ABSTRACT
This chapter is an introduction to the Big Ancient Mediterranean (BAM) and the larger ancient world Linked Open Data (LOD) ecosystem. BAM is an open-access digital framework through which textual, geospatial, and network data can be developed and explored in a unified, interactive model for the study of the classical and ancient Mediterranean worlds. BAM enables new readings of ancient sources by providing students, teachers, researchers, and the public with an open-access toolset wherein they can interact with texts, maps, and visualizations from an ever-increasing number of LOD projects, and it provides an extensible, customizable software base and interface to lower technical barriers for creating LOD applications. The chapter begins with an overview of LOD principles and their use in ancient studies. It then discusses the development of the BAM project and some of its outputs, and concludes with a discussion of BAM’s future development and role within the rapidly developing community of ancient digital scholarship.
