Digital Periegesis

In this presentation, I want to sketch out two ways in which the Digital Periegesis project is bringing to the fore spatial patterns underpinning Pausanias’s text, using Book 1 as a case study, while also developing digital tools and methods for research into textual geographies more broadly. First, I show how annotating in Recogito (an open-source tool produced by Pelagios) assists us in identifying spatial features mentioned in the text — places, objects in space, peoples; in aligning those references to the persistent identifiers (URIs) provided by the Pleiades gazetteer; and in bringing to the fore the underlying spatial structure of the narrative. Second, I explore the affordances provided by another of Pelagios's tools, the visualisation prototype Peripleo. While the annotated data from Recogito can be visualised in various platforms, including GIS, Peripleo enables exploration of the places mentioned vis-a-vis the text, which means that you can “follow” Pausanias’s movements through the civic space of Athens. More than this: by virtue of being based on Linked Data, Peripleo allows the user to follow up the links to other resources, and start to bring the text in dialogue with the archaeological information on the ground.