I guess before I roll out questions and criticisms, I just want to say that this is a really cool project. I love it.
Could you make the dots smaller in the updated UI? I didn’t realize at first that you were using an actual map of Roman provinces.
My eyesight isn’t great and it would help if you used a political map rather than terrain. I’m not sure what’s out there for ancient Roman map tiles, though.
I’m not so much of an antiquity scholar AND I’m an American so my European geography isn’t perfect. It would be neat to be able to flip to a modern map, too, so I can see where things are in terms of modern landmarks.
You’re not getting a ton of comments so far, but FWIW these are the kinds of projects I come to HN for. I’ve been getting into opera lately and suddenly classical antiquity is very relevant to my interests. I’m going to keep this in my bookmarks, I’m finding the tangential historical stuff related to opera is drawing me in nearly as much as the music.
I’m also going to pass it on to an academic friend of mine who is working in an unrelated field but might find similar techniques useful.
Finally, when I first opened the map, I recognized the basic shape of the peak Roman Empire in the dots! I love when data does that kind of thing.
Thank you again for sharing this very cool project.
This is very cool! For the name extraction, how are you handling false positives across such a large dataset? I’m assuming there are mentions that could be a name but are actually just a noun. For example, Agricola being the word for farmer but also a name.
Very cool! Do you plan to share the final dataset? I've been working with geographic data all my life and I'm building a Carto/Felt alternative. Do you want to have your data their? It is https://cartografo.io/ There is a price tag, but I can host this dataset for free for you. I would love to have this map there to show case. If you are interested send an email, davi@cartografo.io.
If you just need some help improving your map I can help you as well.
I am hoping to push a few fixes to the new web interface later today, so if you looked at this and saw anything off, hopefully by COB today I will have the known issues fixed.
This is great. One little bit of UI feedback: the green map clusters when zoomed in quite a bit aren't very obvious on green backgrounds - they merge into the background features a bit (e.g. in the very west of Scotland).
This is really wonderful -- One thing that may be really cool if you have the data is to add a time-axis ability (unless I missed it) for a given location. This is such a delightful application of AI!
Love this. For people who aren’t familiar with Roman history, it would be great to have a short guided tour of how to explore the map. I filtered for 'pompeii' and it gave me 117 dots.
There's a lot of new roads being mapped in England. Interesting how the inscriptions on the map are often between roads, suggesting an unmapped pathway:
have there been any interesting revelations in understanding the history of the Roman Empire in the past 30 years? Newer manuscripts or artifacts discovered ?
I guess before I roll out questions and criticisms, I just want to say that this is a really cool project. I love it.
Could you make the dots smaller in the updated UI? I didn’t realize at first that you were using an actual map of Roman provinces.
My eyesight isn’t great and it would help if you used a political map rather than terrain. I’m not sure what’s out there for ancient Roman map tiles, though.
I’m not so much of an antiquity scholar AND I’m an American so my European geography isn’t perfect. It would be neat to be able to flip to a modern map, too, so I can see where things are in terms of modern landmarks.
You’re not getting a ton of comments so far, but FWIW these are the kinds of projects I come to HN for. I’ve been getting into opera lately and suddenly classical antiquity is very relevant to my interests. I’m going to keep this in my bookmarks, I’m finding the tangential historical stuff related to opera is drawing me in nearly as much as the music.
I’m also going to pass it on to an academic friend of mine who is working in an unrelated field but might find similar techniques useful.
Finally, when I first opened the map, I recognized the basic shape of the peak Roman Empire in the dots! I love when data does that kind of thing.
Thank you again for sharing this very cool project.
Hi, I'm an actual classicist (phd and all), if you wanted to throw any questions my way.
Yo. This is tuff. Curious tho, is your database free or did you have to scrape it from somewhere?
This is very cool! For the name extraction, how are you handling false positives across such a large dataset? I’m assuming there are mentions that could be a name but are actually just a noun. For example, Agricola being the word for farmer but also a name.
Very cool! Do you plan to share the final dataset? I've been working with geographic data all my life and I'm building a Carto/Felt alternative. Do you want to have your data their? It is https://cartografo.io/ There is a price tag, but I can host this dataset for free for you. I would love to have this map there to show case. If you are interested send an email, davi@cartografo.io. If you just need some help improving your map I can help you as well.
I am hoping to push a few fixes to the new web interface later today, so if you looked at this and saw anything off, hopefully by COB today I will have the known issues fixed.
This is great. One little bit of UI feedback: the green map clusters when zoomed in quite a bit aren't very obvious on green backgrounds - they merge into the background features a bit (e.g. in the very west of Scotland).
This is really wonderful -- One thing that may be really cool if you have the data is to add a time-axis ability (unless I missed it) for a given location. This is such a delightful application of AI!
Love this. For people who aren’t familiar with Roman history, it would be great to have a short guided tour of how to explore the map. I filtered for 'pompeii' and it gave me 117 dots.
> I have Claude
And just now I am watching I, Claudius.
Congrats to this great idea! Love it.
The ones around my place all use EDH, which also has a map feature, but not as intuitive as this! Reminds me of vici.org
Could you elaborate on the multi level LLM workflow? Did you set up a benchmark, and you're having a LLM mutate prompts?
Very nice. Are you using the roman roads which were also on HN a couple of weeks ago?
There's a lot of new roads being mapped in England. Interesting how the inscriptions on the map are often between roads, suggesting an unmapped pathway:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44622543
Great resource for baby names. And a great way to help students better understand historiography.
have there been any interesting revelations in understanding the history of the Roman Empire in the past 30 years? Newer manuscripts or artifacts discovered ?
Very nice idea but please, check the performance: I had to close the tab 3 seconds in because it got stuck and my CPU fan got noisy.
So I couldn't even check it out properly.