Hestia

Digital humanities projects are becoming more and more common and study a variety of different topics. The projects typically look at history or literary works. The digital humanities project that I will be looking at is called Hestia. The most important reason I chose this project was because it has a combination of both history and literary works. The site Hestia is supported by some very well-known universities, such as Open University, University of Manchester, University of Southampton, and University of Oxford. The project is also supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Hestia is backed by some very credible names and that also helped me choose this project. There were also two phases for Hestia. The first phase was funded from September 2008-July 2010. The team that worked on the process was Elton Barker, Stefan Bouzarovski, Chris Pelling, and Leif Isaksen. The second phase was funded from July 2013-June 2014. Kate Byrne, Eric Kansa, Adam Rabinowitz, Beverley Daley-Yates, Enrico Daga, all worked on the second phase of Hesita2. The goals for both phases were extremely different but the second phase used phase one to help its research. 

Phase one of Hestia took a look at a Greek writer and historian Herodotus. Herodotus was alive sometime around the fifth century BC and lived in a town called Halicarnassus, which is actually in modern day Turkey. There are five books that Herodotus wrote and that the team for Hestia used in their project. Herodotus would write about the great wars that had occurred between his people, the Greeks, and the Persians a generation before his time. He also explores the world that he lives in and also talks about the conflicts of the world that had arisen during his life, He also wrote about the deeds of various kinds of people and the towns and cities that had risen and fallen throughout his life. It is quite interesting to see how Herodotus states that towns and cities they were small one generation before are now great in size. 

The main goal of phase one of Hestia was to look at all the information provided by Herodotus and use digital humanities tools to make connections. The team that worked on Hestia used a digital form of Herodotus’s work to extract all the places named in his writing. After they did that, they would use web mapping technologies such as GIS, Google Earth, and Narrative TimeMap. These tools allowed for the team to investigate the cultural geography of the ancient world that is shown through the eyes of Herodotus. Not only did they work on mapping the places they were referenced by Herodotus, but after they had mapped them, you could click on the location and read about what Herodotus had writing about that place. You could read about the people that had lived there also. They were also able to see how relevant certain towns and cities were by using a tool to check how many times the place was mentioned in the story. They also used a heat mapping tool to show how much a place was referenced, and this would actually appear on the map. They did not just want to connect the locations named to a map, but they also wanted to connect the people who were mentioned. That is one thing that is commonly left out in digital projects. They will sometimes stop once they have mapped the place, but this team made sure that everyone that Herodotus mentioned was represented. Excerpts of Herodotus’ writing that mentioned people within a city or town were included when you would click on a location to give extra background information. This extra information would allow you to learn about the people, culture, and atmosphere of that place. The team that worked on phase one of Hestia did a wonderful job.

Hestia2 which was created by another team used the work of phase one to show some of the major issues you may face when working on digital humanities projects. The most prominent issue they believe digital humanities projects face is data visualization. The way information is viewed and processed is constantly changing, so it’s hard to keep updating the work to keep up with the new technology. Another major problem is being able to present the data in a way that would make sense to educated and-non-educated people alike. This is extremely hard to do because the teams that work on the projects do not want to reduce the complexity of the data that was collected or give a misleading picture. Another main issue is the struggle to find accurate mapping of the world. There were different maps from the east and western world with colliding information. The maps from Asia and Europe were sometimes very different but were necessary to use due to the fact that the places to which Herodotus was referring were located in Asia, as well as Europe. The team that worked on Hestia2 did an amazing job pointing out some of the problems that Hestia and other digital humanities projects may face. I think it is important for other digital humanities projects to take these issues into account when working on a project in the future. 

There were many reasons as to why I chose to pick this digital humanities project to look at. For starters, I looked at many projects but I was struggling to find one that interested me. The reason this digital humanities project interested me so much was because I am a history minor. History has always been intriguing to me and being able to read a little bit about Greek and Persian writing was quite interesting. Learning about some of the super powers interests me. I also found the tools they used very unique and yet simple at the same time. The heat map was very different from tools I have seen or used myself. The heat map is a very simple yet effective tool. I also did respect the amount of work and research they had to do. The project was very organized and was backed by some very respectable universities, which made the project a lot more credible. The maps they used were also extremely helpful and got their point across. Another reason this digital humanities project caught my attention was because it was somewhat similar to our professor Adam Sills project for Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year.