For sentimental reasons I follow the RSS feed of Southampton University. I did, after all, spend five years of my life there. Mostly I’m looking for Oceanography stories, but today there was a history project that caught my eye. Southampton is part of a project involving various universities and Google that is looking to get a better understanding of how the ancients viewed the geography of their world. The tool they are developing is called GapVis. It works by analyzing the text in books about the ancient world, and presenting the data on geography. The current version already includes work by the likes of Herodotus, Livy, Tacitus and Gibbon. Taking a quick look, I was amazed to see that Herodotus’s Histories includes mention of somewhere in North Britain (mapped somewhere on the current England/Scotland border). Anyway, it occurs to me that this could be a great resource for anyone writing historical or fantasy novels, and therefore worth keeping an eye on.
Who, me?
Because I needed a cat.
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Well, it would be very useful for historians. I have lost track of how much of my life has been spent trawling through sources for any reference that might be even faintly relevant to whatever I was working on.