4/12/2015 Seeing through the fog: Digital problems and solutions for studying ancient women | McAuley | First Monday

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ABOUT THEAUTHOR

Alex McAuleyhttp://www.mcgill.ca/classicsMcGill University Canada

After working as the

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Home > Volume 20, Number 4 ­ 6 April 2015 > McAuley

In spite of the proliferation of online resources dedicated to the study ofthe ancient world, there is nonetheless room for the improvement andexpansion of methodology and content. This paper identifies twopredominant problems in the realm of digital classics: the perpetuation oftraditional methods of presenting research rather than the promotion oftechnology­driven analysis, and the virtual invisibility of ancient women incyberspace. Arguing that there is a gender imbalance in Web­basedresources for antiquity, two solutions are proposed beginning with theaddition of more material regarding ancient women to existing platformsin the interest of equalization. Using an analogous project from McGillUniversity as inspiration, an approach that combines ancient data withGIS analysis is proposed in order to make room for technology­drivenresearch while beginning to mitigate the invisibility of women in theancient world and on the Web.

Contents

IntroductionProblem I: Presentation, not analysisProblem II: Where are the women?Solution I: EqualizeSolution II: InnovateConclusions

Introduction

At the risk of sounding self­congratulatory, the explosion of classicalstudies into cyberspace that has occurred over roughly the past twodecades has profoundly impacted both the mechanism and the outreachof the discipline. Open access texts, online encyclopaedias, coincollections, maps, even message boards and forums have made theancient world accessible to a larger audience than ever before. In turn,this has left its mark on how — and to what end — classicists producetheir research. The ‘digital turn’ in classics has been well discussed in avariety of arenas over the past decade, ranging from online communitiesto print publications (Crane, 2004), most directly in Mahony and Bodard’s(2010) edited volume Digital research in the study of classical antiquityand in Dunn and Mahony’s (2013) Digital classicist supplement.

This has all been an implicitly ‘good thing’ for the field of study, but if wetake a somewhat closer look at the state of the digital realm of classicalstudies certain imbalances in the character and content of onlineresources for the ancient world come to the fore. Most conspicuous

4/12/2015 Seeing through the fog: Digital problems and solutions for studying ancient women | McAuley | First Monday

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Director of Sales fora Montreal­basedWeb and graphicdesign firm, AlexMcAuley then doveinto the world ofacademia with aMaster's in classics atthe University ofEdinburgh, beforereturning to Quebecto pursue his Ph.D.in ancient history atMcGill University.Apart from hisprincipal researchinterest of ethnicityand pluralism in theHellenistic world, heis the primary authorand editor of theongoing SeleucidGenealogy project(http://www.seleucid­genealogy.com), andhas several publishedand forthcomingarticles in the fieldsof Seleucid dynastichistory, Hellenisticroyal women, Greekfederalism, and thereception of theancient world in filmand television series.

among them is the question of ancient women and their digital treatment.The broader concerns of ‘ancient gender’ in the digital realm are manifoldand complex, and in the interest of thoroughness I shall limit my focus inthis article to the digital study of ancient women — in particular, royalwomen. Gender is a much broader cultural lens for research, but in thiswider context I believe that the biographical and social history of ancientwomen presents us with a problem, in digital classics at least, that isfairly easy to resolve. Yet in spite of the far­reaching advances made inthe study of women in the ancient world, the digital realm remains aplace that is associated with a “white male playground” (Scott, et al.,2001), characterized by a masculine gaze and preoccupied with malesubjects. The digital sphere — and thus digital humanities by association— remains torn between an aspiration for its utopian potential (Green andAdam, 2001), and the dystopic reality of online sexism and the digitalinvisibility of women (Foka and Arvidsson, 2014).

I argue in this article that the same gender imbalance is present amongdigital resources for the study of the ancient world, in a manner that hasonly compounded the problem of the invisibility of women in our ancientsources. While we have made striking advances in epigraphy and textualcriticism, the study of ancient women has largely been left by the digitalwayside and we as a discipline have yet to formulate an approach forsolving some of the basic problems inherent in their identification.Righting the online gender imbalance is only part of the problem, butthanks to emergent geographical information system (GIS) technologiesalong with a re­imagined methodology we are indeed better equipped forstudying and identifying women in the ancient world than we may havethought. What I propose below is not meant to be taken as a panacea forwomen in the ancient world, but rather as potential solutions for rectifyingsome of the more particular problems faced by the field of study. Thecriticism and approach that I advance here aim to rectify both this genderimbalance and the general lack of technology­driven research thatremains characteristic of digital classics. Ancient women, in short, neednot be as inconspicuous as they currently are shown to be in cyberspace.

