Cultures & identities
Google puts ancient places on the map
The way scholars research the ancient world, and the way in which we can all access and understand information about it is set to change thanks to an Open University led project Google Ancient Places (GAP).
The amount of data available via the internet is exciting, but often overwhelming. We need to know what is there and how to make best use of it. The GAP project uses digitised literature to map out relationships between locations and literature, and visualises the results using Google Earth.
If you visit an ancient site, GAP will bring up a list of books that mention this place and images of artefacts found there. If you’re reading a best-seller, GAP will bring up the ancient locations mentioned and visualise them in Google Earth. Bridging academia and the everyday, GAP will encourage interest in human culture, and will contribute to the development of new tools and expertise for using data in this way.
The project is funded by a Google Digital Humanities Grant, and is led by Elton Barker from the Open University, in collaboration with the University of Southampton, the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Edinburgh.
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