One thing that's become really clear as I'm reading through the events list is that we need to come to a consensus about and then explicitly define "event." As it stands, there seem to be competing definitions of "event," and this is beginning to cause problems.

When we started this project, and were only going to have a map without text, the definition we agreed on for event was, more or less "at least one person said to be in a given place (doing something)." We were mainly interested in who went where, and whom we could say were in places together. Narrative didn't matter that much. As a consequence, early in the list we find "events" that contain an awful lot of narrative elements. For example, the description of event_542 is "Hercules marches on Elis, kills Augeas and sons, restores Phyleus to power, celebrates the Olympian games, etc." In the logic of our definition, this could all be called one event, since it involved Heracles being in Elis with Augeas and Phyleus.

The problem is that now, we care about narrative. It no longer makes sense to group many narrative elements into the same event, just because they all happen to involve the same person in the same place. This is especially true when we have the same event described in more than one source. "Events" need to be narrative units that can be meaningfully compared across sources. If one author describes Heracles doing 10 things in Thebes and we call that an event, what are we do to when another author describes Heracles doing 3 of those 10 things, plus 2 others not mentioned by this first author, and on and on? Is this the same "event"?

I have consulted with LB, and the provisional definition she suggests is "one or more person in one place doing one thing." The "one place" element of the definition is important for the map. "One thing" is still unavoidably subjective, but is certainly narrower than the definition being used now.