In what follows I begin with an overview of the current state of certainareas of classical studies in the digital realm, and identify two generalizedproblems that are discussed in turn: the trend of the simple presentation,rather than the production, of classical research using digital means; andthe invisibility of ancient women in scholarly cyberspace. I then propose asolution to each problem, and elaborate a case study from my own recentresearch as well as an analogous project undertaken by McGill Universitythat could very well hold the keys to taking some new steps forward inthe digital study of ancient women. In the process, I shall situate thisproject in the troubled context of ancient applications of GIS. Althoughthe case studies that I have chosen below are rather specific, a moregeneral approach has the potential for a far broader application than justin the ancient context. The study of ancient women remains a complexand diverse topic in both print and digital arenas, but in this instance theremedies to problems in the latter may be quite straightforward.

Problem I: Presentation, not analysis

As I mentioned at the outset, the past few decades have been marked bya revolution in the presentation and accessibility of materials from theancient world. There are two sides to the digital coin thus far: first, andcertainly most popular, is the digitization of ancient texts and materials,and their reproduction as open­source resources accessed by a vastaudience. The second are those platforms which use computingtechnologies to generate research regarding some aspect of antiquity.The preponderance of the first, in both number and popularity, is onlygradually coming to be superseded by the emergence of the second, andwe must take each in turn. Classical texts in their original Greek and Latinalong with translations in dozens of languages, photographs and maps orarchaeological sites and artefacts, coins, statuary, are all now available indozens of open access libraries and collections. The most frequently citedparagon of this trend is the Perseus Project(http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/), an open­access library ofresources for the study of the Greek, Roman, and now Arabic worlds. Itjoins the ranks of other collections large and small — Lacus Curtius(http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/home.html), the AncientHistory Encyclopedia (http://www.ancient.eu.com/), the Latin Library(http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/), and dozens if not hundreds of others[1].

The impact of these various ventures on the democratization of classicaltexts and their sheer utility to specialists and casual users alike cannotand should not be understated, and my comments that follow are meant

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to be observations rather than points of criticism. When we considerthese ‘general’ resources along with others that are more specificallyoriented towards the scholarly community we can begin to observe atrend. The majority of digital tools for classics have formulated new andinteresting ways of presenting information and research to a broadenedaudience, but the actual mechanism and methodology by which suchresearch is generated has remained essentially unchanged. Most of thematerials presented online fall into the category of ‘traditional’ philology— textual criticism, morphology and syntactical analysis, etc. — in thatthey are simply digital reproductions of extant print materials. Texts thatwere composed by the ancients and edited by nineteenth or twentiethcentury scholars are stored in beta code and presented in XML, but thetexts themselves are the same; their current appearance remains theproduct of traditional, ‘manual’ philology. There are more recentexceptions which show a great of promise in using digital methods toadvance traditional textual analysis, however, so the trend is notubiquitous. Chief among them is Franco Moretti’s analysis of literarynetworks using what he refers to as ‘quantitative’ means; in the processfemale characters come to the fore and their role in broader plotsbecomes much clearer (Moretti, 2011; 2013). While this is certainly agreat step forward, much more work needs to be done.

The same can equally be said of more material culture­themedresources. The catalogues of the British Museum, the Louvre, theAshmolean, to name but a few, are all available on the Internet in fully­searchable form, complete with descriptions, citations, and photographs[2]. But on a processual level these represent little more than digitizedversions of their print predecessors: the method and criteria forcataloguing have remained the same, only the manner of presentationand dissemination have shifted in the digital era.

The pattern reappears among compendia of secondary sources. TheAncient History Encyclopaedia, Livius, along with for­profit scholarlyventures like Brill’s New Pauly, The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of AncientHistory, and the Oxford Encyclopaedia of Ancient Greece and Rome havecreated digital platforms that vary in their utility and clarity, but all havean online component [3]. The articles are presented on the Web; they aresearchable to some extent, and linked to one another. Yet the articlesthemselves are still the product of traditional classical scholarship, thework of individual researchers that has been compiled and edited in apublication process that is essentially unchanged from that whichproduced the nineteenth and twentieth century Pauly Wissowa. In format,structure, content, and revision they are still the product of workflows andprocesses that predate the digital age.

All of the above, I should note, are simply Web sites which communicateand disseminate classical scholarship, and in this sense they act more asdigital transmitters for ‘traditional scholarship’. There are, of course,dozens of technology­driven projects and for a complete listing I refer thereader to the Digital Classicist Wiki’s ‘Projects’ page(https://wiki.digitalclassicist.org/Category:Projects). However I wish tosingle out a few that I find particularly noteworthy in the context of ourcurrent discussion by virtue of their incorporation of technology­drivenresearch.

