Pleiades: Beyond the Barrington Atlas (APA 2007)
This is a partial text of a paper delivered by Tom Elliott at the Annual Meeting of the American Philological Association in San Diego, California, 6 January 2006. The text breaks off at the point the demonstration portion began; that part was done extemporaneously.
Note that some of the text of this paper overlaps that in a longer paper, delivered to the London Ancient History Seminar, 27 October 2006.
Alot has changed since the Barrington Atlas was published in 2000. Even as the APA-sponsored Classical Atlas project came to a close, it was clear that a staggering series of changes in both mapping and geographic study was well underway. Where practical – and conducive to its ambitious schedule – the project had exploited new developments in Geographic Information Systems – or GIS – as well as other technologies. No one then affiliated with the project believed that its success would be the final word in Greek and Roman geographic reference. Even as Richard Talbert and I Fedex’d the last batch of Map-by-Map Directory materials to the publisher, we knew that the rising technological wave would combine with the pace of historical and archaeological research to produce new opportunities for exploiting and expanding the data embodied in the Atlas.
Of course you’re looking at one of these revolutionary developments – Google Earth. In 2000, GIS was already an established reality, and we could easily name specific Atlas-related tasks for which we wanted to use it. But GIS was still largely the province of highly trained specialists, equipped with the most up-to-date computer hardware and large budgets for software and data. We were still thinking of using GIS to create new digital and print materials that we could provide, in more or less static form, to other projects and individuals.
Few people would have been willing to predict the effectiveness with which Google, NASA and other players have since placed high-quality geographic visualization tools and imagery in the hands of computer owners in the developed world. Now anyone with a reasonably up-to-date computer, and a broadband internet connection, can fly with us from the Atlas' birthplace in Chapel Hill North Carolina, to the erudite confines of the Marriott Hotel and Marina, here in San Diego.
Despite the comfort and marvelous aesthetics of our current surroundings, I assume that everyone here would prefer to set off for a more ancient locale. What if we could harness these new technologies – though developed with modern geography and modern economics as their focus – to serve our research and pedagogical purposes?
It’s a relatively straightforward matter for any user to examine places of interest in Google Earth. If you know the modern name of a geographic feature – and if that feature is significant enough in modern terms to appear in the digital data Google purchases for its services – a simple search is sufficient to take you there. But if you only have a historical name, or if your feature is obscure, or if it is remote from the modern place with which it is commonly associated, this most basic of approaches will fail. You could take matters into your own hands. Assuming a reasonable degree of both map- and computer-literacy, you could derive coordinates from the Barrington Atlas by hand and type them into Google Earth. In this way, you’d create so-called ‘placemarks’ – points on the Google Earth globe to guide your explorations. In this manner, you might ultimately find your way to this site: ancient Choma – known today as Hacimusular, in Turkey.
I think you’ll agree, however, that something more comprehensive and automatic would be preferable. You have students to teach and research questions to answer. Juggling a gigantic book, a recalcitrant mouse and a bunch of numbers is neither your heart’s desire nor your forte. Nor should it be. Google Earth is designed to retrieve data, as you need it, from other systems and services via the Internet.
The scholarly compilers of the Atlas documented over 50,000 physical and cultural features that are attested by the historical and archaeological record. All we need to make this data available in Google Earth is the will – and the resources – to do it accurately and completely.
I am happy to tell you that the National Endowment for the Humanities has generously provided initial funding for a project that will start us down this road.
Specifically, the Ancient World Mapping Center’s Pleiades project is establishing a web-based environment for the perpetual update, perpetual diversification and perpetual dissemination of the data assembled by the Classical Atlas Project. This application, developed with the support of the Stoa Consortium at the University of Kentucky, will facilitate rapid editing of new geographic, bibliographic and analytical information relevant to the study of Greek and Roman geography. Moreover, the mapping center – together with its collaborators – will disseminate this data in various print and digital formats.
