate place references and create visualisations, both at different levels. The practical exercise, involving the Recogito tool will be briefly discussed.

Seminar readings

• Chiara Palladino. 2016. "New Approaches to Ancient Spatial Models: Digital Humanities and Classical Geography." In Digital Approaches and the Ancient World. Edd. G. Bodard, Y. Broux & S. Tarte. BICS 59.2, 56-70. Available: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.2041-5370.2016.12038.x/full
• Randa El Khatib. 2019. "Laying the Foundation for Community-Driven, Open Cultural Gazetteers." KULA: knowledge creation, dissemination, and preservation studies 3.1, pp. 21–. Available: https://kula.uvic.ca/articles/10.5334/kula.53/

Further reading

• Berman, M.L., Åhlfeldt, J., & Wick, M. (2012). Historical Gazetteer System Integration: CHGIS, Regnum Francorum, and GeoNames. 2016-12-10. Available: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/53a1/9e3be077ca259e78947f6ebdba7bf7715dd2.pdf
• Tom Elliott and Sean Gillies (2009). "Digital Geography and Classics." Digital Humanities Quarterly 3.1. Available: http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/3/1/000031/000031.html
• Goodchild, M.F., & Hill, L.L. (2008). "Introduction to digital gazetteer research." International Journal of Geographical Information Science 22(10), 1039-1044. Available: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/13658810701850497
• Patricia Murrieta-Flores & Ian Gregory (2015). "Further Frontiers in GIS: Extending Spatial Analysis to Textual Sources in Archaeology." Open Archaeology 1.1. Available: https://doi.org/10.1515/opar-2015-0010
• Southall, H., Mostern, R., & Berman, M.L. (2011). "On historical gazetteers." International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing 5(2), 127-145. Available: https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/pdfplus/10.3366/ijhac.2011.0028

Essay title

• tba

Exercise

Preparation

• Create an account on Recogito
• If you need more information on the annotation and visualisation process, you can consult the online tutorial at https://github.com/pelagios/pelagios.github.io/wiki
• When creating tags, bear in mind that only the first tag is relevant in most visualisation options.

Option 1

Upload on Recogito a document of your choice (either in text or image format) with a relevant number of place references. Think of a research question that you want to investigate, or a perspective that you want to highlight using map-based visualisation and tags. Perform the annotation and tagging and present your visualisation choices.

Option 2

Download one of the following ancient accounts (translated in English) of the Second Punic War:

• Polybius
• Appian of Alexandria
• Livy (very long text)

Perform a significant number of annotations, using tags to enrich them. Especially for longer text, like Livy's, you can team up with a number of colleagues and annotate collaboratively different sections of the same document, and/or exploit the value of automatic annotation and bulk mode.

Option 3

Create a small research group with some colleagues and develop together a comparative research question. Upload two or more texts at the same time generating a single document on Recogito (see https://github.com/pelagios/pelagios.github.io/wiki/Recogito-Tutorial:-Uploading-modes) and proceed to annotate them. Choose the visualisation "by part" to highlight and analyse the differences in the place references. Feel free to use two or more of the files in Option 2, or any other bundle of your choice. You can compare text and images, if that is relevant to your research question.