The ORBIS mapping project by Stanford (http://orbis.stanford.edu/)creates a geospatial network model of the Roman imperial world and bycombining otherwise isolated sets of archaeological, literary, andgeographical data it permits the calculation of travel times, distances, andcosts that would otherwise elude us. This is technology­driven analysis inthe purest sense, as no such calculation or extrapolation would bepossible without these databases and the computing power that supportsthem. Epigraphy has greatly benefited from collaborative techniquesinvolving XML (Tupman, 2010), and the EDUCE Project allows for thedigital reconstruction of carbonized papyri and analysis of their texts(Terras, 2010). In the same vein as other similar projects for the Romanand Greek worlds, the Persepolis 3D project (http://persepolis3d.com/)spearheaded by Kourosh Afhami, Wolfgang Gambke, and Sheda Vasseghicombines archaeological, geographical, and historical data into a three­dimensional reconstruction of the Achaemenid palace complex. Bynavigating the digital reconstruction in 3­D, various architectural features,organizational traits, and quirks of the site come to the notice thatotherwise would have remained invisible.

Despite these instances, the generalization still holds. The most popularand widely accessed digital classics resources are pages that presentstatic content, with little update or variation save for cosmeticmodifications to page display and code updates. Their value andpopularity, of course, lie in how they facilitate research by providing itsprimary source components with open­access convenience and easyintegration with other relevant materials. The content itself, however, ismostly unchanged from its print predecessors, as are the methods of the

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research. Human­generated research still predominates, as do traditionalmethods of classical philology and ancient history, and only themechanism by which such research is presented has been radicallyaltered in the past two decades. There is perhaps some broader dangerin this for the study of ancient gender: these resources which digitizeolder forms of scholarship serve to reproduce older patriarchal powerstructures and male dominated avenues of research, while newerdevelopments in the study of ancient women have yet to be disseminatedwith such access or prevalence. Most of these resources, in turn, simplyreproduce static print scholarship in hypertext or PDF. In 2010, Bodardand Mahony — along with Stuart Dunn — noted that the popular field ofneogeography has been accompanied by relatively little consideration ofthe broader Web 2.0 context of user accessibility, dynamic contribution,ease of update, and synthesis of data (Bodard and Mahony, 2010; Dunn,2010). Three years later, this call to arms has begun to be answered witha variety of projects that are generating research in new and dynamicways — for a more complete list of these I refer again to the DigitalClassicist Wiki (http://wiki.digitalclassicist.org/Main_Page) and the variousprojects discussed by Dunn and Mahony (2013). Elsewhere, there arestrides being taken in the right direction by projects that continue to bepresented at the Digital Classicist Seminars in London and Berlin, as wellas the eHumanities series in Leipzig(http://www.digitalclassicist.org/wip/).

But when we take a more panoptic view of classics in the digital realm,the generalization as yet holds: Web 2.0 functionality, the potential foruser­driven content and dynamic methods of analysis, have not beenimplemented or exploited by the most prominent players in the game;they remain rather monolithic. Digital technology has becomeinstrumental in the communication of this research, but not its production.In short, methodological innovation has not kept pace with rapidlyevolving means of presenting classical research over the past generation.

Problem II: Where are the women?

The second general problem revolves more around content than themechanical issue I have described above. Since the earliest days of thedigital era, commentators have observed that the masculine tends tomonopolize the digital space, and dominates even discussions thatrevolve around specifically female questions and issues (Kramarae andTaylor, 1993; Herring, 1996; more recently in Green and Adam, 2001).Although the online gender divide is gradually eroding (Foka andArvidsson, 2014; Dean and Laidler, 2013), the imbalance still persists —and this is certainly the case in digital classics. The majority of the mostpopular digital resources for the study of the ancient world are skewedalmost exclusively towards masculine subjects, particularly thecompendia sites that I have mentioned above. Great steps are beingtaken in certain corners of digital classics which are not gendered at all —archaeological reconstructions, 3­D modelling, the aforementioned ORBISproject — but the same cannot be said of the most frequently accessedresources. In these, male subjects dominate in nearly every arena, fromliterature to biography and art, and in general such online platformsprovide information on the traditional ‘big man’ narratives of ancienthistory that the scholarly discipline has generally moved beyond in favourof more nuanced, diverse approaches. The observation, though simple,nonetheless requires elaboration.

By the ‘big man’ narratives of ancient history, I refer to the generalfixation on prominent male leaders, generals, warriors, and politiciansthat dominated the field of ancient history since the nineteenth century.Battles, policies, confrontations, political decisions wrought and fought byancient men were typically considered to be the most worthy subjects ofstudy, but since the cultural and gender turn of the 1970s and 1980s thegeneral focus of ancient history has been substantially broadened. Thestudies of Pomeroy (1995; 2002), Fantham, et al. (1994), as well as morerecent reconsiderations by Foka (2014) and Richlin (2014), among agreat many others, have led to the proliferation of studies dedicated toancient women — and gender more broadly — that has left an indeliblemark on the profession as a whole.

