Digital Humanities Project in Classics

Elton Barker has recently joined the Faculty as a lecturer in Classics (from Oxford) and has brought with him the HESTIA (the Herodotus Encoded Space-Text-Imaging Archive) project. He is Principle Investigator for HESTIA, working with Stefan Buzar (University of Birmingham), Chris Pelling (University of Oxford) and Leif Isaksen (University of Southampton).

HESTIA provides a new approach towards conceptions of space in the ancient world, supported by a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). Combining a variety of different methods, it examines the ways in which space is represented in Herodotus' History, in terms of places mentioned and geographic features described. It develops visual tools to capture the 'deep' topological structures of the text, extending beyond the usual two-dimensional Cartesian maps of the ancient world.

The project website is at: http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/hestia/index.html. Before the end of the year the project team are planning to post some initial results, including a spatial database (with a user-friendly set of queries that can be asked of it) and various maps that it can generate. They are also looking at developing a 'bookline', (a timeline linked to a map showing how certain places/regions come in and out of focus in the literature over time).

For more about the project, listen to a presentation by Elton Barker on 31 July, which can be downloaded from http://www.digitalclassicist.org/wip/wip2009.html along with the PowerPoint slides.

For more information about Digital Humantities projects in the Classics see The Digital Classicist website at http://www.digitalclassicist.org/. The Digital Classicist is a decentralised and international community of scholars and students interested in the application of innovative digital methods and technologies to research on the ancient world. The Digital Classicist is not core funded, and nor is it owned by any institution. The main purpose of this site is to offer a web-based hub for discussion, collaboration and communication.