Mapping Homer's Catalogue of Ships

This article provides a brief description of Mapping the Catalogue of Ships, which maps the towns and contingents of Homer's Catalogue of Ships, analyzing the poet's knowledge and use of ancient Greek geography. We offer a brief account of the questions that drive our research, detail our novel method to analyze Homer's poetry in terms of geospatial organization, and summarize the geospatial organizational principles that we have discovered. We discuss the necessity of a digital format to our research and the presentation of our argument, which requires simultaneous attention to literary, geographical, archival, and bibliographical material. The article also details the Neatline (neatline.org) platform that allows us to achieve these goals. We end with outlining future directions for our research and user interface.