Kate Byrne (University of Edinburgh)
Geoparsing and spatial network analysis in the GAP projects
This talk describes the spatial analysis of textual resources based on the results of two phases of a Google-funded project: Google Ancient Places (GAP) establishes the means of discovering and visualizing ancient place-names in texts, while the Geographic Annotation Platform (GAP2) extends the data capture to any text.
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Maximilian Schich (School of Arts and Humanities, The University of Texas at Dallas)
Topography and Topology: Towards common ground in archaeological research
Topographic space has been a dominant paradigm in archaeology for more than five centuries, ever since practitioners started to systematically document ancient remains in ground plans, elevations, perspectives, and maps. In the digital age, topographic records are accelerating exponentially, from simple lists of toponyms to sophisticated compounds, resulting in a multiplicity of opinion that is hard to reconcile into a single coherent picture with three spatial dimensions and one clear evolution over time. Instead we are confronted with a much more complex, multidimensional, hard to understand and frequently incoherent topological space of similarities, implicit dependencies, and relations to other dimensions, such as the social and conceptual.
This talk explores how the science of complex networks, computer science, physics and information design can help us better appreciate regularities and local deviations in this multidimensional topology.
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A report on the Hestia2 seminar in Southampton, 18 July 2013
Spatial relationships appear throughout our sources about the past: from the ancient roads that connect cities, or the political alliances between places identified by ancient authors, to the stratigraphic contexts archaeologists deal with in their fieldwork. Of course, spatial relationships are also important in contemporary documents and have a key role to play in urban planning and cultural heritage management. However, as the digital medium is increasingly used in recording information, datasets have become increasingly large, making spatial relationships ever more difficult to disentangle. The challenge is particularly acute when trying to extract spatial relationships from texts.
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Hestia2 is a public engagement project aimed at introducing a series of conceptual and practical innovations to the spatial reading and visualisation of texts. Following on from the AHRC-funded “Network, Relation, Flow: Imaginations of Space in Herodotus’s Histories” (October 2008 – July 2010), Hestia2 represents a deliberate shift from experimenting with geospatial analysis of a single text to making Hestia’s outcomes available to new audiences and widely applicable to other texts through a seminar series, online platform, blog and learning materials with the purpose of fostering knowledge exchange between researchers and non-academics, and generating public interest and engagement in this field. You can read more about the new phase here.
Hestia2 is pleased to announce a free one-day seminar at the University of Southampton on spatial network analysis in archaeology, history, cultural heritage and commercial archaeology. Spatial relationships are everywhere in our sources about the past: from the ancient roads that connect cities, or ancient authors mentioning political alliances between places, to the stratigraphic contexts archaeologists deal with in their fieldwork. However, as datasets about the past become increasingly large, these spatial networks become ever more difficult to disentangle. Network techniques allow us to address such spatial relationships explicitly and directly through network visualisation and analysis. This seminar aims to explore the potential of such innovative techniques for research, public engagement and commercial purposes.
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