ToposText.org News

From Brady Kiesling

I'm very happy to report that PAVLA S.A. has pushed out #ToposTextupdates, for iOS (iPhone), Android, and the website. Please spread the word to your students or teachers, tour guides, and zealous travelers across the Mediterranean

 

No significant changes in the mobile app this time, just more (760) and cleaner ancient texts, more ancient places and museums (7539), improved Greek and Latin links, and Greek place descriptions enriched with more resources (EFA/BSA Chronique), and with bibliography for a number of underserved minor places borrowed from the Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis. Please find good wifi and download! If you've been following my bicycle rides, you'll know the ground-truthing is quixotically thorough for the Athens area, though more help is required to map every named antiquity in Spain or Ultima Thule...

The ToposText.org website has been substantially reengineered to be faster and cleaner. We've switched to OpenStreetMaps, and map navigation is much faster and clearer. We've added a new map layer capability, so far only to show Athens antiquities overlaid on Anavasi's nifty map.

 

Now, when cruising the place and person indexes, you instantly pull up the paragraph in question, and then decide whether you want to load the whole text (faster, but still slow for the longest texts). 

The proximity search feature continues to churn out serendipitous, frequently ominous, answers to almost any juxtaposition of words or concepts (try \bTrump\b with world).

 

And with the new API-based internal architecture, it's possible to query the site and extract for your own website or hypertext document, say as a pop-up text box, any paragraph from our ancient library. (Formatted as JSON and xml, which you will then want to parse somehow to make it pretty).

 

Generate a URL of the form https://topostext.org/api/paragraph/readParagraph.php… and you'll get Herodotus 5.6. (It helps to have the Canonical Text Service (TLG/PHI/Stoa) numbers to be sure what paragraph you're asking for).

 

But you can also find it by searching for a string of text you know the passage contains (with + filling spaces between words), such as https://topostext.org/api/paragraph/readParagraph.php…
and you'll get a passage from Plato's Phaedrus. Search for Athens and you'll get the first literary mention, Homer's Iliad 2.546ff).

Thanks as always to the Aikaterini Laskaridis Foundation for its support, and to the smart people at PAVLA who keep improving reality to match the dream.