Italy in Color

I've made some major improvements to the Tabula Peutingeriana Digital Plot. Version 0.64 is the result of several weeks' tinkering at my desk. The three most visible changes are:

• Color coding of the routes in Italy
• Nearly 30 new animations of emendations
• A CC BY-SA Creative Commons licence.

Coding Italy was a precondition for a detailed analysis of how the peninsular part of the chart -- the oldest surviving detailed "map" of the world, now a UNESCO Memory of the World treasure -- was drawn. I'll have more about this analysis for you soon.

The animations help you to visualize the original design, before the scribal miscopyings which litter the surviving manuscript, penned in the (long) 12th century. Most of these re-connections were proposed by Konrad Miller and Richard Talbert and are fairly widely accepted. Visualization, in my view, is better than a textual definition when one wants to make the graphic differences clear.

The licence is important because I am urging others to continue with my line of work. You are welcome to remix and alter the SVG plot for your own research, provided you leave my name attached.

Under the hood there are some technical advances specially invented for the chart:

• The file size was reduced by 200 KB using a script that reconstitutes Talbert Database links on the fly
• Links are shown to be active with underlining and overlining
• Targeted links such as http://piggin.net/svg/PeutingerPiggin.svg#e1087 light up the target name in red with enlarged lettering, like this:
  
  

Check my initial announcement of the project in March and my launch announcement in September for more details. My project was originally based on Talbert's SVG version (sample below), but in my view the Talbert work is in certain respects no longer adequate for contemporary research:

• The Talbert team generously put their suite of SVG files online for free download, but the files are too large to easily manipulate on most home computers and have not as far as I know been updated in the past decade.

• Talbert Map A (above) does not enable you to jump back and forth to place-name entries in the Talbert Database using hyperlinks.
• Talbert's color coding mainly differentiated the characteristics of text marked alongside the route stretches, whereas my color coding distinguishes the individual itineraries making up the chart.

For my articles about the Tabula Peutingeriana, visit my Academia.edu online repository. I also have a page on ResearchGate.