Prof. Anna Foka (Uppsala) on “Reimagining Pausanias: Digital Methodologies for Ancient Cultural Geographies”.
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Abstract
This presentation introduces the Digital Periegesis project, which transforms the study of Pausanias’s Description of Greece through innovative digital humanities approaches. By applying semantic annotation and Linked Open Data (LOD) principles, the team has created a richly interconnected digital edition that captures the complex networks of places, people, objects, events, and narratives embedded in this ancient text. The speaker discusses key methodological developments, including the transition from the Recogito annotation platform to the relational Nodegoat database, which enables sustained visualization and analysis of Pausanias’s intricate narrative structures. The integration of authoritative gazetteers (Pleiades, Wikidata) and the systematic categorization of spatial, temporal, and social entities creates an infrastructure that supports both macro-level cultural-geographic mapping and micro-level analysis of specific features such as tombs, cult sites, and narrative motifs. Through illustrative case studies, the speaker will demonstrate how this digital infrastructure reveals new insights into the interplay of myth, history, and geography in Pausanias’s work. This project contributes to democratizing access to ancient Greek cultural heritage while opening new research directions in digital classics and spatial humanities.
Anna Foka is Professor in Digital Humanities at the Department for Archives, Museums and Libraries (ABM), the director of the international research cluster AI Futures of Culture and Memory, the founder of the Centre for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences, and the coordinator of DASH: Data, Culture and Society, Critical Perspectives. Anna is the national mentor for AI in SKERIC. Her research interests revolve around critical perspectives on the nexus of technology, culture, and memory.