Myths on Maps

Iliad 3.39 "Did you not, such as you are, get your following together and sail beyond the seas ? Did you not from your a far country carry off a lovely woman wedded among a people of warriors - to bring sorrow upon your father, your city, and your whole district, but joy to your enemies, and hang-dog shamefacedness to yourself? And now can you not dare face Menelaos and learn what manner of man he is whose wife you have stolen?" In terms of an event that occurs in the temporal run of the text, this is Hektor shaming Paris for his cowardice, but it refers to the series of events in which Paris sparked the war.

3.181 "The old man marveled at him and said, "Happy son of Atreus, child of good fortune. I see that the Achaeans are subject to you in great multitudes. When I was in Phrygia I saw much horsemen, the people of Otreus and of Mygdon, who were camping upon the banks of the river Sangarios; I was their ally, and with them when the Amazons, peers of men, came up against them, but even they were not so many as the Achaeans."

This, while more vague, seems to refer to Antenor allying with the Otrians and Mygdonians in a battle against the Amazons, but is again temporally irrelevant to the proceedings of book3 proper.

How do we identify moments like this, in which past events are obliquely referred to?

Event 530 offers the desc "theseus clears out bad guys." The corresponding moment in Appolodorus 2.6.3 simply refers to Theseus having cleared away "malefactors" during his trip from Troezen down the Isthmus. This seems a meta-event, in that it refers to a series of Theseus' events, but it's a minimeta event, because it seems to be a passing reference and not wholly consumptive. We need a markup means of dealing with this, or at least a way of linking to sort it out.

Oh, point taken Zaqir. I think there's two separate issues going on there and I misunderstood which you were referring to. Taking a second look I believe you're absolutely correct about the context. To answer your question, my personal feeling is it might be a question to bring to Dr. Bowman. On the one hand, the real place and mythical place are synonymous, since mythology tends to borrow from and aggrandize the natural world - it's simply perceived differently because something magical happened there. I don't know whether or not it would be prudent to clearly delineate the "realness" of these places based on context - if it's clearly inferred that the context is mythical, then I think an argument could be made for it, but it might be difficult to discern in some cases. For the specific ones you're looking at I would say it's fine, but at that point we should probably revisit all such possible cases and make judgement calls on them as well just to be consistent.

Thanks for taking a look, Jenn. I think the question is whether the locations referred to in the sections (and I believe they intend them as the locations of the underworld and zeus' home, respectively, rather than as characters) should be given their mythical coordinates, as intended by the textual matter?

Mount Olympus is a real location, as ostensibly is the entrance to Hades, I think for the tags you mean that show a location where it should be a character they've simply been misinterpreted contextually and we could probably just swap the place tag for the appropriate character one. If there's no objections I'd be happy to make the changes.

Thanks for those catches, I made the changes accordingly. I noticed the same thing with the Hades and Olympus tags, and the fact that they had genuine geo's, which is strange. Shall I change them to beyond, then?

After a bit of experimentation I've discovered that serializing documents that include OpenLayers maps need to be served as text/html. I was serializing may pages as application/xhtml+xml and I got javascript errors like:

Uncaught TypeError: Object #<Document> has no method 'write' 

So, for OL pages, use this serialization option:

declare option exist:serialize "method=html5 media-type=text/html encoding=utf-8 indent=yes";

The obvious problem with serving as text/html is that, according to the spec:

The 'text/html' media type [RFC2854] is primarily for HTML, not for XHTML. In general, this media type is NOT suitable for XHTML except when the XHTML is conforms to the guidelines in Appendix A. In particular, 'text/html' is NOT suitable for XHTML Family document types that add elements and attributes from foreign namespaces, such as XHTML+MathML [XHTML+MathML].

According to the spec, then, if one wants to use something like SVG directly in the document, you may not be able to on pages like this. Using SVG graphics in CSS seems to be OK, though.
I'm not yet sure what impact this will have on OL maps that include SVG via JS.

Things to be considered for Book Three, In 3.76 the term "Trojan" needs to be tagged; 3.181, "Son of Atreus" needs to be tagged as Agamemnon; 3.302- Dardanos' identity may need to be checked (will look into it); 3.310+3.395 Olympus and Hades are tagged as the real places, may need to revise to the "beyond" tag (also need to look into); 3.421 - Laughter loving goddess, could be tagged as Aphrodite, not entirely necessary though.

There are two groups, "argives" and "argivesVSTroy", both state the detail about how the term "argives" can mean not just people from Argos but also the Greeks fighting at Troy collectively. The question in mind is if we should keep this detail in both entries. If kept in just the ArgivesVSTroy entry, it could appropriately be used for any Argive group at Troy, whether it is the Group from Argos or the Greek soldiers at Troy in general. The benefit of taking it out of the "argives" entry could be the clear distinction between people of Argos and Greek soldiers at Troy when it is clear in the use of the term. For example any time it is the Argives involved in the Trojan war, we can use argivesVSTroy, stating it could be either the people of Argos specifically or the more general term. In other circumstances when we know it is just the people from Argos being mentioned, we can use the tag "argives" and the user would not be confused as to whether it is the people of Argos or Greek Soliders at Troy being mentioned. Wanted to see if there was outside reasoning for including it in both first, nothing has been taken out as of yet, only commented.

Cephallenians were originally tagged as "cephalleniansVSTroy" though they are the subjects of Odysseus and it's thought that they should be treated more like the similar group Achille's Myrmidons. I've changed the tag to just cephallenians and any tags leading to cephalleniansVSTroy have been changed. I only want to look into this issue because cephalleniansVSTroy is listed under GreeksVSTroy (though Myrmidons aren't) and I didn't want to change anything in the entries without finding out if there are other reasons they are grouped this way. The reasoning is that since they aren't necessarily people from one place but are subjects of Odysseus it would be better to code them this way.