Welcome
Welcome to Project HESTIA: the Herodotus Encoded Space-Text-Imaging Archive.
News: The HESTIA project team are pleased to announce a colloquium on the subject of New worlds out of old texts: interrogating new techniques for the spatial analysis of ancient narratives, which will take place at the Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies in Oxford on 1-3 July 2010. For more details, including how to book, see our Activities page.
What is it?
- HESTIA provides a new approach towards conceptions of space in the ancient world, supported by a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)
- Combining a variety of different methods, it examines the ways in which space is represented in Herodotus' History, in terms of places mentioned and geographic features described
- It develops visual tools to capture the 'deep' topological structures of the text, extending beyond the usual two-dimensional Cartesian maps of the ancient world
Who are we?
- Elton Barker (Principal Investigator) - Lecturer in Classical Studies, The Open University
- Stefan Buzar (Co-Investigator) - Lecturer in Geography, University of Birmingham
- Chris Pelling (Co-Investigator) - Regius Professor of Greek, University of Oxford
- Leif Isaksen (IT consultant) - Doctoral Researcher, University of Southampton
What do we hope to show?
- We are looking into ways in which Herodotus' History potentially represents a decentred or multicentred understanding of the Mediterranean world based on relational flow and connectivity
- A further part of this investigation considers whether different actors within the History have different conceptions of space
How will we go about it?
- Herodotus' narrative is 'marked-up' in such a way so as to capture spatial information, including place names and regions
- By attaching spatial co-ordinates to place names, the resulting database is fed into a geo-server in order to construct a 'Herodotus Earth', with a 'mash-up' of locations and information about them, as provided by Herodotus
- The way Herodotus' narrative itself organises space and relations between places is interrogated, quantified and then represented via a series of network maps
Outcomes?
- An initial workshop that explores different ways of thinking about space in antiquity
- A final conference that presents the findings of the project and discusses them in relation to other authors, genres and periods
- Various publications that investigate the multiple ways in which Herodotus' narrative embodies a potentially innovative representation of space
- A geo-spatial database that contains all spatial information relating to Herodotus' History
- A dedicated website that will be home to the series of maps depicting Herodotus' world
Network map showing Phocaea's relations to other places in Herodotus' History: the thickness of the lines reflect the length of the citation or frequency of the connection.