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ICS02: 3. Geographic annotation

Gabriel Bodard edited this page Jan 30, 2019 · 13 revisions

Sunoikisis Digital Classics, Spring 2019

Session 3. Geographic annotation of text

Thursday January 24, 16:00 UK = 18:00 EET

Convenors: Antonis Hadjikyriacou (Boğaziçi University), Sinai Rusinek (Haifa University) and Valeria Vitale (Institute of Classical Studies) and (tba)

YouTube link: https://youtu.be/BuC9FF3HdhA

Slides: tba

Session outline

This seminar will discuss the annotation of historical text from a spatial perspective, and how such analysis can enhance our understanding and contextualisation of ancient events. The seminar will introduce Recogito, an online platform (developed by Pelagios) that enables annotation of text (and images) and the geo-resolution of the place references against a number of historical gazetteers (including the Pleiades Gazetteer of the Ancient World), and the visualisation of such annotations in a map-based interface. Two of the speakers will share their experience with the use of Recogito, discussing its practical application as a means to support the creation of a new historical gazetteer from the annotation of an historical text, and as teaching tool to engage the students with historical documents and resources.

The seminar will conclude with a brief demo of Recogito, that will cover its main functionalities, and will suggest possible workflows with other free tools.

Seminar readings

Further reading

Essay title

  • tba

Exercise

Select a text you are familiar with, or you have an interest in, and upload it on Recogito. If you are working with other colleagues, decide together what aspect of the text are you interested in highlighting and exploring in your annotations. If you want to annotate persons and events, consider citing external URIs (from a prosopography or wikidata) for disambiguation, using the "comments" field in the annotation pop up. Look at the map-visualisation of your annotation and check that they are adequate and correct. Analyse the spatial distribution of the annotations and discuss with your colleagues and/or instructor what new insight the spatial perspective and the annotation process have given you on the text.

Now that you have read the text closely, try experimenting with the relations function in Recogito. Focus on a specific topic or aspect that could be expressed via relationships. Create a simple graph of the kind of concepts and categories you intend to connect, and how they relate to each other.

Optional: Download the relations you have created in the text in the nodes and edges format (two files, in data table format). Upload them in Gephi (if you don't have the software already you can download it at https://gephi.org/users/download/), and tweak the network visualisation, following the simple tutorial at: http://www.martingrandjean.ch/gephi-introduction (sections 3.1, 3.2, 3.3).

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