Pleiades Background and Early Developments (1980 – 2006)

For information on more recent developments, see additional sections in PleiadesBackground

Pleiades traces its origins to 1980. This year marked the publication of the final report of a committee chaired by Roger Bagnall under the auspices of the American Philological Association (APA). The committee was chartered to review and make recommendations for the improvement of basic research tools for the study of Classics. The report singled out historical cartography – and in particular the lack of a comprehensive, up-to-date reference atlas – as a matter of deep concern requiring immediate action. Indeed, Smith’s Atlas of 1874 remained the last comprehensive classical atlas to have seen publication. The committee’s recommendation led to the formation of the Classical Atlas Project (CAP), which was chartered by the APA and directed by Richard Talbert (AWMC/UNC-CH; Pleiades co-senior-editor). Bagnall served as a regional coordinator for this effort, supervising the work of a number of scholarly compilers who researched and prepared information for the maps. During the period 1988-2000 and with support from a professional cartographic firm and scholars worldwide, the CAP took in hand the entire process of researching, compiling and producing the Barrington Atlas, assembling for the first time in over a century a comprehensive synthesis of scholarly findings in the area of Greek and Roman geography.

The Ancient World Mapping Center (AWMC) was founded in 2000 by the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A key motivating factor was the realization, already clear in the final years of the Classical Atlas Project, that the pace of technological change was opening up new horizons in historical geographic study. The Center – still the only research entity worldwide devoted to the study of geography across the entire Greek and Roman world – was given the mission of updating and diversifying the information assembled by CAP in the light of new scholarship, fresh discoveries and breakthrough technologies. The Center’s creation and a modest endowment for continuing work were supported by the College, private and foundation donors and a Challenge Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The APA also supported the Center with an initial cash gift and permission to use and redistribute the CAP compilation materials for the benefit of research and teaching in the Classics (with the proviso that if any revenues were generated from said use, these would be shared with the APA).

Tom Elliott was appointed as the AWMC’s founding director, and continued in this position through early 2006, when he stepped down to assume leadership of the Pleiades project itself. During his tenure as Director, Elliott drew on his experience and training as both a software developer and a Roman historian to plan for the transition of the combined analog and digital artifacts of the CAP’s work to an all-digital information system that could support the Center’s mission. His efforts were augmented by his experience as a graduate research assistant for CAP during its last two years, and by a study he commissioned on the editorial practices and workflow of the atlas project.

Significant preparatory work was carried out during this period as well. Major achievements included:

  • Development of a bibliographic database (CAP staff had prepared by hand in Microsoft Word the voluminous bibliographies eventually published in the Map-by-Map Directory). All works cited in the Atlas and Directory were parsed and stored in the database, where they were checked and adjusted, where necessary, with reference to MARC records and other digital data sources
  • Rasterization and georeferencing of the CAP map compilation bases for use in Geographic Information Systems (the Atlas maps were produced as cartographic art rather than as geospatial datasets: 40% using traditional film photographic methods; 60% using vector illustration software; the bases for the latter maps were initially created with GIS software, but its use was not carried through to the end of the compilation process)
  • Development of custom software to extract, parse and normalize the compilation records (also originally hand-maintained Microsoft Word files) that contain the full lists of name variants, periods of occupation, location descriptions and bibliographic citations that underpin the Barrington maps.

By 2003 it was clear that the creation of a digital gazetteer, on the basis of the CAP compilation materials, was an urgent need. Technological and methodological change, already noted during the final years of the atlas project, continued to quicken. Developments in desktop GIS, digital libraries and other areas opened up new research possibilities. It was also clear that the passage of time was threatening the completeness and currency of the information itself. These concerns, coupled with the realization that a small Center at a single state-funded institution could not hope to keep pace with all relevant developments and publications across the entire spatial, linguistic and methodological footprint of the Barrington Atlas, motivated Elliott and Talbert to examine emerging modes of broad, web-based collaboration. The example afforded by the Suda Online Project (SOL) was particularly helpful. SOL combined broad web-based collaboration with active editorial control and open review. It has achieved remarkable success in its on-going work. In consultation with the late Ross Scaife? (then SOL editor and co-editor of the Stoa), Talbert and Elliott devised a plan that would bring SOL’s model together with the editorial practices employed by CAP around a structured, digital gazetteer. Interested parties around the world would be invited to participate in the maintenance and improvement of the gazetteer as an increasingly essential tool of work, roughly analogous to specialized journals and annual bibliographies supporting subdisciplines like epigraphy and papyrology.

An initial proposal for research and development support from the NEH went unfunded. Evaluators’ marks were generally high, but one evaluator expressed concern over one aspect of the proposal: a period for evaluation of web-based content management systems leading to the selection of one to underpin the collaboration support aspects of the project. In the subsequent months, Talbert and Elliott researched these systems and came to the conclusion that the open-source Plone content management system provided the best base platform for this work. A second proposal for research and development funding was granted, and work began on Pleiades 1 in February 2006.