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- I am hoping to push a few fixes to the new web interface later today, so if you looked at this and saw anything off, hopefully by COB today I will have the known issues fixed.by metiscus
- And thank you to whomever flagged EDCS-31400647 and EDCS-21700214. The militia militia militia attribution was hilarious, wrong, and has been fixed.by metiscus
- On the Greek side this has been done, the Greek Lexicon of Personal Names is an effort to find all Greek names down to 600 CE. https://www.lgpn.ox.ac.uk/. You might want to try using that as the basis of your map.
In general the word 'prosopography' might be helpful for you. There's been lots of work over the centuries on analyzing large groups of people in antiquity.
by goldfishgold - The map is woefully inaccurate, because it depicts present-day topology.
See e.g. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ce/Peace_of...
From: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Atlas_of_European_history
by tosti - The map tiles themselves come from the Digital Atlas of the Roman Empire. Which you can find here.by metiscus
- This is really wonderful -- One thing that may be really cool if you have the data is to add a time-axis ability (unless I missed it) for a given location. This is such a delightful application of AI!by aspenmartin
- Yeah, I thought about that. The issue is that the date density is poor already and the ranges are pretty broad. Someday I'll give it a try, but the search interface can limit you to date ranges for now, so the infrastructure is all there.by metiscus
- 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.by daviTeodoro
- > I have Claude
And just now I am watching I, Claudius.
by yubblegum - Watching?
I just finished reading “I, Claudius” and “Cladius the God” this month. Didn’t know there was a series / movie, would you recommend it?
(I highly recommend the books FWIW, although I prefer the more modern writing style of the Cicero trilogy)
by Insanity - 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!
by doodlesdev - Couple of videos from the Roman Society recently, connecting landscapes and Latin epistolography, which may be of interest to those enjoying this map: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.
- So most inscriptions are somewhat formulary, and I provide examples to the llm to assist it to find the names. I also have a postprocess blacklist that removes some known cases where things slip through. It's never going to be 100% perfect but to my untrained eye, it seems to do okayish. Waiting on some professionals to cross check my data. If that is you, you can search and export the data in csv via the browse button.by metiscus
- 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
by busyant - Hi, I'm an actual classicist (phd and all), if you wanted to throw any questions my way.by cwnyth
- I've contacted a Professor in Europe who was doing research in this area and pointed him to the page. What I genuinely need is someone to spot check a few of the attributions. I can send you a list of the ones I think are the most likely to be good.
It looks like my auto-translation and summarization layer is hallucinating on this entry, but the extraction appears correct. I'll flag it for the next run.1. Laepoca / Laepocus — Piquentum, Venetia et Histria (1–50 AD) Three family members: two women (Laepoca Regilia, Laepoca Tuia) and a man (Metellus Laepocus). The nomen appears in both feminine and masculine forms in the same inscription, pointing to a genuine local gentilicium, likely of Istrian or Liburnian origin. https://new.roman-names.com/#edcs_id=EDCS-04200530
Here, the auto-translate and summary worked as intended. It does garble the dedication into the status.2. Tocernius — Eraclea Veneta, Venetia et Histria (3rd c. AD) Father (C. Tocernius Hermeros) and son (C. Tocernius Maximianus), the latter a soldier of Legio II Italica. Probably a Venetic name surviving into the imperial period. https://new.roman-names.com/#edcs_id=EDCS-04200461
The auto-translate and summary layers do not make this error, only the name extraction layer does. I have flagged the entry and am diagnosing it.3. Laulenia — Thibilis, Numidia Two sisters, Laulenia Matrona and Laulenia Naxina, daughters of the same Marcus. The name looks Berber/Numidian in origin. (I should note that our pipeline transcribed the nomen as Lauzenia — the raw EDCS text reads Laulenia, which is probably the correct form.) https://new.roman-names.com/#edcs_id=EDCS-13500401
Here there is an issue where I think in the processing for the web I am feeding interpreted text into the raw extraction field as my displayed raw text seems to be expanded from EDCS. Mine: Caius Kanulanius Eumitus vivus fecit sibi et Nansiniae Verecundae coniugi et Caio Kanulanio Nepoti filio militi alae III Thracum annorum XXV stipendiorum VI loco et impensa Anni Festi4. Kanulanius / Nansinia — Flavia Solva, Noricum Father (C. Kanulanius Eumitus) and son (C. Kanulanius Nepos, a soldier of Ala III Thracum). The K-spelling may reflect local Celtic orthographic convention. The wife's nomen, Nansinia, also appears unattested in standard sources and may be a second find in the same inscription. https://new.roman-names.com/#edcs_id=EDCS-14500644EDCS:
C(aius) Kanulani/us Eumitus / v(ivus) f(ecit) sibi et / Nansiniae / Verecundae con(iugi) / et C(aio) Kanulanio / Nepoti f(ilio) mil(iti) alae III / Thrac(um) an(norum) XXV stip(endiorum) VI / loco et impensa / Anni Festi
by metiscus - 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.
by jnovek - The actual code is here https://github.com/metiscus/roman-names/ and it is licensed under MIT, while the datasets are slightly more restrictive, and mentioned in the repo.by metiscus