Mapping Greek Tragedies: A Contribution to MANTO
Mapping Ancient Narratives, Territories, Objects (MANTO) is a developing, accessible database that works to catalog Greek myth in the tangible world. It aims to capture the scope of Greek myth by collecting mythological data from ancient Greek and Roman literature, giving insight into the values and priorities of the ancients. MANTO allows academics and amateurs alike to interact with the world of Greek myth in a dynamic way. Its uses range from examining the messy family tree of the Olympian gods to attacking extensive academic research questions. The objective of this project, funded with a grant from the Research Experience and Apprenticeship Program (REAP) at UNH, was to contribute new data to a gap in the MANTO database.
While myth is generally fictional, it largely takes place in locations that are a part of the same world we live in. By tagging location to mythological information, MANTO allows people to understand and interact with the myth in a different way. The database can also be used to track things quickly, such as references to a location or character within an author’s works, or the locations a particular ancient hero visited in their adventures. The study of myth has much to offer in terms of our understanding of how people develop stories and culture.
MANTO is an ongoing project, so there are swaths of literature that have yet to be entered. Greek tragedy is one such area. Many of Euripides' surviving works were not a part of the database prior to last summer. My research project was designed to begin filling this hole.
Over the course of the summer, I worked through five plays by Euripides (Hecuba, Andromache, Iphigenia in Aulis, Helen, and Electra). These plays each focus on women related to the Trojan War. Although I did not draw formal conclusions from this data collection project, I did learn a great deal about the Greek perceptions and characterizations of women and their roles in literature. The characters I worked with included mothers, captives, daughters waiting on the return of their fathers, and of course Helen, the very woman whose disappearance sparked the conflict at Troy.
How is Data Collected?
The data in MANTO is collected in the form of "ties" between entities, which demonstrate genealogical connections and other interactions that connect mythical figures, objects, and places. Each tie (whenever possible) is tagged to a location that is attached to real-world coordinates through the Pleiades database of ancient locations. Ties generally consist of a semantic triple: they contain a subject, a predicate, and an object. The subject and object are entities that exist in the database. These entities can be people, gods, monsters, regions, cities, and even some important objects. The predicate is also selected from the options within the database.
In the first weeks of this project, I read Apollodorus' Library and other texts to build a comprehensive understanding of Greek myth. While I have extensive background in myth, the majority of my knowledge was accumulated through years engaging with classics and mythology at an amateur level in my youth, and through modern pop literature. In lieu of a formal myth class here at UNH, I needed to bolster my general mythological knowledge to catch any brief references within the text that I might be able to capture in a tie. I continued to use Apollodorus and other reference books of Greek myth to support my research throughout the summer.
I also spent this time familiarizing myself with the intricacies of the data entry process and Nodegoat, the software that MANTO uses. I read the Manual for Data Collection in full, which details how to properly create and format new entities, as well as how to create ties. It includes instructions for situations in which certain ties might be preferable and contains a full list of tie predicates and their respective uses. Some ties, such as “is child of” or “kills” are straightforward. Other ties, however, rely on specific circumstances. “Abducts,” “captures,” and “takes,” for example, are all separate predicates to be used in different circumstances. Prepositional phrases, locations, and a series of motives can also be attached to ties, which allow a greater breadth of data to be captured in one item. A particularly extensive tie could say something like, “Agamemnon deceives Clytaimnestra, Iphigenia concerning Iphigenia at Aulis with the involvement of Calchas at the instigation of Odysseus.”
The next tie might read something along the lines of, “Achilles kills Hector at Troy to avenge Patroclus.” Generally, the goal is to capture the greatest amount of data in the fewest ties, and to avoid capturing the same piece of data more than once from each text.
Research Methods
During this project, I accessed the original Greek and an English translation of the texts I worked with online through the Loeb Classical Library. I borrowed commentaries and further translations for each text from the Dimond Library at UNH and my faculty mentor's personal collection. I worked with one play at a time, collecting data in three stages.
