Intertextuality in the Journey of Paris
About the digital resource
This case-study focuses on the detailed description of the itinerary followed by Paris, as a series of successive place-names. Additional to the elements included in the other one, this also contains a map. The objective is to provide the user with a cognitively simple and easily grasped visualisation of the toponymical and geographical information contained in the text and allow for an enhanced reading experience of the journey scene both in words and on the map, translating the mythical narrative into the real world, the actual geography in which it is set.
When the user clicks on a place-name, it is highlighted on both text and map and the commentary holder pops up in the map itself. It is possible to zoom in and out, to move to the next mentioned landmark of the route and to access the corresponding lemma in Pleiades1 or any citation included in the commentary. A combination of land markers (for the place-names mentioned) and sea markers (which follow the maritime route) are all tagged with their coordinates and connected between them with a polyline.
This part of the resource does not only serve to display the research results. During the initial stages of the study, in its capacity as data visualisation, it was crucial to help evaluate the precision of the geographical information provided by the poet and, as a result, it triggered a comparative approach of cross-generic intertextuality between the epic text and contemporary technical literature, such as the genre of periplous, which follows and describes a coastal route.
Footnote
1 A community-built gazetteer and graph of ancient places.