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  • 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 have Claude

    And just now I am watching I, Claudius.

  • Since you are using LLMs to create the transcriptions, I wonder whether you've measured the difference in precision between the chosen model, Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite, and newer/larger models such as Gemini 3.5 Flash, Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite or GPT5.5.

    I've read the README in the feat-api branch and, from what I understand, you've already assessed that false negatives are not a model failure, but I'm not sure I understand why (haven't spent that much time looking at it though, just curious to hear from you).

    This is a really cool project, by the way! In my opinion this is a place where LLMs shine: produce the work of hundreds of hours of manual human labor much quicker and cheaper, for something that no one else would ever bother to do the work!

  • Couple of videos from the Roman Society recently, connecting landscapes and Latin epistolography, which may be of interest to those enjoying this map:

    https://youtu.be/9aBxIRCGkl4?si=Dh5P6_NGzSasBG_1

    https://youtu.be/nxCNrTYQ_ys?si=ngWa94p2KQdri_Fz

    by thom
  • 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. I'd like to explore it, but I'm getting a lot of "page unresponsive" and I can't tell if it's a back-end server being swamped, or if it's something else.

    My son just graduated with a double major in classics and molecular biology (doing informatics work), so maybe he could help! lol

  • Hi, I'm an actual classicist (phd and all), if you wanted to throw any questions my way.
  • 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.

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