MANTO: mapping Greek myth
Written by Greta Hawes and Scott Smith
In its original conception MANTO was, and remains, an initiative to model the data of Greek myth and to map both its relevance to and its impact on the landscape of the ancient Mediterranean.
Like many, this project developed out of frustration and sought to fill a hole: there wasn’t any way of easily seeing the places associated with various Greek heroes, or all the myths associated with particular places. In a process that took well over a year, we developed a standardised vocabulary for expressing the many and various ways that myths, places and objects interact, and have so far used this to capture data from four major sources of ancient myth: Homer’s Iliad, Hesiod’s Theogony, Apollodoros’ Library, and Pausanias’ Description of Greece. We are in the process of adding or refining the data from other works as well (e.g. tragedy, Apollonios’ Argonautica).
Somewhat ironically given our frustration at the difficulties organising mythic data by place (rather than the more traditional approach of organising them by people), one of the most formidable aspects of the project so far has been creating an authoritative digital dataset of mythical names. Our list now comprises some 3600 individuals and groups, paired with stable URIs. MANTO’s entities are now, thanks to the work of Brady Kiesling, a Wikidata property. Further discussion about dealing with mythical entities can be found in this blog about the project.
This is a truly collaborative project. We have benefitted from the advice and support of many others in Classics and Digital Humanities, including many members of the Pelagios community. We have also been fortunate to have had a group of patient and enthusiastic students working alongside us collecting data and helping refine the data structure.
MANTO is built in Nodegoat, a new Pelagios partner. Finding this platform was a game-changer for the project. Its platform provides the ideal data collection environment: reliable, cost-effective, and precisely customisable to our specific needs. The public interface for MANTO is now available, and we welcome feedback.
Finally, a word about unintended consequences. Although our modest goal was to provide a way to visualise the mythical storyworld, MANTO has become something larger, almost as a by-product of our original aims: a modern and fully digital mythographical encyclopedia that can be manipulated by users to collect the data they want. Its usefulness, we think, will grow as more texts are included in the database, and we are hopeful that both scholars of the ancient world and other enthusiasts will find something of interest in our work.
