The Hellespont Project

Available

 * http://hellespont.dainst.org/startpage/index.html#

Editors

 * CoDArchLab / Perseus Digital Library

Description
The aim of The Hellespont Project was to integrate Arachne's and Perseus' digital collections of classical studies. By the cooperation between CoDArchLab and the Perseus Digital Library at Tufts University, indeed, one of the most comprehensive and free online collections of Greek and Roman antiquity will be available for public and scientific use.

The Hellespont Project combined text and object data using the metadata format CIDOC CRM to map ancient text content in order to link them to other types of sources. The material world in Thucydides' Pentecontaetia (Thuc. 1,89 to 1,118) was chosen as a starting point for the integration of both datasets.

The project had the task to identify manually entities representing categories in the archaeological and textual evidence (e.g. built spaces, topography, individual persons, populations) within the whole text of Thucydides' Pentecontaetia. These entities were annotated according to the TEI guidelines, so as to enrich the text simultaneously with historical background information.

At the same time, the narrative and discursive structure of the text, as well as all its relevant linguistic features, were also annotated. This was supported by a CHS/DAI joint fellowship. One of the goals of this linguistic annotation was to provide a more solid background for the task of event identification.

Furthermore, a part of the research was about the idea of a Virtual Research Environment (VRE) combining archaeological and philological data with secondary research literature and in particular journal articles, that will be collected in an automized way. This is carried out in the context of a PhD project at the Department of Digital Humanities at King's College (formerly the Centre for Computing in the Humanities) since January 2011 and in cooperation with the Thucydides Project at the CoDArchLab.

Starting from October 2010, the project was funded for three years by the NEH / DFG Bilateral Digital Humanities Program 'Enriching Digital Collections'.