Elton Barker

Pelagios and the emerging graph of ancient world data

This paper discusses an emerging cloud of Linked Open Data in the humanities sometimes referred to as the Graph of Ancient World Data (GAWD). It provides historical background to the domain, before gong on to describe the open and decentralised characteristics which have partially characterised its development. This is done principally through the lens of Pelagios, a collaborative initiative led by the authors which connects online historical resources based on common references to places. The benefits and limitations of the approach are evaluated, in particular its low barrier to entry, open architecture and restricted scope. The paper concludes with a number of suggestion for encouraging the adoption of Linked Open Data within other humanities communities and beyond.

GAP: A Neogeo Approach to Classical Resources

Google Ancient Places (GAP) is a Google Digital Humanities Award recipient that will mine the Google Books corpus for classical material that has a strong geographic and historical basis. GAP will allow scholars, students, and enthusiasts world-wide to query the Google Books corpus to ask for books related to a geographic location or to ask for the locations referred to in a classical text. The traditional difficulty of identifying place names will be overcome by using a combination of URI-based gazetteers and an identification algorithm that associates the linear clustering of places within narrative texts with the geographic clustering of locations in the real world.

PAGING THE ORACLE: INTERPRETATION, IDENTITY AND PERFORMANCE IN HERODOTUS' HISTORY

Herodotus begins his enquiry (‘historia’) into why Greeks and Persians came into conflict with the figure of Croesus, ‘the first man whom we know enslaved Greeks’ – the archetypal eastern despot. In the subsequent narrative of his reign, Herodotus explores the reasons behind Croesus’s actions, and the consequences following on from them, through a series of consultations that Croesus seeks with the Delphic oracle, which he tries to enlist in support of his imperial project. This paper argues that Herodotus frames these consultations in such a way that not only challenges the king’s power but also puts the oracle’s famed ambiguity to service in a way that obstructs complacent reading of his narrative. From the beginning of Herodotus’ narrative, the oracle is represented as a key site in and over which the competing claims of knowledge and power are played out. Croesus courts the oracle with a display of riches beyond measure, but fails to interpret correctly its responses, which raises several important issues. First, it shows that the oracle cannot be put at the personal service of a powerful individual, who, by showering the god with gifts, had expected a simple transaction of knowledge. Second, it undermines the power of that individual, whose downfall is expressly precipitated by virtue of having got the oracle wrong. Third, it raises the possibility that the reason for the failure of interpretation is institutional: because Croesus is solely responsible for posing the question and interpreting the response, the likelihood of him getting it wrong is greatly increased. Herodotus not only emphasises the importance of working out the oracle, but also indicates the cultural context in which correct interpretations may be made. Throughout the narrative, kings fall because they fail to interpret divine signs correctly or because special advisors, out of deference, tell their masters what they want to hear. In contrast, different Greek communities are presented as having the possibility at least of getting interpretation right precisely because difference is allowed, even promoted, within the institutional polis framework. Moreover, by leading its readers through a process of interpreting the oracle Herodotus’s narrative presents itself as an alternative venue for political decision-making: thus they may not only feel superior to the king, whose attempts to exert control over his fate demonstrably fail; they may also perform that superiority by approaching the material with a self-reflexive, critical attitude that the king (inevitably) lacks. In this way, readers not only learn about the limits of authority and what it means to be free, but in doing so enact their difference as an independent, free-thinking agents.

Flight club: the new Archilochus fragment and its resonance with Homeric epic

This paper analyses the new Archilochus fragment (POxy. LXIX 4708), which tells the story of Telephos’ rout of the Achaeans, in terms of its resonance with Homeric epic. Where previous scholarship has read Archilochus’ poetry as indebted to and derivative on Homer, we instead use the idea of ‘traditional referentiality’ – the process by which a word, phrase or even story pattern resonates with other examples across a broader tradition – to explore the poetics of the new Archilochus and to shed light on the narrative dynamics of the Homeric poems. In our first section, we analyse scenes from the Iliad in which the spectre of flight is set against the backdrop of the sack of Troy. We examine speeches by various Achaean heroes on the issue of flight, concentrating in particular on the leader of the coalition forces, Agamemnon, and the hero of the rival tradition, Odysseus. Our aim is to show that this fragment reflects one version of a discussion about fight or flight that is present and on-going in the Iliad. In our second section, we consider comparable scenes from the Odyssey as evidence that this exploration extends far beyond the bounds of any one representation. Rather, we suggest, the new fragment appropriates the motif of deliberation on flight or flight as an entry point into an interpoetic ‘play’ or competition that projects an ‘Odyssean’ voice consistent with other fragments of Archilochus. Thus we aim to show that both Homeric epics engage in the deliberation over flight in ways that underline their own poetic strategies: the Iliad casts retreat as inappropriate to the aims of heroic narrative, at least as it is represented among the Achaeans; the Odyssey employs the motif of flight in the context of sympotic tale-telling, but subordinates it to the epic drive towards the hero’s return. In turn the new Archilochus fragment resonates with the language, motifs and story-pattern of an epic tradition only to construct a very different world view that rejects both the Iliadic martial anxiety about the shame of flight and the Odyssean appropriation of flight for the achievement of nostos. Instead, it celebrates flight for its own sake. In this way, the fragment leaves us with a tantalizing glimpse of a ‘flight club’, where singers compete in plying their versions of a wider poetic inheritance, and where the values inherent to that tradition and its performance contexts are set out, contested and enacted.

