Time and People in Pausanias Greece

About the project

Digital Periegesis aims at creating a digital enriched a edition of the 2nd Century traveller’s guide to Greece (Funded by the Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg Research Foundation 2018-21 and the Swedish Research Council in 2022-2026). The project, financed by the Swedish Research council (2023-2026) will create a digital edition of Pausanias’s ten volumes of the Description of Greece, the touristic guide of the 2nd century CE enriched with entities which, though critical for the analysis of cultural geography, have been relatively neglected in spatial/digital humanities: namely, data about time and people. The project will develop methods and tools for identifying and investigating in Pausanias’s Description: (a) time as both a relative and absolute concept, including time formats (periodization vs. numerical time etc.); and (b) people, including social categories for the study of ethnicity and gender. A broader objective will be to use semantic annotation for the identification and analysis of these entities, which will mean the development of Linked Open Data methods and applications for time and people on the model of place. The project’s research questions are: (1) to investigate the intersection and co-implication of temporal, spatial and societal data in Pausanias’s narrative; (2) to reveal new understandings of past and present cultures and societies via a geographic, diachronic study of temporal and social textual data; and (3) to develop the technology and design interface principles that facilitate a combination of spatial, temporal and social data for critical analysis. The final digital edition will serve as an educational and research resource.