The Perseus Time Space Visualizations

The Perseus home page released in November, 2000, includes automatically generated maps and timelines designed to show the geographic and temporal coverage of Perseus as a whole and the collections within it. Programs have scanned through the objects in the Persus Digital Library searching for what look like dates and places.

We will be documenting the work that we have done over the course of the next several months, but we can already offer the following preliminary information.

• Dates have proven relatively easy to identify. The timelines provide a very accurate general picture of the temporal focus of each collection.

• Place names are much harder to extract. Americans in particular tend to be very free with their placenames: there are places in English such as "Christmas, Florida," and "John, Louisiana" that make it very difficult to determine whether a proper name refers to a place. Furthermore, even if we know that we have a placename, many placenames are ambiguous: there are, for example, dozens of Springfields in the United States. A great deal of work can be done to refine our current results, but the automatically generated maps nevertheless do provide a reasonable sense of geographic coverage.