Digital resources have not been so quick to catch up. Particularly amongopen access, generally non­scholarly online resources, thepreponderance of male subjects is striking. In the Ancient HistoryEncyclopedia, for instance, there is an article on Justinian, but not onTheodora; Cleopatra VII is the only Cleopatra to be given an article, andthere is no entry for ‘women’ in general [4]. Nonetheless, articles onAlcibiades, Sargon II, or the Caesars are long and elaborate — Artemisiaof Halicarnassus seems to be the only figure who bucks the trend, and

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this is likely thanks to her appearance in the second 300 film [5]. TheLivius project does a somewhat better job of incorporating articles aboutancient women, but the balance of entries nonetheless tilts towards malesubjects. The same can also be said of Wikipedia. There is, as yet, nocategory devoted to ‘women’ or ‘gender’ in the ancient world. Publicationsthat are intended for a scholarly audience have, admittedly, been eagerto add entries for various female subjects in recent years, but theseremain inaccessible to the average user because of the prohibitive costinvolved.

In the realm of literature and philology, female subjects remain absent —though we must concede that this must be more the product of oursource limitations than any conscious scholarly bias. Women were, Iought to highlight, for the most part invisible in the ancient world,particularly among our (almost exclusively male) ancient authors onwhich we must base much of our analysis. But thanks to the efforts of thescholars I have cited above, this invisibility has been overcome inmainstream scholarship and it would seem odd that this has not yetmanifested itself in our digital resources that reach an exponentiallylarger audience. This is not meant to be an indictment, merely anobservation that ought to be made: Digital classics remains anoverwhelmingly male corner of cyberspace in the most purelyquantitative terms. Regardless of the intention of the end­user, thecorpus of digital classics scholarship is weighed heavily towards malesubjects: there are simply more articles, more resources, and easierways of accessing information and research about men in antiquity thanabout their female counterparts. The much broader character of therelationship between gender and the digital realm is outside the scope ofthis article, and to make the subject manageable we must treat theimbalance in simple terms of quantity and accessibility.

The few exceptions to this general trend, unfortunately, give little causefor enthusiasm. The scarce digital resources for the study of ancientwomen that I have been able to find are decidedly lacklustre. The aptlyentitled Web site womenintheancientworld.com, for instance, was lastupdated in 2010 and features no images, links, or any sense of academicrigour. Broad — often unsound — generalizations abound that likely do asmuch harm as good. The more scholarly­oriented Diotima project(http://www.stoa.org/diotima/), last updated on 7 April 2011, has anadmirable anthology of primary sources, syllabi, even suggested readingsbut is mired by a dense and inaccessible format. While perhaps quiteuseful for the lecturer putting together a course outline, the compendiumwould hold little interest to the general public — and in the Web 2.0 agesuch a static, outdated site is quickly glossed over by search enginespiders and end users alike. Swathes of broken links only compound theproblem.

I do not mean to adopt an overly accusatory tone towards the generalcorpus of digital classics that has generally brought only immeasurablebenefit, only advance observations that might aid in its betterment. Thelack of ancient evidence for ancient women is constraining, yes, but notto the point of impossibility, as so many recent gender studies haveproven. To what extent we can blame the ‘masculine’ bias of the Internet,or the interests and expectations of society writ large, is, in equal parts,unclear and irrelevant. As cyberspace evolves to allow ‘previouslymarginalized groups to participate in the digital mainstream,’ so tooshould it evolve — or be pushed towards — the presentation ofmarginalized groups, in the present as in the ancient past.

Solution I: Equalize

Thus far this paper has been dominated by a negative tone, but all is notnecessarily cause for doom, gloom, and resigned bitterness. In theinterest of righting the gender imbalance in digital classics, I propose twosolutions and an accompanying methodology. One is far morestraightforward than the other, though both are aimed towards rectifyingthe two problems that I have discussed above. The first solution is simplyto equalize the amount of content relating to ancient women on existingopen access platforms, and involves only adding to existing frameworksrather than re­inventing the wheel.

The article portions of the Ancient History Encyclopedia, Livius, or anynumber of similar digital resources could be balanced by the inclusion ofentries on prominent women — wives, queens, empresses, and the like —whose careers have been the subject of so much recent scholarlyactivity. Given that there are full­length biographical treatments of ClodiaMetelli (Skinner, 2011), Arsinoë II (Carney, 2013), or Berenice (Clayman,2013), to name but a few, it would not be a burdensome endeavour to

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add concurrent biographical entries on Wikipedia or other encyclopaedicsites. The research is already extant and of high quality; it would simplyneed to be distilled and added to current resources. The inclusion of thefemale counterparts to male rulers would do well to increase theirprominence and visibility in already popular open access platforms, andprovide the end user with a more balanced perspective that they lack atpresent. If universities and departments were disposed towards assigningthe composition of such articles as projects to advanced undergraduatesor graduate students, so much the better, and the process would becompleted far more quickly. Unfortunately not all academic institutionsare so accommodating to ‘unconventional’ methods of assessment.

