HESTIA

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.

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.