ToposText

Available

 * https://topostext.org
 * https://topostext.org/search-tool

Author

 * Brady Kiesling

Description
From the project author (2019-11-26):

ToposText is a website and free mobile application based on a very large (20 million word) collection of ancient texts indexed to a database of more than 7000 mapped places relevant to the history and mythology of the Greco-Roman world. Each place page has an OpenStreetMap mapping, a brief description (borrowed from the Princeton Encyclopedia of Classical Sites and other references, or by the author), and a table of the literary mentions of the place, key-word-in-context, linking to the full text, filterable by author/work or by mention type, sortable by work date or the approximate date of the event in which the place is mentioned.

The library includes 770 translated Greek and Latin texts in clean digital form, almost all important surviving works of history, mythology, and geography from Homer through the Early Byzantine period, mostly out-of-copyright translations but some open source or CC translations online for the first time, with links to the original Greek or Latin text.

The app includes 7600 mapped historic places and archaeological sites from Spain to India, attested by 230,000 ancient references. The level of mapping detail is highest in Greece, and dependent on Pleiades and the Digital Atlas of the Roman Empire for outlying regions. It documents and geolocates 250 monuments in Athens, a similar number in Rome.

ToposText also indexes 10,300 proper names – people, gods, festivals, animals – attested by 368000 key-word-in-context ancient references.

A proximity search tool on the ToposText.org site allows one to search for any two words or strings (case-insensitive) within 200 characters of each other, using regular expressions. Thus \bHannib AND \belephant will find 34 instances from Plutarch to Eutropius.

The gazetteer is downloadable as a .kml file or in Pelagios LOD orWorld Historical Gazetteer json-ld format.

Reviews

 * Review: Mapping Ancient Literature through ToposText Reviewed by Janet D. Jones in Society for Classical Studies Digital Reviews (2019).