The equalization of the gender balance in prosopographical sites issomething that I have begun to undertake in my own research, namelywith the Seleucid Genealogies project (http://www.seleucid­genealogy.com). In the process it has increasingly come to my attentionthat detailed biographical entries regarding ancient women are theexception rather than the rule, and analytics data has shown that sucharticles are among the most popular pages on the site. More users, forinstance, tend to visit pages about female members of the dynasty —Apama of Cyrene, Antiochis of Cappadocia, etc. — than their perhapsmore prominent male counterparts. Admittedly my own project is modestin size, scope, and impact, but nonetheless the pattern should in alllikelihood persist at scale. There are similar steps being taken in otherendeavours of much more ambitious scope: the newly formed SNAPproject — ‘Standards for Networking Ancient Prosopographies’ — hasreceived AHRC funding and aims to unite and integrate otherwisedisparate resources for ancient biographies and personal names(http://snapdrgn.net/). Though still in progress, endeavours such as thisshow a great deal of promise for bringing otherwise isolated attestationsof ancient women to the fore, and promoting their digital visibility.

In order to round out socioeconomic and gender considerations, broaderentries discussing the more general place of ancient women in variouscontexts — Greek, Roman, Near Eastern, etc. — would provide a morebalanced thematic overview of ancient gender. Moving away from simplenames, dates, and careers and towards a more theoretical description ofgender in antiquity would draw our focus away from the elite and towardsthe common. Again, none of this would require any sort of technologicalinnovation or even structural addition; simply build on what is alreadythere.

This aspect of the solution, in essence, is delightfully simple: add to thefemale in order to counterbalance the male, and in the process we regainsight of otherwise invisible ancient women.

Solution II: Innovate

While such an equalization of extant scholarly materials would makegreat strides towards righting the gender imbalance in digital classics, itwould still not rectify the other predominant issue with the digital classicsstatus quo: a lack of technology­generated research. As I havementioned above, classicists have taken great advantage of the internet’sability to communicate and disseminate knowledge but have not been soquick to capitalize on its potential for methodological innovation; thediscipline has remained fairly set in its ways and it is only in recent yearsthat we have begun to see new initiatives take form. This slow processneed not necessarily be the case, and researchers in similar fields havebeen very effective in employing digital methods of data collation andanalysis in the consideration of ‘traditional’ questions of social history.

I take the Swedish context as an illustrative case study for themethodological benefits of incorporating quantitative analysis of digitizeddata. Numerous large­scale projects have emerged in the past decade,among them the Demographic Database (DDB) spearheaded by UmeåUniversity which makes detailed parish registers from the eighteenth andnineteenth century available to an international audience. (Vikström, etal., 2002). The DDB has not simply been of interest to demographers andstatisticians, but has been indispensable in ostensibly non­quantitativedomains of research like psychology, cultural geography, medicine, andsocial history. (Nygren, et al., 2014). The same can be said of the searchengine SHiPs, linked to the Swedish Tabellverket Database, whichvisualizes population and demographic data using GIS technology.Diverse publications have emerged from such technology­driven analysisthat have now informed debates regarding women in the job market(Nygren, et al., 2014), birth control (Edvinsson and Kling, 2010), and thelasting impact of crime (Vikström, 2011).

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Although the data for ancient history is of course an altogether differentbeast, this does not automatically exclude the possibility that suchmethodologies could be equally effective for the study of antiquity. Quitethe opposite: I argue that by adopting this technology­driven approach ofdiverse data and applying it to the study of ancient women, we can in nosmall measure negate their traditional obscurity in the ancient sourcerecord and previously invisible figures and trends will come to light. Allthe while, such an approach would serve to right the imbalance in digitalclassics with an innovative methodology.

I take as my inspiration here the Major Collaborative Research Initiative(hereafter MCRI) spearheaded by McGill University’s Indian Ocean WorldCentre (http://indianoceanworldcentre.com/mcri). Though not the onlyproject of its kind, it nonetheless provides a fitting avenue for exploringthis potential applicability of such technologies to the ancient world. TheMCRI unites 37 researchers divided into nine teams at institutions acrossthe world with the aim of exploring the rise and development of the firstglobal economy in the context of human­environment interaction.Inspired by the analytical approach of Fernand Braudel and the Frenchaprès­guerre tradition, the project seeks to expand traditional state­and­society based frameworks to include the environment as a formativeinfluence on social and material culture.

