Humlab HITS: The Digital Periegesis & Arctic Visible

Kyriaki Konstantinidou and Eavan O'Dochartaigh are newly appointed researchers at Humlab and will talk about their research projects at the seminar. The seminar will be held in English. 

Konstantinidou is part of the project "The Digital Periegesis: Tracing the places of Ancient Greece and the stories associated with them".

The Periegesis Hellados is the title of a work by a certain Pausanias of Magnesia, who was writing in the second century CE/AD. Pausanias set out to write a detailed account of a journey (or, better, journeys) through mainland Greece. The result is a ten-volume survey of the human footprint on that landscape, which presents a wealth of information about its towns, buildings, monuments and artefacts. Known in English as the Description of Greece, the term periegesis derives from the verb periēgeisthai, "to lead or show around". It is this double sense of movement (through space) and description (of place) that we wish to explore in this Digital Periegesis.

Read more about the project.

O'Dochartaigh project at Humlab "Arctic Visible: Picturing Indigenous Communities in the Nineteenth-Century Western Arctic" (ARCVIS) investigates the visual representation of indigenous people and their local Arctic environment in the nineteenth century, a period that saw intense exploration in the region. A key element of the innovative project is the collation and interpretation of the material through an open-access online geospatial platform, which combines the visuality of exploration and travel with digital methods that seek to bring out the richly contextual information often bypassed in visual documentary records. The production of the online portal will make the material accessible, contextualised, and relevant for communities in the Arctic, educators, and interested members of the public, as well as academic researchers across disciplines. In contrast to enduring images of ice and vast empty landscapes, the project will show the Arctic as a peopled environment with a rich history and heritage. The indigenous contribution to Arctic exploration in the nineteenth century, often thought to be 'invisible,' will be made visible by the research.