Macuilcoatl Yolchicahua
Research Mentor: Francesca Schironi
Mentor Department: Classical Studies, LSA
Author(s): Not Available
Session: Session 7 (4:00 PM – 4:50 PM)
Presentation Type: Poster 16
Abstract
The Phaenomena, written by Aratus around 270 BCE in Greece, is a poem written in hexameters that describes constellations, forecasts for weather, and the changing of seasons. Our goal is to build an interactive website for public use so others can better understand this difficult text and have the past brought to life. For the first section of this project, I studies Aratus’ descriptions of natural phenomena, flora, fauna, weather patterns, and moon phases and found creative commons licensed images that visualize those phenomena described by Aratus. These images will be later posted to the website alongside Aratus’ poem. For the second section of this project, I have helped build an interactive digital planetarium using georeferencing for showing the constellations gathered from Ptolemy’s star catalogue. The biggest gap we have in this project is primarily in the first section. Sometimes we do not know what Aratus meant for some words so that identifications of flora or fauna are either educated guessworks or genuinely impossible to know. There is also a problem with the use of creative commons. Such images are usually limited, so there were plenty of times where we couldn’t find a fair-use image. I will later try to provide the missing images by taking my own photos of specific celestial and meteorological phenomena.
