Workshop 2: Scraping Data from the Web: A Tutorial for Ancient Classicists and Historians

Date: Tuesday, 12th November 2024

Time: 14:30-16:30

Instructor: Laura Soffiantini (PhD candidate, Dept. of Classics, KU Leuven)

Overview: Learn web scraping techniques tailored for scholars of ancient texts and history, covering essential tools and best practices.

Pre-register here for the Zoom link.

Short CV: Laura Soffiantini is a Ph.D. student at KU Leuven in Belgium and visiting scholar at TALOS (winter semester). After earning a degree in Classical Philology from the University of Pisa, she specialized in Ancient History, focusing on the self-representation of Hellenistic Greek cities. Her doctoral dissertation, titled Greek Spaces in Roman Times, aims to explore the geographic representation of Greece in Naturalis Historia by Pliny the Elder. Through this work, she investigates the spatial knowledge and experiences embedded in Pliny's encyclopedia by employing digital technologies such as Named Entity Recognition, pattern extraction, relation extraction, formalized knowledge representation, semantic annotation, and digital mapping.