New approaches to ancient spatial models: Digital humanities and classical geography

Abstract

This paper proposes a methodology to address the problem of the representation of Greek and Roman geography in the digital environment. As classical geography was not only a graphic representation of the world, but a multi‐layered cultural system based on specific notions and concepts, it is now necessary to go beyond the taxonomy of place‐names and their visualization on modern maps. The interpretation of ancient geography as a ‘mental model’ implies the importance of different and complementary aspects which should be addressed systematically: the expression of distances, the language of spatial orientation, the definition of environmental landmarks. For each of these aspects an integrated digital methodology is proposed, either implementing existing infrastructures or focusing on new strategies. The conclusion establishes a workflow to be tested on the corpus of the Geographi Graeci Minores and extended to a variety of other texts.