Google Ancient Places
GAP : A new way of reading books about places
Funded under Google’s Digital Humanities Research Awards programme, GAP addresses two primary concerns related to online resources: discovery and usability. In phase one, GAP uses the Edinburgh Geoparser and Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places to geo-tag and identify place references in primary and secondary literature about antiquity from the Google Books corpus. The results are visualized and made available online using a single-screen application called GapVis, by means of which a user can navigate through a text geospatially. The second phase of the project is abstracting these principles into a toolkit—the Geographic Annotation Platform—that will allow anyone to geoparse their own texts and make them available online. The Geographic Annotation Platform is Open Source and will be available from summer 2013.
GAP are: Elton Barker (OU), Leif Isaksen (Southampton), Eric Kansa (UC Berkeley), Kate Byrne (Edinburgh) and Nick Rabinowitz.