We are currently less than half-way through a two-year startup phase. Our present focus is the conversion of basic data and the creation of a web-based editorial system for its management. At the end of this phase, we will open this system to public submissions, which will then be reviewed for quality and relevance before publication and updating of the dataset. A second phase, now in planning, will build upon the data and the collaborative editing environment built in phase 1 to establish a set of public services for spatial data interchange and dynamic mapping. This phase will see the complete incorporation of all legacy data, as well as the collation of this data against the geographic references now managed separately in the databases of a number of key projects across the discipline. In this regard, we are already in close consultation and prototyping with a number of partners, including those listed here.
The goal of this collation effort is simple: to bring into alignment with the Pleiades dataset the geographic references already used in several established digital resources for antiquity. This process will enable two complimentary advances:
- Participating projects will then have a straightforward mechanism for requesting data, and automatically generated custom maps, from our system, ready to use in their own interfaces for their own users
- Similarly, Pleiades will be able to provide its users direct access to primary source materials, bibliographic records and ancillary information keyed directly to spatial features of interest
We do not have time today to review in detail the contents of the Barrington Atlas and its associated, 1,500-page Map-by-Map Directory. Allow me only to remind you that it provides its users with 102 maps depicting the ancient landscape of Greek and Roman culture with modern cartographic conventions. These maps highlight both physical and cultural features to the extent that modern scholarship can report their details. Where our sources provide us with names for these features, these too are indicated. The millennium and a half spanned by the atlas is subdivided into 5 broad periods to facilitate the presentation of what we can recover concerning the currency of names, and the relevance or habitation of built features. Finally, a select number of bibliographic citations are provided in order to direct users of the atlas, as efficiently as possible, to a comprehensive or representative work that, in turn, facilitates discovery of all relevant scholarly publications.
Like all reference works, the Barrington Atlas is aging. Every day, research and publication in fields ranging from Classical Philology to Archaeology to Geophysics are rendering its picture of the ancient landscape less complete. This obsolescence is occurring at precisely the moment in history when reference works are becoming more important than ever before. My daughter will grow up using a global information system offering – for better or worse – data extracted from virtually all printed, graphic and audio works now preserved in one or more first-world, brick-and-mortar bookstores, libraries or museums. Necessarily, she will join her contemporaries in increasing reliance on programmatically constructed summaries, extracts, collections and analyses of this vast data hoard. Accordingly, her economic, social and intellectual competencies and behaviors will be shaped by automated processes in ways impossible for me to imagine.
I am only confident in predicting that she will need, and deserve, automated help in dealing with it all: not only with the millions of old books that are about to be brought – by brute force – back into the public consciousness, but also with the rising tide of new digital publications and data streams that will accompany growing populations, cheaper access to global audiences, and the popularization of traditional academic topics.
As scholars, we have a part to play in conditioning the outcome of this process. Reference works are already key components in both corporate and academic efforts to bring order to information chaos. Greg Crane and his collaborators at Perseus are not alone in demonstrating that software tools, designed to mine information from large document collections, can be improved significantly through training with structured reference data. Biographical, geographical and historical reference works provide the information necessary to contextualize otherwise ambiguous references found in both primary and secondary texts. If scholars can grapple effectively with the tendency of their reference works to age, and if we can simultaneously restructure and redeploy these works to facilitate use – not only by individuals, but also by automata – we can improve the quality of what our children will learn.
For its part, Pleiades inherits from the Classical Atlas Project the traditional aims of a scholarly reference work: to quicken research across the field with comprehensive assessment, organization and presentation of findings in a difficult but essential subdiscipline. In terms of this traditional task, we may ask: Does the increasing flexibility of digital information systems provide a means for creating and updating reference works like the Atlas, thereby reducing the probability of obsolescence?
In light of the information revolution, can we continue to think of our goal as the publication, or even just the serial updating, of a monolithic reference work? Should we, instead, take account of the probability that our users may prefer to employ a range of computational methods in working with our output, just as we grow more sophisticated in its digital creation? Can we facilitate the selection, adaptation, reuse and even incorporation of our work by others through digital publication services designed for automated exploitation?
