Structuring the Sights and Stories of Pausanias with Wikidata

The Digital Periegesis (DP) project aims to create a multipurpose tool for archaeological, historical, and literary analysis of Pausanias by extracting from the text every significant manifestation of the classical past he records. The resulting database relates thousands of identifiable ancient places, people, collectivities, gods, objects, rituals, source texts, and events to each other and to their narrative context. Each text paragraph is linked to the geographic location the narrative implies to allow the possibility of visualizing complex special and temporal relationships in the narration that may have been clear in Pausanias’ time but are opaque to most modern readers. Capturing that narrative context requires uniquely granular mapping of the physical landscape of Greece while linking to those places the historical and legendary personalities and events that gave meaning to that landscape. Our goals could be achieved by adapting existing resources, in particular by exploiting the cross-disciplinary scope, openness, and flexibility offered by Wikidata both as a source of unique identifiers and as a relatively secure and sustainable repository of structured data extracted from the text of Pausanias.