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Over the past decades the extraordinary growth of new technologies has made it possible to extract data from literary texts and analyse them using digital tools. This chapter focuses on the process of creating an enriched digital edition of Pausanias's Periegesis Hellados or Description of Greece. The purpose of this research is twofold: to identify 'heritage data' in Pausanias and to describe the technical and epistemological parameters of their aggregation and organisation. In answering the essentially digital humanities research question "how Pausanias's literary heritage information can be best organised and connected to the archaeological record on the ground", the Digital Periegesis project is charting and analysing the relevant digital tools and methods by which extensive semantic annotation and Linked Open Data (LOD) can facilitate the organisation of heritage information in Pausanias's text and its connection to actual archaeological finds. This chapter discusses the potential application of Geographic Information Science (GISc) and Geographic Information System (GIS) for such complex pre-cartesian narrative analysis. Finally, it emphasises the importance of building geo-spatially enriched digital editions collaboratively, involving discipline specialist researchers and information organisation experts, with the aim of interpreting histories of "place".

This progress article focuses on an overview of the potential and challenges of using contemporary Geographic Information System (GIS) applications for the visual rendering and analysis of textual spatial data. The case study is an ancient traveling narrative, Pausanias’s Description of Greece (Periegesis Hellados) which was written in the second century CE. First, we describe the process of converting the volumes to spatial data using a customized version of the open-source digital semantic annotation platform Recogito. Then the focus shifts to the implementation of collected and organized spatial data to a number of GIS applications: namely Google Maps, DARIAH Geo-Browser, Gephi, Palladio and ArcGIS. Through empirical experimentation with spatial data and their implementation in different platforms, our paper charts the ways in which contemporary GIS applications may be implemented to cast new light on ancient understandings of identity, space, and place.

Geovisualization, here perceived broadly as a representation of data on a digital map, has been used within a number of disciplines for different purposes: from creating new knowledge to sharing existing scholarly ideas. This chapter focuses on how building maps conceptually and with specific research questions in mind often requires a set of fresh methodologies. Methodologies ought to be tailored to conceptual research questions and existing limitations set by data, as well as aggregation, and visualization software. Through an analysis of three case studies spanning the disciplines of archaeology, linguistics and ethnology, classics and media studies, we identify a number of methodological choices and limitations for geovisualization set by available fragmented historical data, digital platforms for data aggregation, and visualization software. We then highlight two issues that are open for further development, more specifically 1) the complexities of representing multiple temporal data in one single mapping interface, as well as 2) the need for common global vocabularies and ontologies that provide us with the possibilities of linking common references.

The article offers a state-of-the-art overview of a number of Digital Humanities (DH) initiatives that have emerged in Sweden over the past decade. We identify two major developments that seem to be taking place within DH, with a specific focus on the infrastructural aspects of the development: (1) a strive to open up and broaden the research output and (2) multi-disciplinary collaboration and its effects. The two major components accentuate the new infrastructural patterns that are developing and the challenges these infer on universities. While current research is at large multi-disciplinary, developing infrastructures also enable the move towards post-disciplinarity, bringing the universities closer to the surrounding society. At five universities in Sweden, individual-sited infrastructures supporting DH research have been built today. They are complemented by national and international infrastructures, thus supporting developments and tackling some of the major challenges. In the article, the relations between individual disciplines, the question of multi- and post-disciplinarity, and the field of Digital Humanities are discussed, while stressing the factors necessary - sine qua non - for a fruitful development of the scholarly infrastructures.

Pausanias's second-century CE Periegesis Hellados presents a ten-volume grand tour of the Greek mainland. After the post-enlightenment rediscovery of ancient Greek literature, his Description of Greece proved highly influential as a guidebook to Greece's antiquities, directing travellers and archaeologists alike to uncovering and interpreting major sites, notably at Athens, Corinth and Olympia. Recent studies focusing on his Description as a narrative, however, have drawn attention to the textual construction of space, and the different ways in which space and place are conceptualised and related to each other. This paper outlines the initial work of the Digital Periegesis project, which is using semantic geo-annotation to capture and analyse the forms of space within and the spatial form of this narrative. In particular, it discusses the challenges and affordances of using geo-parsing, spatio-temporal analysis, network analysis, and Linked Open Data (LOD) for rethinking the geographies of a non-modern literary text as based more on topological connections than topographic proximity.

Museums represent complex layers of place. From carefully managed curatorial spaces, to exhibition environments, to the layout of display cases, to the representation of distant parts embodied in the collections of the great encyclopedic collections, the negotiation, representation and presentation of place has always been central to the mission of any museum. This chapter will examine the history of how museums (especially museum catalogues) present place, from early origins to the Internet. A set of case studies will be examined as a means of exploring how, where and in what form art objects and artefacts first began to be transported from non-Western to Western nations for display in the museums of Western capitals, thus representing the origins of what Cuno has called our "basic and inevitable cultural interrelatedness"; and what others have called "object itineraries" or "object biographies". A comparison will be made of the same museums' online representation of the same places today. It will thus be possible to present a framework for considering object itineraries—historic and modern—as a subject of both history and historiography.

Universities around the world have increasingly turned to digital infrastructures as a way to revamp the arts and humanities. This article contributes a fresh understanding by examining the material development of HumlabX, a research laboratory for digital humanities at Umeå University, Sweden. Specifically, we approach the empirical case as a timeline of research funding, projects, events, and deliverables to examine how the research laboratory as an organizational and material space developed and evolved in relation to new technology investments. Based on our analysis, we argue that while digital research infrastructures can, indeed, stimulate innovation in and around research, aimed to produce new knowledge, digital technologies carry social and material implications that affect organizational processes. We show that while knowledge production processes at HumlabX were highly influenced by the infrastructural legacy of the past, they indeed directed scholars toward innovation. By discussing these implications in detail, we move beyond the debate of humanities qua digital, and demonstrate the need for scholars of digital humanities to engage in the development of policies for digital research infrastructures. Using a Swedish case study, we argue that research laboratories for the digital humanities must be scrutinized and should be fully exposed as socio-material organizations that develop, and should develop, over time. In particular, we stress the need to ensure that digital humanities laboratories are sustainable and open for redevelopment.

This is the guest editors' introduction to the Digital Humanities Quarterly special issue on Digital Technology in the Study of the Past.