Humanitext GEO

An interactive visualization that maps the lives, places, and works of ancient Greek and Roman authors across time and space. Combining a timeline with a geographic map, it allows you to explore where classical authors lived, worked, and traveled throughout the ancient Mediterranean world.

The Explore feature provides AI-powered exploration of classical texts using retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), enabling you to ask questions about ancient cities and receive answers grounded in primary sources from Greek and Latin literature.

Authors & Data

• Covers authors whose texts are included in Humanitext Antiqua, the corpus behind the Explore feature.
• Birth/death/floruit dates and occupations sourced from Wikidata (P569/P570/P1317 for dates, P106 for occupations). Authors without any recorded dates are omitted.
• Geographic data (places of activity, residence, birth, death) from Wikidata (P937/P551/P19/P20) with coordinates (P625).
• Author links to Wikipedia.

Geographic Data

• Pleiades — a community-built gazetteer of ancient places, used for place names and coordinate matching.
  License: see Pleiades credits
• AWMC geodata — ancient coastlines, from the Ancient World Mapping Center.
  License: ODbL
• Natural Earth — rivers, lakes, and sea regions.
  License: Public Domain

Map Tiles

• Esri World Physical Map
  Tiles © Esri — Source: US National Park Service

Technology

• Vis.js Timeline — timeline visualization
• Leaflet — interactive map
• Leaflet.markercluster — marker clustering
• Pinecone — vector database for RAG retrieval
• Google Gemini — embeddings, query reformulation, and answer generation

Credits

• Ikko Tanaka — J. F. Oberlin University
• Jun Ogawa — University of Tokyo
• Naoya Iwata — Nagoya University; National Institute of Informatics

Part of the Humanitext project.