Digital Classics is a rapidly growing discipline at the OU with connections both across Arts (see the Digital Humanities homepage) to other faculties (e.g. KMi and IET) as well as to a wide range of international higher educational institutions. Under the leadership of Elton Barker, the group have successfully gained external funding from various government funding agencies and commercial bodies. Work focuses primarily on the use of digital tools for investigating the geography of the ancient world, as exemplified by three ongoing projects.
Funded by the AHRC, Hestia aims to enrich contemporary discussions of space by developing an innovative methodology for the study of an ancient narrative, Herodotus’s Histories. Involving a team of researchers from Classics, Geography and Archaeological Computing, Hestia uses digital technology and webmapping tools to investigate the geographical concepts through which Herodotus describes the conflict between Greeks and Persians. Initial findings nuance the customary topographical vision of an East versus West polarity by drawing attention to the topological network culture that criss-crosses the two, and develop the means of bringing that world to a mass audience via the internet.
Hestia are: Elton Barker (OU), Stefan Bouzarovski (Birmingham), Chris Pelling (Christ Church, Oxford), Leif Isaksen (Southampton).
Funded under Google’s Digital Humanities Research Awards programme, GAP addresses two primary concerns related to online resources: discovery and usability, using the ancient world as a test case. No one person is going to able to find all the ancient places referenced in large text corpora (like the one million plus Google Books corpus): for that you need a helping hand. GAP is constructing a search engine (based on the Edinburgh Geoparser), which automatically finds (“geotag”) references to ancient places in a text and then links (“georesolve”) them to a gazetteer. In order to visualize the results in meaningful ways, GAP is using a single-screen application called GapVis with various components to help the reader navigate through a text geospatially.
GAP are: Elton Barker (OU), Leif Isaksen (Southampton), Eric Kansa (UC Berkeley), Kate Byrne (Edinburgh) and Nick Rabinowitz.
Funded by JISC in successive programmes (the Geospatial Strand and the Resource Discovery Strand), Pelagios aims to connect Ancient World resources online. On the one hand, the Pelagios Explorer allows students, researchers and the general public to discover the cities of antiquity and explore the rich interconnections between them. But, by providing guidelines and schema for annotating, cataloguing and visualizing references to ancient places, Pelagios also assists researchers or curators working with the ancient world to make their resources more discoverable, accessible and usable to others. Using the principles of Linked Open Geodata, this digital toolkit will help connect together resources across the Web.
Pelagios are: Elton Barker (OU), Leif Isaksen (Southampton) and Rainer Simon (Austrian Institute of Technology). Our growing range of international partners include: Arachne; CLAROS; Digital Memory Engineering; Fasti Online; Google Ancient Places; LUCERO; nomisma.org; Open Context; the Perseus Digital Library; Pleiades; PtolemyMachine; SPQR; the Ure Museum.
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The Department of Classical Studies has a rich array of open-access electronic resources aimed at both students of and, more generally, anyone interested in the classical world. These include materials to support the teaching of Latin and Greek, the culture and physical remains of the Greco-Roman world, and topics in World Archaeology.
OU classicists also run Classics Confidential, a vodcasting site about the ancient world, featuring interviews with UK and international researchers working on classical antiquity, as well as other people doing interesting things with ancient material.
The Ancient Olympics: Bridging past and present was part of an OU outreach programme in the run up to the London 2012 Olympics, overseen by Dr Aarón Alzola Romero of the Department of Classical Studies. The site allows users to engage with the history and heritage of the Olympics experientially, through audio, animations, interactive maps and images. The content, which was written in collaboration with various external institutions, is freely available under a Creative Commons licence.