In my initial read-through, I made note of the narrative of the play and recorded the location in which it was set, as well as any entities I might need to add to the database (if they had not appeared in any previously entered texts) and any particularly difficult-to-wrangle chunks of text. As I read, I broke the text into “passages” of 30-60 lines. These passages allow a user of the database to find the source of a tie more quickly, so they must only check a few dozen lines, rather than an entire 1300-line play. After an initial read-through, I began collecting data passage by passage. These initial notes, kept in a notebook, were not polished ties. They captured the idea of what I wanted the tie to look like and included notes if I was confused or debating how precisely to construct the tie.
After collecting data on paper, I transferred each tie to an Excel spreadsheet. I consulted the existing database and the Manual for Data Collection as I polished each tie, ensuring I wrote the entity names, predicates, and additional information (prepositional phrases, genitive absolutes, locations, etc) exactly as they would appear in the database. In this stage, I also removed any redundancies in my ties to avoid capturing the same data twice from one text. I created a separate spreadsheet for each play, with a separate page for each passage. This way I could easily break up and keep track of my progress. Once I finished polishing the ties for a passage, I entered them into the database one by one. I created each passage in the database as I entered ties and also created a handful of new entities for characters and locations that had not previously been added to the database.
Throughout the entire process, I maintained weekly communication with the co-directors of MANTO: R. Scott Smith, my faculty mentor for this project, and Greta Hawes, a professor at Macquarie University. In my weekly meetings with each of them, I had the opportunity to bring up questions or difficult areas in my work.
Future Plans
This exposure to research opened doors into the world of digital humanities that I can apply to future research, as well as skills I can use in a professional capacity. I now lead a group of students in the MANTO research group, where I oversee data collection and enter polished ties, and plan to continue working with MANTO for the rest of my time at UNH. I also intend to dig deeper into the digital humanities by exploring mapping software. This January, I will be learning the fundamentals of ArcGIS and survey equipment at an archaeological field school in Belize run by UNH professor Eleanor Harrison-Buck. With the skills I gain in that course, I will return with an enhanced understanding of mapping software and how to apply it to future research or careers. I would also like to explore the maps of the plays I read this summer and expand on the theme of women in the Trojan War, whether for independent enjoyment, a future formal research project, or simply a blog post for the MANTO website.
I intend to attend graduate school for further study, and this research will help me narrow down a topic of study and build the skills and resume I will need to pursue that goal. In the meantime, I have made a substantial hole in the database much smaller and brought MANTO one step closer to completion.
I would like to express gratitude for my mentor, R. Scott Smith, for placing so much trust in me and being a constant source of guidance and support for both my research and academic career. Thank you also to Greta Hawes for her expert advice throughout the research process. Finally, I would like to thank the Hamel Center for Undergraduate Research and my donors, Mr. Dana Hamel and the Rogers Family Undergraduate Research Fund, for making this research opportunity possible.
Author and Mentor Bios
Ivy Young, originally from Exeter, New Hampshire, will graduate in 2028 with a bachelor of arts in classical languages and literature and linguistics. She discovered MANTO in high school at a NH Junior Classical League event and was delighted at the opportunity to work on the program with a Research Experience and Apprenticeship Program (REAP) grant through the Hamel Center for Undergraduate Research. Ivy is a part of the UNH Rowing team, as well as the Eta Sigma Phi Classics Honor Society. She is currently exploring opportunities in the field of archaeology.
R. Scott Smith is professor of classics at the University of New Hampshire, where he has taught since 2000. His major field of study is ancient myth and mythography, with special focus on the intersection of mythography, space, and geography. He is currently co-director (with Greta Hawes of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia) of a digital database and map of Greek myth, MANTO: https:manto.unh.edu. He also produces the podcast, The Greek Myth Files. In addition, he is the Director of the Responsible Governance and Sustainable Citizenship Project, which seeks to promote responsible practices in public and private arenas, as well as to create sustainable institutions that foster the values of active citizenship.
Copyright © 2025, Ivy Young
