ABSTRACT
Over the past decades the extraordinary growth of new technologies has made it possible to extract data from literary texts and analyse them using digital tools. This chapter focuses on the process of creating an enriched digital edition of Pausanias's Periegesis Hellados or Description of Greece. The purpose of this research is twofold: to identify ‘heritage data’ in Pausanias and to describe the technical and epistemological parameters of their aggregation and organisation. In answering the essentially digital humanities research question “how Pausanias's literary heritage information can be best organised and connected to the archaeological record on the ground”, the Digital Periegesis project is charting and analysing the relevant digital tools and methods by which extensive semantic annotation and Linked Open Data (LOD) can facilitate the organisation of heritage information in Pausanias's text and its connection to actual archaeological finds. This chapter discusses the potential application of Geographic Information Science (GISc) and Geographic Information System (GIS) for such complex pre-cartesian narrative analysis. Finally, it emphasises the importance of building geo-spatially enriched digital editions collaboratively, involving discipline specialist researchers and information organisation experts, with the aim of interpreting histories of “place”.