But it is how the MCRI goes about accomplishing this ambitious task thatis of the most interest of us. Each of the project’s teams digitizes andinputs a truly vast variety of data, including everything frommeteorological patterns, crop harvests, and migratory routes to traderoutes, political developments, and market analysis. The data is thencompiled into a GIS database that allows for the analysis of the spatialand temporal relation of such seemingly separate sets of data, and thusthe impact of one on the other. In the process, fascinating socialnetworks emerge, the influence of a drought in East Africa on traderoutes in the South China Sea suddenly becomes conspicuous, andvectors of influence and interrelation that would have otherwise remainedimperceptible can be effective glimpsed and analysed [6].

When such a methodology is applied at scale throughout the entirety ofthe Indian Ocean world stretching from East Africa to China and Indiaacross a chronological span of the first centuries B.C.E to the presentday, the project’s research potential becomes staggering. Theconsideration of otherwise isolated sets of data in relation to each other,the inclusion of patterns and influences that are usually discounted ordismissed, and the synthesis of seemingly disparate scholarly approachesinto one GIS­driven project has an intriguing potential for sundry otherfields in history and beyond.

The technology­driven approach of the MCRI project and those like it dowonders to overcome the barriers and limitations of fragmentary sourcematerial, and in the process fills or glosses over evidentiary gaps.Researchers at Nipissing University have begun to do precisely this withtheir Ancient History GeoVisage project, and while the endeavour is still inits infancy, its approach nevertheless holds great promise for the digitalstudy of ancient women. The Pelagios Project is likewise highly appealingin this regard, and perhaps could provide the sort of meta­platform thatwould facilitate such data synthesis (http://pelagios­project.blogspot.ca/).In any eventuality, the method seems particularly promising with regardsto increasing the digital visibility of ancient women.

I must note, however, that GIS is not an unequivocal solution for digitalclassics, and poses no lack of problems in and of itself for the study ofantiquity. Its benefits are patent, and the inclusion of a spatial dimensionto the study of antiquity aids greatly in correlating otherwise disparatesets of data. As Bodenhammer aptly sums up, by “locating historical andcultural exegesis more explicitly in space and time ... [GIS] findspatterns, facilitates comparisons, enhances perspectives, and illustratesdata” [7]. Such is certainly true of more contemporary quantitative datasets, but when it comes to the integration of literary and archaeologicalmaterial the approach becomes somewhat more complicated. GIS is,unfortunately for antiquity, poor at handling and integrating incomplete orfragmentary sets of data — not to mention the disparate data sets thatplague so many corners of the ancient world — and thus the nature ofevidence becomes troubling (Gregory and Healey, 2007). While issues doarise when applied in the context of antiquity, these are notinsurmountable — if anything they underscore the amount of work thatremains to be done. In the end, though, GIS remains promising even inthe perilously fragmentary realm of the Hellenistic world. It is certainlyworth a try.

The approach has already worked on a small scale and in a specificcontext. A project that I undertook in collaboration with MonicaDrsquo;Agostini sought to reconstruct the family tree of a regional clientdynasty of the Seleucid Empire in third century B.C. Asia Minor as part of

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the broader genealogical research to which I have already alluded(http://seleucid­genealogy.com/Achaeus.html). An already thin sourcerecord for the region is particularly sparse for this family, andnecessitated somewhat different methods in order to fill theprosopographical gaps — particularly when it came to the women of thedynasty. Pen and paper were too conventionally limiting for such aproject and, as ever with genealogical research, the spatial freedom andflexibility provided by the digital work environment proved indispensable.Possible combinations, interrelations, and vectors of descent can be laidout with a facility that allows for ease of experimentation.

Despite the utility of the digital environment for formulating such astemma, one glaring gap still remained: who was the matriarch, the firstprominent woman of the dynasty? On the surface, and according totraditional analysis and sources, she did not exist: we were provided withno name, no literary reference, no inscription, and no trace of herpassage on the Anatolian stage. Yet by deduction we know that she hadto exist. With the digital stemma we could clearly see that she hadproduced several children for whom we knew the attested father, andeven though she was not attested, she must have still existed. But whowas she?

The answer lay in the combination of two vastly different data sets thatare almost never considered in relation to one another, but neverthelessshare an interrelation that becomes conspicuous when working in thedigital environment. The first: onomastics. Glancing at the stemma as ithad been digitally reconstructed in all of its complexity brought aninteresting pattern to the fore: while the men of the family had variousnames, some of which were dynastic, the female members of the familyall had only one of two names — Laodike or Antiochis. Both, as ithappens, are female dynastic names of the family’s more prominentroyal overlords, the Seleucid dynasty, and thus carry something of aroyal trademark.

