The Traveler’s Lab Blog – Methods, Analysis, Interpretation

By Caroline Diemer (Wesleyan ’18) (introductory note by Jesse W. Torgerson)

This blog post is the second part of a description of our work to see what the “geographic references” that we generated from the Chronicle of Theophanes the Confessor using MAXQDA looked like when projected onto maps. This is in fact the seventh in a series devoted to the project “Geography and Narrative in the Chronicle of Theophanes.” Previous posts considered, in order: “place” in history; “place” in narrative; how we divided our text; how we coded “geography” in our text; how we organized those codes. Our immediately previous post (please read that first!) from November 2017 discussed the initial steps we took to map the geography of the Chronicle using the free online platform Recogito.

It should be noted that the present blog post is already several months out of date. Currently we are re-working the maps that Ms. Diemer displays here with some of the new features that are now available on Recogito. We are also updating and adding to these maps with more complete geographic date from the Chronicle (we are now only a few months away from having completely indexed the work’s geography).

What to tag as a “geographic reference” in making a Recogito map?

Just as we have described in our previous posts on tagging with MAXQDA, we faced the same nuances here in determining how to capture the many ways in which geographic references manifest themselves in the Chronicle. In making our maps we worked with the same distinction of “explicit” and “indirect” references.

Nevertheless, as will be clear, there are some unique nuances to Recogito’s mapping capabilities that means, in the end, the maps it generates do not coincide exactly with the hierarchies of geographic terms derived in MAXQDA.

1. Tagging Explicit Geographic references in Recogito

To give an example of how I would tag or create such an item consider the sentence example cited in the previous post:

AM 5796

Diocletian lived privately in his own city at Salon in Dalmatia while Maximamus Herculius lived in Lykaonia

To create a map for this sample sentence we would tag the explicit geographic references: Salon (in Dalmatia), Dalmatia, and Lykaonia. Lykaonia and Salon would appear as dots (as cities) while Dalmatia would be a polygon (as a region).

Most of the time, people who are directly associated with geographies (i.e. are from [X place], live in [X place], hold a position at [X place]) would be tagged.

Thus, in this sentence, Lykaonia, Salon, and Dalmatia would be tagged but Diolcetian would not. Readers might recall from our post on MAXQDA that in that program we did tag Diocletian. That was because we use the MAXQDA data differently, for instance to also ask questions of textual proximity.

But in the Recogito side of the project, we are only interested in seeing the actual geography, so we did not to tag Emperors because emperors are, in general, not tied to their city in ways that say a bishop would be.

2. Tagging Indirect Geographic References in Recogito

Not all, or even most of the geographic references in the Chronicle are as clear and straightforward as tagging explicit references.

Some of these are indirect references such as “the city” or “that river.” Geographies like these require reading the surrounding sentences to determine exactly which geographical feature is being referred to. This type of tagging also requires that the tagger go through individually, rather than allowing the program to tag all mentions of “the city” or “that river” because often times that phrase is used to describe different places. It is because of our interest in these sorts of references that we have not been able to use text analysis programs alone to “tag” our document, but have had to also “tag” the entire Chronicle by hand.

One question that is raised with indirect geographic references is whether or not direct references like Constantinople, should be weighed more than indirect references.

It has been our practice to tag the indirect references just as if the text had states the place itself.  “Salon”, “Dalmatia”, and  “that city” each have equal weight in the geographic references.

3. Tagging Vague Geographies in Recogito

Vague or unspecific geographic references also pose some problems

Consider two sentences from one entry (this sentence is also used as an example in a previous post).

AM 5885

In this year the pious emperor Theodosius fought bravely against Eugenios as the passes to the Alps, and, after capturing him alive, executed him,… The most Christian emperor … ordering that bishops from the East should come to Rome for this, among whom was sent Akakios of Beroia.

Some of the limitations of Recogito means that we do not run into some of the problems we would anticipate.

Take the line “Passes to the Alps” in the above sentence. It is both an incredibly specific and incredibly vague statement, which should make it incredibly difficult to know how to map “accurately.” That is, from a mapping standpoint: should I tag the entirety of the Alps or just the passes? If just the passes, which passes?

This would be a major issue if Recogito could be that specific, but at the moment it cannot and this takes this decision out of our hands. At the moment Recogito uses is Map Tiles imported from Pelagios. These do not have region tags for landmarks / geographical features. This means that for the moment the decision of how to tag places such as “the Alps” has been taken out of our hands. This is only a temporary relief, for in the future, when we begin to export and manipulate these maps in a program like ArcGIS, we will have to make decisions about such geographic features as these.

