Google Ancient Places (GAP): Discovering historic geographical entities in the Google Books corpus, an online project developed by researchers from three universities, has just secured funding from Google to make the classics and other ancient texts easy to discover and access online.
Leif Isaksen of the University of Southampton, working together with Dr Elton Barker at The Open University and Dr Eric Kansa of the University of California-Berkeley, are the leading one of 12 projects worldwide to receive funding as part of a new Digital Humanities Research Programme funded by Google.
The GAP researchers will enable scholars and enthusiasts worldwide to search the Google Books corpus to find books related to a geographic location and within a particular time period. The results can then be visualised on GoogleMaps or in GoogleEarth. The project will run until September next year.
“We are very excited about the potential of this project,” said Leif Isaksen. “Up to now many ancient texts have been accessible only at elite institutions or have been very hard to find; now a much wider range of people will be able to discover them. This work will really help open up the field and lead to many further projects.”
University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science will work on a Web Service and Web Widget for the project. This will make it possible for Webmasters to add links to the ancient texts within their websites, enabling the public and researchers to search for them easily. The Widget will also be embedded in the Hestia (Herodotus Encoded Space-Text-Imaging Archive) and Open Context projects.
Leif Isaksen is completing a PhD at Southampton with Dr Kirk Martinez and Dr Graeme Earl on integrating archaeological data using Semantic Web technologies. “Google’s recent acquisition of Freebase, the Semantic Web encyclopaedia, means there is a range of exciting possibilities for convergence in the future,” he said.
The funding for the GAP project was part of $479,000 in funding that Google announced earlier this month. The dozen university-based projects mark Google’s first formal foray into supporting humanities text-mining research on its corpus of more than 12 million digitized books, according to the company’s academic partners. Google will be spending close to $1 million over the next two years as part of their Digital Humanities Research Programme
Other winning projects include The Open Encyclopedia of Classical Sites, which was established by David Mimno and David Blei of Princeton University, and Early Modern Books Metadata in Google Books.
Source: University of Southampton
