Home About Team Blog GIS

The digital Periegesis

tracing the places of ancient Greece and the stories associated with them

The research team

Anna Foka is Scientific Leader of the Digital Humanities Initiative at the Institute for Archives, Museums and Libraries (ABM) Uppsala University, and Associate Professor in Information Technology and the Humanities at Humlab, Umeå University, Sweden. She has a background in Classics, Ancient History and Archaeology (MA 2006, PhD 2009, University of Liverpool) as well as Media and Performance Studies (NCU Athens, Greece). Anna’s research interests lie in the intersection of digital technology with historical disciplines. She has published on classics, ancient history and archaeology, gender and humour, classical reception, game studies, augmented and virtual reality for museums, digital visualizations and geography.

Anna Foka


Elton Barker

Elton Barker is a Reader in Classical Studies at The Open University. He has held research fellowships with the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Freie Universität Berlin; the University of Leipzig), the Alexander S. Onassis Foundation (the National Hellenic Research Foundation, Athens), TOPOI (Berlin), Venice International University, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and Wolfson College, Cambridge. Elton’s research interests cross generic and disciplinary boundaries, ranging from poetic rivalry in ancient Greek epic to representations of debate in epic, historiography and tragedy. Since 2008, he has been at the forefront of efforts to develop digital tools and methods for rethinking spatial understanding of the ancient world. As PI of the Hestia project, Elton led an interdisciplinary team that experimented with digital mapping as part of a far-reaching analysis into the spatial organisation of Herodotus’s Histories. As a winner of a Google Digital Humanities grant, he helped to pioneer Named-Entity Recogition of historical texts in the Google Books corpus. He is currently Community Director of Pelagios (now into its seventh phase of funding), which is establishing the digital and human infrastructure to connect together heterogeneous online resources by virtue of their common references to historical places.
O. Cenk Demiroglu is a researcher and lecturer at the Department of Geography at Umeå University and an Associate Professor of Tourism with the Turkish Interuniversity Council. His research is mainly focused on the interrelationships of climate change and ski tourism. Besides research, he has served as an expert to several destination development projects and teaches tourism and GIS related courses. He is an affiliated researcher with the Arctic Research Centre and Humlab at Umeå University.

O. Cenk Demiroglu


Brady Kiesling

Brady Kiesling is a historian, archaeologist, writer, and former U.S. diplomat living in Athens. His current major project is ToposText, a free mobile application indexing ancient primary sources to geolocated ancient places. A particular interest is ancient religion and its political and social role in Greek society. He has taken part in excavations in Greece (Corinth, Nemea, Zagora, Methone), Turkey (Aphrodisias), Spain, and Armenia. His favorite occupation is cycling in search of obscure archaeological sites.
Kyriaki Konstantinidou is a Senior Research Assistant at Humlab, Umeå University, Sweden. She has studied Classics at Nottingham, UK (PhD 2009), Cambridge, UK (MPhil 2003) and Thessaloniki, Greece (BA 2000) and held positions at Freie Universität (Berlin), Boğaziçi University (Istanbul), The Hellenic Open University, and The Open University of Cyprus. Her research interests include ancient Greek language and literature, ancient Greek religion, human and divine justice, space and identity, verbal acts and emotions. She first came into contact with digital humanities tools and methods through her participation, as a research student, in data analysis for the project “the Oath in Archaic and Classical Greece” (University of Nottingham, UK) — which involved constructing a digital database of all references to oaths in archaic and classical Greece. She has also been initiated into digital pedagogy through her teaching experience for the Hellenic Open University and The Open University of Cyprus. Through the project digital periegesis, she is gradually merging into digital text-based analysis.

Kyriaki Konstantinidou


Linda Talatas

Linda Talatas is a researcher in Archaeology, Ancient History and Digital Humanities, as well as a cultural travel writer. She has a background in Classics (MA) and holds a double PhD in Archaeology from the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and the University of Athens. Her research interests include animal studies, ancient Greek religion, gender, as well as the use of digital tools in the organization of spatial and social data. She is a dedicated excavator (Athenian Agora, Keros, Tinos-Xobourgo, Euromos) and an intrepid adventurer with a passion for ancient languages and theater. She spends most of her time in Greece, where she can often be found on-site lecturing for several academic institutions. She is an associate researcher at the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (UMR 7041 ArScAn) and an affiliated researcher at Humlab, Umeå University.
Nasrin Mostofian is a computational linguist (MA, 2017, Uppsala University) and a linguist with a background in teaching Persian as a second language (MA, 2013, Shahid Beheshti University). She studied Ancient Greek language in Tehran (2013) and modern Greek language and culture in the University of Ioannina in Greece under the IKY programme (2014-2015). Since her graduation from Uppsala University in 2017, she has been involved in computational linguistic projects in Sweden and abroad. She is currently working as a research assistant and annotator in the research project "the digital Periegesis" hosted by Humlab (Umeå University). She is based in Uppsala, Sweden and spends her free time learning and teaching languages and running.

Nasrin Mostofian

Contact: info@periegesis.org
@PeriegesisH