A related issue is when features do have a referent, but are not depicted in the way one might desire. One obvious example of this is the “Nile River.” The great river does not appear as a region, or as a line (as we might hope), but as a singular “dot.” Similarly, we have had to rely on “dots” to stand in for regions. The most notable version of this problem is Persia or the Sasanian Empire, for which there is no tag, due to the fact that no one has yet made a region tag in Pelagios for this area. Persia is a place mentioned quite often in the Chronicle. As a placeholder I used Ctesiphon as the place tag for Persia, because it was the capital during the Sasanian Empire. It should be noted that Ctesiphon the city is actually only mentioned once in the entirety of the Chronographia.

Red Arrow points to the point that represents the Nile. Purple Arrow points to the point which represents the Persian empire

To return to the example of the entry for AM 5885, we can illustrate another difficulty. “Rome” and “Akakios of Beroia” are easy to tag but “Bishops of the East” is much more challenging. In our minds, this is most certainly a geographic reference, but one that is even broader than “the Alps.” What does “the East” exactly mean to the reader? Where does the East start and stop? Should the East be the entirety of the Eastern Mediterranean and Persia? Even if we wanted to express something like that, Recogito does not have such a general region tag. Because there are no other options I annotate “the East” by simply marking it as “Flagged.” This means the word has been tagged but there is no correlating point on the map.

I often run across geographies within the Chronicle, which have points or regions but Recogito does not recognize the spelling or name. This is often due to the fact that there was a misspelling, or the fact that the Pelagios Map Tile does not list a version of a name as being from a particular place.

For example, Skythopolis is a Roman town in the Levant which comes up semi-regularly. Bet She’an is the official name of the site at the moment, and it is the name that Recogito has listed, so when I tag Skythopolis Recogito tells me that there are no towns of that name. From the tagging page I must look up Bet She’an to tag the reference correctly.

To deal with geographies like this, we have kept a running list of all the geographies that have to be tagged with its modern or alternative place name. At this point, this list is about 7 pages long, and so it is not an insignificant issue.

The second type of vague reference is when we don’t know where a specific city, feature, or monument is. In cases like these I have to utilize the flagging option (already mentioned above).  At the moment there are 134 geographic references flagged. There are a couple reasons why there are geographies that need to be flagged. The first is that there are no tags in Recogito, nor are there any modern towns which have evolved from the Byzantine town, which I could tag.

However, sometimes the need to “flag” a reference is due to the name of a place being the same as somewhere much more important. For example: Avroleva is a town or possibly mountain somewhere in Bulgaria. I am not exactly sure where. The reason I know that much about Avroleva is because there is a glacial mountain range in Antartica which is named after Avroleva, Bulgaria. Searching for any information on Avroleva the town is quite difficult to near impossible because all of the results are about Avroleva the glacial range.

A final example of uncharitable geographies in the Chronicle is towns whose only documentation of existence is the Chronicle itself. Take for example “John of Kyrestai.” We do not know where Kyrestai is because that is the only mention of the place, and the mention does not even give us a general idea of where it could be.

These flagged towns will forever be a mystery.

Conclusions

These two posts on our use of Recogito are simply preliminary documentation of our process and ongoing questions. Over the course of this Summer 2018 we will be using Recogito to craft some carefully edited maps for portions of the Chronicle. These will take advantage of some of Recogito’s new tools for analysis, such as color-coding based on item “type.” Look for a blog post in August 2018 on the results of these efforts.

By Caroline Diemer

Note: This is the sixth in a series devoted to the project “Narrative and Geography in the Chronicle of Theophanes the Confessor”.
First post (“place” in history) here; second (“place” in narrative) here; third (how we divided our text) here; fourth (how we coded “geography” in our text) here; fifth (how we organized those codes) here. 

This blog post will follow very closely the “geographic references” that we have implemented in MaxQDA (as discussed in the previous blog post).

With the easily accessible, incredibly detailed and accurate maps constantly available to us in our daily lives, we must always keep in mind that we do not have the same mental visualizations of the physical world as would those we study in the past (for this project specifically, ninth-century Byzantines).

When reading such geographic reference-rich texts as the Chronographia, it is hard to understand the world that is being constructed for the contemporary (ninth-century) reader. This is due in part to the disjunct created by our own reliance on visualizing the world as maps, but also to our unfamiliarity with the names and connotations specific places would have had for a ninth-century Constantinopolitan.

Our tool of choice: Recogito

To understand the geography of the Chronographia, we are using Recogito, a program which visualizes, or actualizes, written geographies that can cause the modern reader confusion. Why was Recogito the right source for our purposes?

Recogito is an initiative of the Pelagios commons, a text annotation tool for creating maps by turning “tags” of geographic references in a text into either points or polygons (the program’s way of representing a region) on a geographic projection.

