My Experience with MANTO and other Linked Open Data Projects
Written by Gabriel Jower
Before starting my MANTO internship I had actually already worked with Linked Open Data (LOD) projects, specifically when writing my undergrad capstone research paper last year. My research was on Ancient Greek papyri, and I became intimately familiar with the LOD dataset of Egyptian documents from BC 800 - 800 AD collected in the searchable database Trismegistos.org.
Therefore, I was immediately drawn to MANTO above all other internship options this semester for two reasons:
1.) It was a good opportunity to read more Ancient Greek texts!
2.) I was curious to see how an LOD dataset actually gets built by participating, in some small way, in its development.
The first thing that struck me about MANTO was how rigorously defined the project’s remit is: to untangle and visually delineate conflicting mythic traditions. What makes this a difficult task is that when we compare Homer, Plutarch, Attic drama and Strabo, for example, we see that all of these authors seem to recall the features of this distant, mythic world in differing ways. Through the dataset collected by MANTO, we are given the opportunity to parse out how these various mythic traditions differed, and therefore better understand what the specific beliefs of these ancient authors and communities were.
This leads me to the feature of the project I am perhaps most passionate about: visualisation and accessibility. Throughout the past thirteen weeks I’ve noticed that the project's design considers accessibility for the non-specialist user (as well as academics) as a priority. I think this is admirable, as although it was a priceless tool I often found it intimidating to navigate through Trismegistos’ massive dataset (951, 398 entries at the time of writing!). I felt it was likely that most of the wonderful ancient Greek documents I had found using it were in practice only accessible to other researchers like myself with a working knowledge of Ancient Greek.
A typical search result for papyri using Trismegistos.org.
In MANTO, on the other hand, the public-facing interface relies heavily on maps and imagery to visualise the data. Furthermore, MANTO only references freely accessible English translations of all the Latin and Greek texts in its publc-facing interface, such as those provided through other digital tools like Topostext or the Perseus Digital Library.
A typical search result for an ‘entity’ (a character, object, place or event from Greek myth) in MANTO.
In my opinion, making the content of ancient Greek and Latin texts more freely accessible, comprehensible and visualisable through LOD and other digital tools is essential for the future of this field of the humanities. As Gregory Crane, the director of the Perseus Digital Library, said about the upcoming 6th version of Perseus on a recent appearance on the Gnostic Informant podcast (‘Why Thucydides was a Game Changer; starting around 59’10”):
“in summary our focus is... how do we transform the social contract between academic humanities (like what I get paid to do) and the intellectual life of humanity. I’m not interested in writing books for professors or in participating in closed networks of specialists who only want to talk to each other.”
I’m confident that with the assistance of Linked Open Databases like MANTO and Digital Libraries like Perseus, soon the fascinating, arcane and entangled traditions of Greek myth recorded by ancient writers can be disentangled, parsed and visualised to those interested, whether from inside or outside of academia. An exciting future!
This is the third in a series of blog posts from students at Macquarie University who answered the call for PACE interns this semester
