Semantically geo-annotating an ancient Greek "travel guide" Itineraries, Chronotopes, Networks, and Linked Data

Abstract

Pausanias's second-century CE Periegesis Hellados presents a ten-volume grand tour of the Greek mainland. After the post-enlightenment rediscovery of ancient Greek literature, his Description of Greece proved highly influential as a guidebook to Greece's antiquities, directing travellers and archaeologists alike to uncovering and interpreting major sites, notably at Athens, Corinth and Olympia. Recent studies focusing on his Description as a narrative, however, have drawn attention to the textual construction of space, and the different ways in which space and place are conceptualised and related to each other. This paper outlines the initial work of the Digital Periegesis project, which is using semantic geo-annotation to capture and analyse the forms of space within and the spatial form of this narrative. In particular, it discusses the challenges and affordances of using geo-parsing, spatio-temporal analysis, network analysis, and Linked Open Data (LOD) for rethinking the geographies of a non-modern literary text as based more on topological connections than topographic proximity.