Google Ancient Places digs into the past

Past Horizons ^ | Tuesday, February 28, 2012 | University of Southampton

[SunkenCiv]

An exciting new project exploring how people in the past viewed the geography of the ancient world, has been backed by $50,000 grant from Google, Inc. via its Digital Humanities Awards Program.

Google Ancient Places (GAP) is developing a Web application which allows users to choose a classical text or book (from between 500BC - 500AD) and then search for references to ancient places within it, presenting the results in a user-friendly interface.

[SunkenCiv]

[SunkenCiv]

GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach	join list or digest view topics view or post blog bookmark post a topic subscribe
Thanks Renfield. To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list.

[bigheadfred]

explore ‘self-correcting’ algorithms

With books by Labadius-Zymethus, Livy, Josephus and already available...

Alrighty then...

[JoeProBono]

[Condor51]

LOL. I knew someone would do it.
But you need an Anthem for your Country under the sea.
So here ya go: Octopus's Garden (sic)

[JoeProBono]

[Condor51]

I don't know why but I like the Beatles latter days 'silly songs' like Octopus's Garden, Yellow Submarine and 'Obladi Oblada' - one heck of a Polka tune :-)

Maybe 'cause they got away from their 'darker side' and that Indian Guru junk. One LP I absolutely loathed was Rubber Soul, but ironically I loved the White Album and 'While My Guitar Gently Weeps' (now I know why, I found out it was Eric Clapton playing lead guitar). And of all things I liked 'I Am The Walrus'₍₁₎

(1) I drove the guys in the local Tavern nuts paying that over and over and over. So much that when the Jukebox guy came in they bought it from him and gave it to me as a present ;-)

[wildbill]

I used to belong to a site called “Ancient Sites” or something like that.

It featured 3d reconstructions of locations like ancient Rome, Macchu Pichu, Memphis, etc that you could wander around. I used it when I was reading Collen McCulloughs books on Rome so I could ‘be’ at the locations and ‘see” the buildings. Very cool.

You could also take a name for an avatar and interact with other members of the site. I think I was a Roman Senator named Antoninus or something, but I didn’t really get into that side of it too much.

Don’t know if it is still in operation.

[SunkenCiv]

Me too, always inflexible (after that first blush with cool graphics and such, it didn’t have a lot of options) it deteriorated into a stagnant, ancient historian wannabee version of MySpace; later it was revived as Ancient Vines or something like that, I tried that I think, anyway, it’s probably still around somewhere.

[wildbill]

...er...were we stagnant wannabee histrorians because we went there or were we cool like Fonzi because we left?

[SunkenCiv]

;’) I think the money was the problem — the comic book-like feel of the place was actually pretty nice, but all that must have cost someone some money, and of course they had to pay for hosting and bandwidth. Oh, and it’s got a new name, but it’s still there, and the URL still works:

http://www.ancientsites.com/

Here’s a site from someone who probably was there:

http://www.ancientvine.com/