From an early age, Herodotus' inquiring nature led him to engage in extensive travelling. During his long and perilous journeys he examined, inquired and accumulated a vast amount of well-documented materials complementing them with rich narratives. What makes him more modern in his approach than any other ancient historian is not only his ability to collect and interpret facts concerning the nature of the ancient world relating to geography, anthropology and history during his travels but more so his self-conscious awareness of what is at stake depending on who tells the story - his entertaining and storytelling charisma in assigning stories and perspectives to different people as he travels around the Mediterranean, opening the possibilities for the different groups of the historical agents to explore space.

Herodotus' texts offer an excellent opportunity to collect, compare and analyse ancient Greek attitudes of different historical agents towards space. His rich and well-documented narratives offer new stimuli in exploring human conceptions of space. It is this unique conception and representation of differing views of space in Herodotus that the Herodotus Encoded Space-Text-Imaging Archive (HESTIA), an open source project lead by Dr Elton Barker, lecturer in Classical Studies at the Open University and a team of experts, Dr Stefan Buzar, Prof Chris Pelling and Mr Leif Isaksen, is exploring.

                                                             Herodotus Earth with mash-ups

HESTIA aims to enrich the discussion of space exploring the interactions of monuments, spaces and rituals, proposing a new approach towards conceptions of space in its cultural context in the ancient world and to introduce Herodotus' world view to a new and wider audience via the internet. Combining a variety of methods, it examines the ways in which space is represented in Herodotus' History in terms of places mentioned and geographic features described and tries to capture the "deep" topological structures of the text in order to understand the Mediterranean world based on relational flow and connectivity.

                                                         Herodotus World of Networks of Places

A geo-referenced database that contains all spatial information relating to Herodotus' History is used in Google Earth to construct "Herodotus Earth" with a "mash-up" of information and locations in English and Greek.

                                                               Herodotus Narrative Timeline

The Herodotus Narrative Timeline allows users to visualise, with the assistance of Google maps, locations referred to in the text by scrolling along a "timeline", representing the chapter text and highlighting any references to the location.

In collaboration with Dr Elton Barker and his team at HESTIA we are exploring the opportunities for teachers, learners and researchers to use Herodotus Earth and the Herodotus Narrative Timelines in a manner that is engaging, useful, enlightening and meaningful. Find out more about our work with HESTIA here. If you want to find out more about HESTIA, please feel free to check out their website here.