Richard Talbert and Sean Gillies (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)

Pleiades : Advancing Ancient Geography Online

Pleiades is an online, international research community, devoted to advancing the study of ancient geography. Its mission is the perpetual update and diversification of the immense dataset assembled by the American Philological Association's Classical Atlas Project (1988-2000) for publication of the Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World and its associated 1,400-page Map-by-Map Directory (Princeton, 2000). This major reference work – edited by Talbert and generously supported by NEH among major donors – spans Europe, North Africa and Western Asia in 99 maps at 1:500,000 scale (for the core) or 1:1,000,000 (for the periphery). Pleiades is based at UNC’s Ancient World Mapping Center in Chapel Hill. Its current two-year startup phase is funded by NEH, and web hosting is provided by the Stoa Consortium at the University of Kentucky. When initial operational capability is reached as planned early in 2008, Pleiades will be open to online contributions and adjustments of spatial locations, toponyms and bibliography from scholars, students and the public worldwide. These updates and recommendations will be vetted for publication, and incorporated into a great variety of digital and print outputs. Thereafter this material will also be available for wide reuse under the terms of a Creative Commons ‘Attribution, Share-Alike’ license.

Our paper focuses first on the goals and achievements of Pleiades to date, with an emphasis on innovative features and policies that offer potential application across the spectrum of humanities and cultural heritage activities. In particular, the paper addresses the challenges and opportunities which arise when web-based content management and digital globe software are brought together in the service of a hybrid publication model that incorporates wikipedia-style ‘mob’ participation as well as the editorial goals of a traditional journal. The paper concludes by outlining the scope of the second phase planned for Pleiades from mid-2008 (subject to funding). This would embark upon the logical next step of collaborating with major collections of ancient documents and material objects worldwide to align relevant cataloging and descriptive practices with Pleiades data. By such means, Pleiades extends the geographic standard and methodology that its first phase has established, and as a result digital records of ancient names and places, their locations and their dynamic mapping all become interoperable. Far into the future, users everywhere at any level benefit hugely.

Construction Zone

The talk

  1. Background
    1. Pleiades Project overview
      1. Perpetual update, diversification and dissemination of the Classical Atlas Project dataset
      2. Initiative of the Ancient World Mapping Center
    2. Barrington Atlas: Map 65 and Directory excerpt
  2. Infrastructure
    1. Pleiades follows best open source project practices
      1. Based on our experiences with EpiDoc?, MapServer?, and Plone
      2. Informed by Karl Fogel's "Producing Open Source Software"
      3. Uses Subversion and Trac
      4. Networked with other open source projects
    2. Pleiades models our understanding of ancient geography
      1. Locations
      2. Names
      3. Places and Temporal Attestations
      4. References
    3. Pleiades Site and Services
      1. Based on Plone
      2. PleiadesEntity implements the model
      3. PleiadesGeocoder provides KML and GeoRSS views
      4. PleiadesOpenLayers provides a map interface
  3. Collaboration
  4. Demonstration
    1. Search and view Pleiades places using Google Earth
    2. Manipulate Pleiades places using Yahoo Pipes
    3. Manipulate GeoRSS feeds using Mush