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<!doctype html>
<html class="no-js" lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title>GapVis: Visual Interface for Reading Ancient Texts | About Us</title>
<meta name="description" content="GapVis is a visual interface for reading ancient texts for the Google Ancient Places project.">
<meta name="author" content="Nick Rabinowitz / Google Ancient Places Project">
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<script src="http://html5shim.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/html5.js"></script>
<![endif]-->
<link rel="stylesheet" href="css/style.css"><link rel="stylesheet" href="lib/jquery/css/jquery-ui-1.8.16.custom.css"><link rel="stylesheet" href="css/gapvis.css">
<script type="text/javascript">
var _gaq = _gaq || [];
_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-29652313-1']);
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);
(function() {
var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;
ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
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</head>
<body>
<div id="container">
<header>
<h1><a href="index.html">GapVis</a> <span class="beta">BETA</span></h1>
<nav>
<a href="index.html">Home</a> · <a href="about.html">About Us</a> · <a href="http://googleancientplaces.wordpress.com/">Blog</a>
</nav>
</header>
<div id="app-view" role="main" class="clearfix">
<!-- Homepage -->
<div id="about-us-view" class="topview">
<div class="content panel">
<h2>About Us</h2>
<p>The Web is seeing an explosion of digitized material being made freely and openly available online. Google Books alone has some 12 million books in over 300 languages; but other collections, such as the Open Library and the Hathi Trust, are also making accessible texts, many of which were previously available only in prestigious university libraries. But the challenge is: What's there? And how can it be used?</p>
<p>The Google Ancient Places (GAP) project addresses these two primary concerns of discovery and usability using ancient world places as the target information that we want to able to find and visualize. We call this automated process the 'there and back again' principle: it's not enough to empower users to discover ancient places in large text corpora; we also allow users to move back again to find the books that refer to them.</p>
<p>On the discovery front, we have used and adapted the Edinburgh Geoparser to find ("geotag") references to ancient places in the text and then link ("georesolve") them to a gazetteer. Since we want to maximise usability, we have identified all the places found using Pleiades, which provide unique labels (or URIs - Uniform Resource Identifiers) for each location. In this way every place that we find has a URI that allows it to link to, or be linked from, other resources with information about the same place.</p>
<p>For visualization purposes, we have used a single-screen application with various components to help the reader navigate through a text geospatially. It comprises of three "views", focused respectively on:</p>
<ul>
<li>A <strong>Book Summary View</strong>, which provides a perspective on the text as a whole;</li>
<li>A <strong>Reading View</strong>, which focuses on a single point in the narrative and is meant as an enhanced interface for reading the text; and</li>
<li>A <strong>Place Detail View</strong>, which offers more information on how a particular geographic location fits into the text.</li>
</ul>
<p>This is a "beta" application (which is basically a Web 2.0 equivalent of a little animated man with a shovel), but we hope it's solid enough for you to test out some of these approaches and find out more about ancient places.</p>
<!--[if lt IE 9]>
<p class="warning">
To use all features of this application, we strongly recommend using a modern browser, such as IE9, Chrome, or Firefox.
</p>
<![endif]-->
<h2>We Are</h2>
<p><strong>Elton Barker</strong> <em>(the Open University)</em> – a Classicist (reads ancient Greek) and has stumbled into the murky world of digital humanities having led a project called HESTIA, which explored ancient places in one book (Herodotus's Histories). Though he doesn’t know his APIs from his URI’s, he knows what he likes, and he likes what he sees.</p>
<p><strong>Leif Isaksen</strong> <em>(University of Southampton)</em> – a humanities-IT hybrid, who also worked on HESTIA and specializes in computer applications for archaeology and all kinds of spatial analysis. Having also graduated in philosophy, here’s one scholar who knows his Socrates from his javascript.</p>
<p><strong>Eric Kansa</strong> <em>(University of California at Berkeley)</em> – lead developer of Open Context, which puts archaeological data on line for free, but, then, he's that kinda guy. He also teaches at Berkeley's School of Information.</p>
<p><strong>Kate Byrne</strong> <em>(Institute of Informatics, Edinburgh)</em> – a researcher in the Language Technology Group at Edinburgh University. She’s been adapting the Edinburgh Geoparser so that it can automatically find any ancient place in any digital text, which is quite an achievement if you think about it.</p>
<p><strong>Nick Rabinowitz</strong> <em>(independent consultant)</em> – the visualization expert. Nick produced a Herodotus NarrativeMap for the HESTIA project, but with GapViz he has taken visualizing a book to a completely different level. Reading has suddenly become a whole lot sexier.</p>
<p>GAP is funded from a Digital Humanities Research Grant as part of the Google Research Awards Program. You can read more about us on the <a href="http://googleancientplaces.wordpress.com/">Google Ancient Places blog.</a></p>
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