Colloquium: Digital Technologies--Help or Hindrance for the Humanities?.

This article offers reflections arising from a recent colloquium at the Open University on the implications of the development of digital humanities for research in arts disciplines, and also for their interactions with computing and technology. Particular issues explored include the ways in which the digital turn in humanities research is also a spatial/visual one; the tension between analysis based on the extensive ‘hard’ data generated by digital methodologies and the more subtle evaluations of traditional humanities research; the advantages and disadvantages of online resources that distance the researcher from the actual archive, book, artefact or archaeological site under investigation; and the unrealized potential for applying to the humanities software tools designed for science and technology. Constructive responses to such challenges and opportunities require the full rigour of the critical thinking that is the essence of arts and humanities research.This article offers reflections arising from a recent colloquium at the Open University on the implications of the development of digital humanities for research in arts disciplines, and also for their interactions with computing and technology. Particular issues explored include the ways in which the digital turn in humanities research is also a spatial/visual one; the tension between analysis based on the extensive ‘hard’ data generated by digital methodologies and the more subtle evaluations of traditional humanities research; the advantages and disadvantages of online resources that distance the researcher from the actual archive, book, artefact or archaeological site under investigation; and the unrealized potential for applying to the humanities software tools designed for science and technology. Constructive responses to such challenges and opportunities require the full rigour of the critical thinking that is the essence of arts and humanities research.

Even Heracles Had to Die: Homeric ‘Heroism’, Mortality and the Epic Tradition

Our purpose in this chapter is not to try to reconstruct the lost epics of Heracles but rather to use the conceptual framework of interformularity and intertraditionality to explore the ways in which the Iliad represents Heracles and makes his tradition speak to the concerns of this narrative. We begin by sketching out the antiquity of Heracles in myth and assessing its resonance in the fragmentary and extant poetry from the archaic period. After establishing Heracles’ independent existence outside Homer, we explore how speakers in the Iliad relate – and relate to – the accomplishments of this hero, in trying to make sense of or influence their situations. Finally, we consider how Heracles’ appearances in the Iliad communicate the poem’s sustained engagement with Heracles traditions through the adaptation of traditional structures and the manipulation of formulaic language. This analysis helps us reconsider Achilles’ curious statement as part of an agonistic process by which the Iliad appropriates and marginalizes a hero ill fit to its tale.

Achilles' last stand: Institutionalising dissent in Homer's Iliad

Debate in the Iliad – what form it takes, what significance that might have, whether or not it even exists – has been a matter of some controversy. One approach has been to examine debate in terms of a formal social context and to extrapolate from this some kind of political or – according to other accounts – pre-political community that the Iliad preserves. Scholars have, however come up with very different ideas about how to describe that society, how to interpret that depiction, or whether such attempts are even fruitful. An alternative approach focuses on the form of the speeches and analyses them as the production of thesis and antithesis: in these terms the cut-and-thrust of debate is understood as a form of proto-rhetorical theory. All this seems far removed from debate as it is represented in the narrative, which is the subject of this paper. I begin with four preliminary propositions. Previous approaches have tended to homogenise different scenes of debate, with little regard to differences in structure or context.

Linked Data Annotation Without the Pointy Brackets: Introducing Recogito 2

Recogito 2 is an open source annotation tool currently under development by Pelagios, an international initiative aimed at facilitating better linkages between online resources documenting the past. With Recogito 2, we aim to provide an environment for efficient semantic annotation—i.e., the task of enriching content with references to controlled vocabularies—in order to facilitate links between online data. At the same time, we address a perceived gap in the performance of existing tools, by emphasizing the development of mechanisms for manual intervention and editorial control that support the curation of quality data. While Recogito 2 provides an online workspace for general-purpose document annotation, it is particularly well-suited for geo-annotation, in other words annotating documents with references to gazetteers, and supports the annotation of both texts and images (i.e., digitized maps). Already available for testing at http://recogito.pelagios.org, its formal release to the public occurred in December 2016.

Telling Stories with Maps

A story map can also do all of these things. Story maps combine maps with other elements that facilitate and emphasize the message the creator seeks to convey. Title, text, legend, popups, and other visuals—graphs, charts, photographs, video, audio—help interpret the map or maps that form the centerpiece of the story. Story maps include a user experience—a set of functions presented within a user interface—that also facilitate the story. For the most part, story maps are intended for non-technical audiences. They present geographic information with the goal of informing, educating, entertaining, and involving their audiences.

The Iliad's big swoon: a case of innovation within the epic tradition?

Abstract In book 5 of the Iliad Sarpedon suffers so greatly from a wound that his ‘ψυχή leaves him’. Rather than dying, however, Sarpedon lives to fight another day. This paper investigates the phrase τὸν δὲ λίπε ψυχή in extant archaic Greek poetry to gain a sense of its traditional referentiality and better assess the meaning of Sarpedons swoon. Finding that all other instances of the ψυχή leaving the body signify death, it suggests that the Iliad exploits a traditional unit of utterance to flag up the importance of Sarpedon to this version of the Troy story.