The Hellespont Project

Available

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

Editors

 * CoDArchLab / Perseus Digital Library

Description
The aim of The Hellespont Project is 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 combines 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) has been chosen as a starting point for the integration of both data sets.

The project has 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 will be annotated according to the TEI guidelines, so that they will 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, are also being annotated. This is supported by a CHS/DAI joint fellowship. One of the goals of this linguistic annotation is to provide a more solid background for the task of event identification.

Furthermore, a part of the research is 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 has been funded for three years by the NEH / DFG Bilateral Digital Humanities Program 'Enriching Digital Collections'.