Ancient MakerSpaces: Digital Tools for Classical Scholarship (all-day workshop Saturday January 6)

The Homer Multitext project aims to make the full complexity of the textual transmission of the Iliad and Odyssey accessible to scholars and undergraduates by means of high-resolution images of the historical manuscripts that transmit the poems, together with digital diplomatic editions of their contents.

ORBIS is a web-based tool that makes it possible for the first time to simulate the time cost and financial expense incurred by travel and transportation around the Roman Empire. In this workshop, you will learn to use ORBIS to (e.g.) find the fastest route between Londinium and Constantinopolis, calculate the cost of shipping wheat from Alexandria to Rome, and make your own distance cartogram to represent travel times from Antioch to more than 600 other locations throughout the Roman Empire.

The PeriodO gazetteer is a collection of period definitions with coordinates in both time and space, drawn from authoritative sources and provided as structured data with globally unique, persistent identifiers. This growing collection of period definitions seeks to provide a common reference for descriptions of named time-spans in the past (like “the Archaic period” or “the Iron Age”), in the same way that Pleiades provides a common reference for places in the past.

This presentation introduces the concept of "semantic inferencing" as it applies to archaeological databases. Inferencing in general means deriving new facts from one set of facts. All finds within a stratigraphic unit can also be said to be from the tomb to which the unit belongs. All finds from Italy or North Africa also belong to the group of finds from the Central Mediterranean. This form of reasoning can be efficiently expressed and utilized to answer queries that combine findspot, geographic origin, and other common archaeological criteria.

Computational stylometry has aided the work of philologists for over 50 years. From simple word counts to the latest use of machine learning for authorship attribution, computation offers the literary critic a wide array of techniques to better understand individual texts and large corpora. To date, these methods have largely been accessible to specialists possessing a background in programming and statistics.