Who would resist reading History if it is taught this way?
In a clever bit of technological legerdemain, Stanford University has combined historical research, mapping, and Web technology to bring ancient Roman Empire travel to the Internet. A cross-disciplinary team has created and launched ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World. With it, a user can determine how long it will take to travel from any point in the Roman Empire to any other, as well as calculate the cost of transporting goods and people.
This heretofore unnatural union of geographers, technologists, and historians of the ancient world is becoming more and more common under the descriptor of “digital humanities.” ORBIS looks to be one of the most effective examples of its promise.
Built by historian and classicist Walter Scheidel and Stanford Libraries’ digital humanities specialistElijah Meeks, with the assistance of geographer and Web developer Karl Grossner and GIS analyst Noemi Alvarez, the interactive online atlas is based on a host of data. This includes historical tide information and weather; size, grade, and surface of roads; main cities and ports; land, sea, and river routes; vehicle speed (including ships, ox carts, horse, and walking); and the cost of transport.
The time period the system centers on is about 200 CE, when Roman power was at its highest and the empire’s extent was greatest. The atlas is built from 751 sites, most of which are cities and towns, and covers about four million square miles. Two hundred sixty-eight of the sites are ports. The road network mapped on ORBIS includes 52,587 miles of road, including desert tracks and 17,567 miles of rivers and canals.
According to Meeks, the project started when Scheidel happened to see a dynamic distance cartogram of the London tube system. Dynamic distance cartograms distort the layout of their data based on your selection. If you choose one stop, it will show you a map of how close in time expenditure the other stops are, based on information like train connections.
“In building a geographic transportation model of the Roman Empire, you can’t just download an API for distance,” Meeks told Ars. So once the proposal was approved, the principals had to figure out how to collect that data. For land travel, they were able to use itineraria, Roman accounts of time spent traveling various routes. But for sea voyages, similar information did not really exist. It was in creating a model for the missing information that ORBIS’s builders found themselves in the role of pioneers.
They had to write a model for ancient sea travel based on scientific data regarding wind, currents, and weather. Meeks did so using Gephi, the agnostic network analysis and visualization tool. He subsequently imported it into PostGIS, a PostgreSQL open-source database.