Ptolemy machine

Available

• http://shot.holycross.edu/nsmith/projects/ptolemymachine.html

Author

• Neel Smith

Description

The Ptolemy machine is the attempt to publish a digital Geography so that, as Ptolemy intended, it can serve as a “map-making kit”. Such a digital map-making kit of Ptolemy therefore should generate both a readable text and a usable geographic database from a single source.

This is the description of the current status of the project from the project web page (Accessed 2017-09-05):

I have published an initial TEI-compliant text of Ptolemy’s Geography in this Canonical Text Service. The site includes links to OAC annotations of all geographic locations in the Geography. These annotations associate a canonical identifier for each geographic feature in Ptolemy’s database with a canonical reference to a defining passage in the Geography. The feature identifiers can be used to refer to entities in Ptolemy’s geographic database. In the fall of 2011, students in an “Introduction to Classical Archaeology” course at Holy Cross sampled about 10% of the sites in Ptolemy’s and tried to equate them with identifiers in the Pleiades geographic database. I will add further information and links here when we have expanded the comparison to see how Ptolemy’s inventory of the world in the mid-second century compares with the Pleiades’ modern gazetteer.

It is impossible to access the TEI XML souce code of Ptolemy’s Geography in the Canonical Text Service, because the link is dead (2017-09-05).