Comparing these names and this pattern to the rest of the empire’sbroader family tree proved equally revelatory (McAuley and d’Agostini,2013). Every other sub­dynasty which had the same pattern of femalenames shared one thing in common: a princess of the main dynasty hadmarried into each, as both a token of the royal house’s appreciation anda recognition of their fealty. In the following generations after theseprincesses married into the client dynasties, the same naming patternemerges: every subsequent female in these families has one of the twodynastic names that we saw in our mysterious Anatolian family. Fromexamining the entirety of the Empire’s genealogy and descent —something which is only possible in the digital environment — theconclusion thus became clear: our shadowy family in Asia Minor musthave also received such a princess in marriage, and thus we werebrought a step closer to discovering her identity [8].

The Empire’s geography, almost never considered in relation to suchquestions of genealogy, lent credence to this idea as well (McAuley,2011). Inspired by the IOWC’s approach and the potential of GIStechniques, I mapped the spatial dimension of such dynastic marriages inthe hope of revealing the connection between dynasty and territory. Theresults were again enlightening, and the structure of this Empire becameconspicuous: every region or territory which had sworn itself to theSeleucids had been given a princess in marriage in a very feudal pattern.When all of this is seen on a map, it becomes clear that the entirety ofthe empire adheres to this feudal pattern of intermarriage and allegianceacross all of its diverse regions, stretching from modern day Uzbekistanand Afghanistan to Turkey and the Levant coast. Every region, that is,except precisely where we began: southern Asia Minor, the realm of ourmysterious family which lacked a matriarch. Given that every otherregion of the map had a dynastic tie, why should we think that this part ofAsia Minor would be an exception?

So through a combination of GIS mapping, a prosopographical database,and onomastic analysis a firm conclusion emerged: the mysteriousmatriarch of the family must have been part of a dynastic marriage, andthus she must have been a princess — either a daughter or sister of thereigning king. Her marriage must have conformed to the samemechanism of feudal intermarriage seen in every other corner of theempire (Engels, 2011). The names of all of her subsequent daughters andgranddaughters further reveal her to be of royal status, and thus clearlyof the overlord Seleucid dynasty. Her age and the relative timing of hermarriage were accordingly extrapolated from the attested dates for herchildren and husband. Perhaps we could even hazard a guess at hername — Laodike — given her family’s trend in that generation.

It is remarkable, using this synthetic and technology­driven approach,how much about this one ancient woman can be gleaned from essentiallynothing. With no direct attestation of her life or her career, we are

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nonetheless able to safely conclude that she was a Seleucid princess, thatshe was married to a prominent general and loyal servant of her fatheror brother, that she resided in Asia Minor as the prominent matriarch ofan emerging dynasty, and that she passed on her family’s traditionalnames to her children in a manner that broadcast her own status. Herlifespan, career, relationships, issue, and even some glimpse of hersymbolic prominence would otherwise have been either invisible ornebulous.

What is to say that this approach could not be replicated at scale in anyother corner of the ancient world, or indeed other time periods? Althoughthis is the isolated case of one ancient woman in what is admittedly anobscure corner of an obscure period of antiquity, if it worked in her case,it could certainly work elsewhere. This methodology, in this smallinstance, allowed us to identify and describe an ancient woman for whomwe have no concrete record, and in the process her absence from theancient source record has been overcome by extrapolation and syntheticanalysis. If the same approach were taken for much larger areas, andmuch larger periods of time — provinces of the Roman Empire, the otherHellenistic kingdoms, the states and leagues of the classical period, or thesatrapies of the Achaemenid Empire — the prospect of recovering the losttraces of numerous ancient women becomes tantalizing. By placing thesocial networks, dynastic marriages, relations and descent of thesewomen in their spatial and temporal context then the whole of theevidence becomes far greater than the sum of its parts. In the process,technology could drive analysis towards overcoming the constraints ofour source material, and thereby equalize a prominent imbalance incurrent scholarship.

Conclusions

In the midst of the on­going debate regarding the relation of gender tothe Internet, and in which precise direction this relationship is heading,the realm of digital classics seems to reflect the character of its ancientsource material. Ancient women are superficially invisible in our ancientevidence, and as a consequence they have a decidedly humble presencein our digital resources. The most prominent digital resources for thestudy of antiquity tend towards the masculine; male subjects of studypredominate, and the study of ancient women has yet to enjoy the samedigital prominence. Articles on women are conspicuously absent, evenamidst the proliferation of large­scale encyclopaedic resources and morenarrowly focussed scholarly research projects. Such is particularly thecase among open access Web sites intended for a general audience,which tend to reflect the masculine preoccupations of an earlier period ofclassical scholarship. The Internet has not yet caught up to the scholarlycommunity; the latter is perhaps more so the fault of the former than theinverse.