The placement of the points, as well as the shape of the polygons, come from Pelagios Map Tiles. Recogito collects its place data from the community-built and rigorously edited online gazetteer Pleiades, as well as the Digital Atlas of the Roman Empire (DARE). As such it not only has the virtues of being online and open access, but is also backed up by the most up-to-date and rigorous geography of the ancient and late antique world available.

Recogito works to put texts in direct conversation with all of this geographic data.

For instance, Recogito has a function for tagging/annotating all references in a text. For example, when I tag Constantinople, I am given the opportunity to tag all the mentions of Constantinople in the text I am working with.

After I have finished my tagging, Recogito will generate a map that represents points as circles. A point with many tags will be larger than a point with very few (though there is a small standard size, so depending on the range of the distribution of points, points with a few tags may be the same size as one with only 1 tag).

When you click on one of these circles (or “points”) Recogito shows you all the different terms from the text that we have located at that geographic point. This is especially important for our project as this feature allows us to see who is mentioned in association with a specific place. That is, many of our geographic tags are what we have called “implicit geography” – such as bishops who are tagged with the city of their see.

Clicking on a point also displays a portion of the specific passage that point comes from (and if multiple passages, how many), as well as the number of tags for a place.

Both of these features help to show what has determined the nature of the site’s role for this section of the text. Such as: Is Alexandria, as a city, mentioned a lot or are there a lot of people from Alexandria doing things?

The Process

1. Splitting up the Chronographia into the different emperors

We split up the Chronographia into individual text documents for the reigns of each emperor. We did this first because it is an extremely long document.

But second (and most important for our analytical questions), dividing by emperor allows us to compare the differences between emperors. We are interested in seeing what types of geographies appeared with each emperor. Where are the geographies of concern? Is there one place mentioned more than the others? Is each particular reign more region-based or city-based (as we found when comparing Diocletian to Constantine)? What people groups or regions did the Chronographia consider to be of greatest concern under each emperor?

2. Uploading the Documents, and Recogito’s self tagging

Recogito has a feature whereby, when you upload a document to the program you can allow it to automatically tag any place it can recognize. In theory this would be an incredibly helpful feature, considering about 25% of the things I tag in Recogito are well-known places. As already stated, Recogito draws place-names from several platforms, not just from Pelagios map tiles, but DARE (Digital Atlas of the Roman empire) and Modern Geonames. It seems that with the automatic tagging feature, however, Recogito currently does not use Pelagios and DARE but only Geonames, or at least prioritizes this database. This is a problem because there are many places around the world which share names. One example of this is Antioch. Syrian Antioch is an often mentioned city in Recogito because it is one of the bishops that is included in the rubrics. But instead of tagging ancient Antioch, Recogito automatically tags the Antioch in southern California, half a world away from where we needed it.

This is what happens when Recogito autotags all of the Chronographia

This problem arose with the majority of the automatic tags. Because Recogito does not have any way to mass edit tags, I would have to go through and fix each tag individually. So instead of letting Recogito try to automatically tag places for us, we had to start with a clean slate. This required us to unclick the automatic annotation button during the uploading process.

3. With and Without Rubrics comparison

Besides comparing the narratives of different emperors’ reigns to each other within the Chronographia, we are also ultimately interested in comparing two versions of the Chronographia. The main difference between the “geography” of the two versions of the text is quite significant, more so than one would guess as the bulk of the text of the Chronographia is exactly the same in both.

The one version – that which is familiar to historians of Byzantium as the version in all the critical editions and translations – has what we call “dating rubrics,” which are not red-lettered headings, but a list at the beginning of each new entry with the current emperor, the emperor of Persia, and the bishops of Rome, Constantinople, Jerusalem, Alexandria, and then Antioch.

The other version of the Chronographia (preserved in the ninth-century manuscript Paris BnF Grec 1731) lacks this rubricated system of dividing up each entry.

Since our interest is in studying geographical mentions or references in the Chronography, the difference between these two is significant as the one version initiates each entry with this “dating rubric” rote-mentioning seven places, whereas the other version has none of these.

Thus far, all of the Chronographia with rubrics has been mapped in Recogito. A selected number without rubrics has also been mapped. At this mid-way stage of our project, comparing the two versions allows us to already see exactly what a difference these references make in the geographic “pictures” created in the two versions of the text. The difference is immediately apparent, and quite visually striking:

The Geography of the Reign of Constantine I according to the Chronographia (305-335):
(left) with dating rubrics, (right) without dating rubrics

This is, however, preliminary and is merely a preview of some of the analyses we will use Recogito to perform on the narrative of the Chronographia.

In our second post on Recogito, we will describe some of the procedures and problem solving techniques we have developed in order to use this tool to map our text in a manner aligned with our research questions and agendas.