Google has set up a new Digital Humanities Research Program which recently granted funding towards a project that will make ancient texts easier to locate and access online.
The project will be entitled the Google Ancient Places (GAP), and will be led by Leif Isaksen of the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science, Dr. Elton Barker from The Open University and Dr. Eric Kansa of the University of California-Berkeley. This project is one of twelve different projects to share a total of $497,000 in awards from Google.
The GAP project will make possible searching within Google Books to find content related to a geographic location and within a particular timeframe. Search results would then be visible using GoogleMaps or GoogleEarth.
“We are very excited about the potential of this project,” Leif Isaksen said. “Up to now many ancient texts have been accessible only at elite institutions or have been very hard to find; now a much wider range of people will be able to discover them. This work will really help open up the field and lead to many further projects.”
(To read the full article, please go to http://www.bib-arch.org).