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TOPOSTEXT: Primary historical sources in geographic context
Published on 11 June 2018
Greece
Attiki
This is the good practice's implementation level. It can be national, regional or local.
About this good practice
ToposText is a mobile app and website designed to reduce the user disconnect between Greek (and broader Mediterranean) ancient cultural heritage monuments and the ancient written sources that gives those monuments relevance. Few modern travelers have extensive knowledge of ancient authors. Even experts cannot summon up the precise passages on the spot to elucidate the historical or mythological associations of the place they are standing.
Topostext is a library of 15 million words of ancient texts in English translations (with links to Greek/Latin originals, indexed against a location-aware digital map of 6,000 places relevant to the ancient Greek world – in great detail in Greece but including ancient settlements and monuments from Spain to the Caucasus. Selecting a site from either the list or the map opens up a table of two-line snippets from ancient authors, headed where available by a modern description. Selecting from this index list, which can be filtered by date, genre, and relevance, connects one to the full text of the work.
The beneficiaries are history & archaeology enthusiasts, researchers, students, and ordinary travellers who can have access to thousands of mythical and historical locations with one click on their smartphones. The idea belongs to Brady Kiesling, and the implementation was done by IT company Pavla AE and was supported by the Aikaterini Laskaridis Foundation.
Topostext is a library of 15 million words of ancient texts in English translations (with links to Greek/Latin originals, indexed against a location-aware digital map of 6,000 places relevant to the ancient Greek world – in great detail in Greece but including ancient settlements and monuments from Spain to the Caucasus. Selecting a site from either the list or the map opens up a table of two-line snippets from ancient authors, headed where available by a modern description. Selecting from this index list, which can be filtered by date, genre, and relevance, connects one to the full text of the work.
The beneficiaries are history & archaeology enthusiasts, researchers, students, and ordinary travellers who can have access to thousands of mythical and historical locations with one click on their smartphones. The idea belongs to Brady Kiesling, and the implementation was done by IT company Pavla AE and was supported by the Aikaterini Laskaridis Foundation.
Resources needed
App coding costs €35K (should be €70K, company worked for free in spare time). Data collection 4 years of unpaid work by the designer, value €120K. Data management scripts, 30 hrs volunteered by data scientist, value €4500.
Evidence of success
It succeeded because it stayed simple, using off-the-shelf software, avoiding digital humanities jargon, time-consuming&data-heavy visual displays&multimedia enhancements that would detract from the goal of putting primary historical sources in users' hands.
The results: a)Thousands of downloads despite limited publicity b)Winner of 2016 Digital Humanities Award for Public Engagement c)Growing name recognition in the Greek archaeological community, among tour guides and with Classics students
The results: a)Thousands of downloads despite limited publicity b)Winner of 2016 Digital Humanities Award for Public Engagement c)Growing name recognition in the Greek archaeological community, among tour guides and with Classics students
Potential for learning or transfer
The ToposText concept - assembling in a mobile app a critical mass of source text indexed by place names and presented via a map interface and keyword-in-context indexes - can be applied to any historical area/period at any scale - but local, cult, and military history seem to attract the most devoted followers. A local historian has already gathered most of the information required - the job of the developer is to provide the tools and platform for organizing and sharing a pet obsession.
Digital mapping has advanced rapidly since 2013. Assembling geographic coordinates to link to place names - hundreds of hours of labor using Google Earth for ToposText - is now unnecessary. Gazetteers can be borrowed or generated almost effortlessly. The tagging of texts requires relatively simple computer scripting, with modest human curation
For more information: Mr. Brady Kiesling, [email protected]
Digital mapping has advanced rapidly since 2013. Assembling geographic coordinates to link to place names - hundreds of hours of labor using Google Earth for ToposText - is now unnecessary. Gazetteers can be borrowed or generated almost effortlessly. The tagging of texts requires relatively simple computer scripting, with modest human curation
For more information: Mr. Brady Kiesling, [email protected]
Further information
Website
Good practice owner
You can contact the good practice owner below for more detailed information.
Organisation
PAVLA S.A and Aikaterini Laskaridis Foundation
Greece
Attiki
Contact
Researcher