It also exemplifies an increasingly popular mode of scholarly communication: the published online object. It is a tool that is both useful and reflexive, offering engagement with both process and product. ORBIS is a big step forward in designing digital scholarly objects for the digital humanities. These calculations take into account the time-of-year and usual weather, elevation changes between sites, fourteen modes of travel (ox cart, foot, army on march, camel caravan, etc.), river travel (including extra difficulty moving upstream), etc. As I mentioned earlier, the model works like Google Maps given two locations, it tells you the cheapest, shortest, or fastest route between them. The ORBIS model includes 751 sites covering about 4 million square miles of ancient space, including over 50,000 miles of road or desert tracks, nearly 20,000 miles of navigable rivers and canals, and almost 1,000 sea routes between sea ports. Rather than asking us to trust that their data are accurate, the makers revealed their model – their underlying argument – for critique and extension. They built an explicit model of the ancient world, taking into account roads and rivers, oceans and coastlines, weather and geographic features, various modes of transportation for civilian and military purposes, and put it all together so any researcher can sit down and figure out how long it would have taken, or how expensive it would have been, to travel between 751 locations in the ancient Roman world. It is a map that allows the user to engage in the process of map-making, and a presentation of a process that allows the user to make and explore in ways the initial creators could not have foreseen. Of course, as with any project there are a few rough edges and desired features, which I’ll get into further down below.Įlevation data to help model the difficulty in getting from one place to another.Īlong with the map, the Makers of this project (by which I mean authors, developers, data gatherers, …) present a fairly interactive documentary of the map-making process, including historical accounts, data sources, algorithmic explanations, visual aids, downloadable data, and a forthcoming API. ORBIS is among the first digital scholarly tools for the humanities (that I have encountered) that really lives up to the name “digital scholarly tool for the humanities.” Beyond being a simple tool, ORBIS is an explicit and transparent argument, a way of presenting research that also happens to allow, by its very existence, further research to be done. Walter Scheidel and Elijah Meeks could have posted the automated map portion of the site by itself, and it would have garnered deserving praise, but they went well beyond that goal they made a reflexive tool. Tool As Argumentīeyond being an exceptionally well-made and useful tool, it is not the tool itself which makes ORBIS stand out. I then highlight some of the cool features, and finally list some rough edges and desiderata for future iterations or similar projects.

The first section explains what I feel is the most important contribution of ORBIS to the Digital Humanities it is a reflexive tool that allows the humanist to engage with the process as well as the product. I was among the lucky few to see an early version of the tool, and after sending back an informal review, Elijah Meeks invited me to review the site publicly via my blog. It’s Google Maps for the ancient world, complete with the “Avoid Highways” feature.

The executive summary: given any two cities in the ancient world, it returns the fastest, cheapest, or shortest route between them, given the month, the mode of transportation, and various other options. ORBIS is many things but, most simply, it is an interface allowing researchers to experience the geography of the Roman world from an ancient perspective.

Orbis research reviews