Due to Google’s digitization programme, the information now available is unprecedented: but what exactly is there, and how can it be used? The Google Ancient Places (GAP) project investigates a means of facilitating the discovery of data that is of interest to scholars working on the ancient world, and experiments with ways of making use of the results.

So, for example, with GAP you’ll be able to discover all references in the Google Books corpus to a particular ancient place, and then visualize the results in GoogleEarth to gain a snapshot of the geographic spread of the references. Or, alternatively, you’ll be able to discover all ancient places mentioned in a specific book, and visualize them in GoogleMaps as and when they are mentioned alongside the actual text. In the first instance you know the place and want to find the books; in the second, you have the book and want to discover the places. And you’ll be able to do this either as a scholar whose research has a historical or geographical basis, or as a member of the public visiting, for instance, an ancient location and wanting to download information related to it on your iphone―a case of literally putting knowledge into people’s hands.