While the expanding prevalence of open access classical materialsavailable in cyberspace has done wonders for the promotion of classicalstudies to a popular audience, there is still work to be done. In a sense,the digital classics community is halfway there: the communicativepotential of the Internet has been well realised and utilised, but not theproductive potential of digital methods of conducting research into theancient world. The seeds of change are, however, beginning to germinatein a variety of labs and projects that gives due cause for optimism. As wehave learned from early forays, it is greatly beneficial to begin producing,rather than simply disseminating, classical research in the digitalenvironment. Various projects are now coming to fruition, as highlightedin many of the resources which I have discussed above, but these do notyet have the impact or popularity of more conventional digital resourcesfor the study of antiquity.

This need not be the case, and again I do not intend the abovecommentary to be a scathing indictment of a systematic failure ofacademics. Rather I simply hope to bring a trend that has lain unnoticedthe fore and take a moment to pause and reflect on the current state ofdigital affairs. The solutions, as I see them, are both enticing andlucrative. Equalizing the amount of scholarly material dedicated to ancientwomen and gender would be a straightforward task that would notrequire vast implementation of new technologies and approaches. It issimply a matter of adding to what is already there and rounding out thealready­impressive slate of subjects. Doing so would bring the openaccess classical resources closer to the scholarly bar set by moreexclusive, for­profit ventures. At the risk of sounding overly idealistic, itwould seem that the resources of the study of the ancient world that havethe largest audience impact ought to be of the same balanced standardas those which academics circulate amongst themselves in closed

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isolation.

At the same time, there is room for innovation: the application of GIStechnologies and Web 2.0 functionality in research processes — not justresearch outcomes — is ripe with potential as means by which toovercome the inherent limitations of ancient source material for the studyof women and gender. A synthetic methodology, characterized by thecombination of disparate sets of data into new platforms and databases,freed of the constraints of paper and liberated from more narrowscholarly confines, allows a vastly different set of patterns to comeforward. None of this is without its methodological or technical difficulty,but in the process of its application, technology drives research, and theline between quantitative and qualitative analysis is blurred in a mannerthat overcomes the deficiencies of both. All the while, the fog thatobscures our understanding of ancient gender as much as its moderncounterpart in the digital age is burned away as it comes to be seen in adifferent light.

About the author

After working as the Director of Sales for a Montreal­based Web andgraphic design firm, Alex McAuley then dove into the world of academiawith a Master’s in classics at the University of Edinburgh, before returningto Quebec to pursue his Ph.D. in ancient history at McGill University.Apart from his principal research interest of ethnicity and pluralism in theHellenistic world, he is the primary author and editor of the ongoingSeleucid Genealogy project (http://www.seleucid­genealogy.com), andhas several published and forthcoming articles in the fields of Seleuciddynastic history, Hellenistic royal women, Greek federalism, and thereception of the ancient world in film and television series.E­mail: alexander [dot] mcauley [at] mail [dot] mcgill [dot] ca

Notes

1. The Classics Department of Williams College has compiled anadmirable list of links to various other resources available athttp://classics.williams.edu/resources/online­resources­2/.

2. For the British Museum Collection:https://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/search.aspx;for the Louvre: http://www.louvre.fr/en/departements; AshmoleanMuseum: http://www.ashmolean.org/collections/online/. These are onlythree examples among many.

3. Brill’s New Pauly project:http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/browse/brill­s­new­pauly; BlackwellEncyclopaedia of Ancient History:http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/book/10.1002/9781444338386; OxfordEncyclopaedia of Ancient Greece and Rome:http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780195170726.001.0001/acref­9780195170726.

4. Ancient History Encyclopaedia entry ‘Cleopatra VII:’http://www.ancient.eu.com/Cleopatra_VII/.

5. Ancient History Encyclopaedia entry ‘Artimisia I of Caria:’http://www.ancient.eu.com/Artemisia_I_of_Caria/. Livius’ entries onwomen tend to be more robust, for instance the listing of severalCleopatrai: http://www.google.com/cse?cx=000714590587527494598%3A0sc8p7o4i5s&q=Cleopatra&sa=Search&cof=FORID%3A0#gsc.tab=0&gsc.q=Cleopatra&gsc.page=1

6. I owe my thanks to Prof. Gwyn Campbell and Mr. Carl Hughes of theIOWC for the kind insight, correspondence, and screenshots of theproject they were generous enough to provide.

7. Bodenhamer, 2010, p. 28.

8. A full treatment of the House of Achaeus and the rationale explainedhere in superficial detail will soon be published in K. Erickson (editor).War within the family: A reassessment of the first half­century of SeleucidRule. Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, c. 2015. At the moment, ashorter account is provided at http://seleucid­genealogy.com/Achaeus_the_Elder.html.

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Editorial history

Received 3 March 2015; accepted 24 March 2015.

This paper is in the Public Domain.

Seeing through the fog: Digital problems and solutions for studyingancient womenby Alex McAuley.First Monday, Volume 20, Number 4 ­ 6 April 2015http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/5467/4429doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5210/fm.v20i4.5467

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