Somehow despite writing an essay above, I forgot to mention that the whole codebase and web frontend is on GitHub.
For reasons the main dev right now is on a branch, also the browse feature is live allowing a better search ability.
Show HN: I am building a map of people who lived in the Roman Empire
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Re: Show HN: I am building a map of people who lived in the Roman Empire
#32This is cool – I'd like a way to click through from a given entry to find out more, appreciate it may not be much, but each one came from somewhere. There's a few in my hometown so just idly interested if they're from somewhere I know about or something that would be new to me.
so there should be some links when I have the information available. If you link me the entries I'll see what is going on.
Re: Show HN: I am building a map of people who lived in the Roman Empire
#33This is very cool! For the name extraction, how are you handling false positives across such a large dataset? I’m assuming there are mentions that could be a name but are actually just a noun. For example, Agricola being the word for farmer but also a name.
So most inscriptions are somewhat formulary, and I provide examples to the llm to assist it to find the names. I also have a postprocess blacklist that removes some known cases where things slip through. It's never going to be 100% perfect but to my untrained eye, it seems to do okayish. Waiting on some professionals to cross check my data. If that is you, you can search and export the data in csv via the browse button.
Re: Show HN: I am building a map of people who lived in the Roman Empire
#34This is really wonderful -- One thing that may be really cool if you have the data is to add a time-axis ability (unless I missed it) for a given location. This is such a delightful application of AI!
Yeah, I thought about that. The issue is that the date density is poor already and the ranges are pretty broad. Someday I'll give it a try, but the search interface can limit you to date ranges for now, so the infrastructure is all there.
Re: Show HN: I am building a map of people who lived in the Roman Empire
#35I guess before I roll out questions and criticisms, I just want to say that this is a really cool project. I love it. Could you make the dots smaller in the updated UI? I didn’t realize at first that you were using an actual map of Roman provinces. My eyesight isn’t great and it would help if you used a political map rather than terrain. I’m not sure what’s out there for ancient Roman map tiles, though. I’m not so mu…
The actual code is here https://github.com/metiscus/roman-names/ and it is licensed under MIT, while the datasets are slightly more restrictive, and mentioned in the repo.
Re: Show HN: I am building a map of people who lived in the Roman Empire
#36Wait this is so sick, will send to my friend who's super interested in history
Re: Show HN: I am building a map of people who lived in the Roman Empire
#37Congrats to this great idea! Love it. The ones around my place all use EDH, which also has a map feature, but not as intuitive as this! Reminds me of vici.org
I also used EDH as ground truth but not directly as a source and link out to it and other sources when I have those links available.
Re: Show HN: I am building a map of people who lived in the Roman Empire
#38Great resource for baby names. And a great way to help students better understand historiography.
have there been any interesting revelations in understanding the history of the Roman Empire in the past 30 years? Newer manuscripts or artifacts discovered ?
The short answer is yes. Successo-Terra has done a lot of work on the preroman history of Italy quite recently.
https://www.successoterra.net/en
The Vesuvius scrolls have been partially decoded with some interesting results. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/three-students-dec...
The Vindolanda tablets are constantly being worked on as well https://www.heritagedaily.com/2017/07/roman-tablets-unearthe...
Re: Show HN: I am building a map of people who lived in the Roman Empire
#39Could you elaborate on the multi level LLM workflow? Did you set up a benchmark, and you're having a LLM mutate prompts?
But yes, the runbook in the project gives the llm instructions on how to use the scripts and what to modify. I let Claude code read that and tell it to work on a province. It runs a small segment and analyzes the results until it hits 1-2% error with no systemic errors. If it can't get all the errors out then I have it switch to using gemini-flash-lite-latest instead of 2.5, which costs slightly more but performs much better. Basically Claude code runs a self governing loop with my oversight mutating the prompts and data inputs to extract all the names.
EDIT My instructions to the supervising LLM are in here https://github.com/metiscus/roman-names/blob/feature/webapp-...
Re: Show HN: I am building a map of people who lived in the Roman Empire
#40Couple of videos from the Roman Society recently, connecting landscapes and Latin epistolography, which may be of interest to those enjoying this map: