(To get a “live action” summary of what Pelagios is all
about, watch the Elton and Leif
double-act at the recent Digital Humanities 2012 conference in Hamburg.)
Pelagios
phase 1 (Feb – Oct 2011) had established the concept that you can link
online stuff about the ancient world by using a lightweight framework, based on
the concept of place (a Pleiades URI)
and a standard ontology (Open Annotation
Collaboration). Its guiding principles have been Openness and
Decentralization—we store no data ourselves centrally but rather enable
connections between different datasets to be made (based on common references
to places). Building on this “bottom-up” infrastructure, Pelagios
phase 2 (Nov 2011 – Jul 2012) has produced four outcomes:
1.
an indexing
service that allows any ancient world scholar working in the digital medium to
make their data discoverable;
2.
an
API (an interface allowing computers to communicate with each other) that enables other users and data-providers to discover
relevant data and do interesting things with them;
3.
a suite of
visualization services including widgets
that empowers any interested party to find out more about the ancient
world—through literature, archaeological finds, visual imagery, maps, etc.
4.
the Pelagios “cookbook”,
into which the community’s wisdom and experience has been poured and distilled.
Successes
The Pelagios API has
provided at least three quick wins. It helps provide Context for those
hosting data online, by allowing you to obtain links to online material that
may be relevant to your own. It facilitates Discovery of your data, so
that any web-user can find your resources by following links on other partners’
sites. Finally it allows Reuse by providing machine-readable
representations (JSON, RDF) by means of which you can mash-up the data you find
in ways you want.
The Pelagios API in action
The suite of visualization
tools that we’ve been developing illustrates just some ways the API can be
used: so, we have created widgets
that can be embedded on partners’ websites that enable place searches, a “heat
map” that shows annotations within the Pelagios cloud on a map by virtue of
their density, and the Graph
Explorer, which allows users to search for connections between places in
documents or find out about the documents that reference a particular place.
Perhaps even more exciting is to see what partners are making of the API
themselves. So, for example, Nick Rabinowitz and Sebastian Heath have developed
a JavaScript library for Ancient World Linked Data, “awld.js”, which adds
functionality to a website by providing a pop-up preview of Web
links to Pelagios references for a place, simply by virtue of you passing your
browser over the place-name.
The number of partners has
grown appreciably. In addition to the “originals” from phase 1 (Pleiades, Arachne,
GAP, nomima.org, Perseus Digital Library, SPQR), Pelagios2 introduced CLAROS,
Open Context and Ure Museum at the outset, and have since been joined by the
following: the British Museum, Fasti Online, Inscriptions of Israel /
Palestine, Meketre, OCRE, ORACC, Papyri.info, Ports Antiques and Regnum
Francorum Online. It is exciting to note that some of these new partners, such
as ORACC—or, to give it its full title, the Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform
Corpus—extend the Pelagios family into new geographical areas (i.e. the Near
East and Egpyt). And this is important not only for challenging the still
dominant “eurocentric” vision of antiquity but also because it more accurately
reflects the interconnected nature of the ancient world. By doing so, it opens
up a whole new range of potentially exciting linkages.
Challenges
This wouldn’t be nearly such
an exciting, or fun, project if it didn’t throw up the odd occasional
difficulty. These have tended to focus on the process of data alignment, which
is not surprising since mapping your place references to Pleiades is the hardest
part. On the one hand, Aggregating Data is inevitably challenging since
no two datasets are the same, and the process has thrown up questions of how to
label appropriately (references, data containing the reference), what
kind of dataset partitions to
have (no subsets vs. multiple levels of hierarchy), and how to keep Pelagios up-to-date of changes you may make to
the annotations. On the other hand, we have found that the process of alignment
has obliged partners to think about how they are Conceptualizing Data in
the first place: i.e. how they are expressing the relation between data and
place, such as find-spot vs. origin, uncertain references (probably made in,
from the vicinity of), different levels of granularity or specificity (South
Italy, Greek Islands, etc.). Because computers are unable to make
the “semantic leap”, as humans we have to be a lot clearer about what it is we
think we’re doing. To find out about how the partners tackled some of these
issues, you can browse through the blog (summarised here
in our cookbook) and join the pelagios-group
mailing list, where you can also share your experiences.
Pelagios has also been
very concerned that all our visible outcomes—the suite of visualizations
especially—make sense to everyone. Accordingly, we have been conducting robust
and iterative user-testing throughout development, keeping in mind the “Child
of 10” standard: for the results of this phase 2 testing, see here
and here
(and for phase 1, here).
But we can still do much better. Part of this perhaps might be better managing
the expectations of our home constituency (ancient world scholars), whose
excitement at the prospect of being able to gather all different kinds of
information about antiquity suggests to them that we’re hosting it—i.e. that
we’re a kind of Ancient Wikipedia. Remember: Pelagios is expressly not “one
ring to rule them all”, but a means of facilitating connections. Getting out
the message that this is in fact a community to which they can also contribute
will continue to be central to our mission. Still, this enthusiasm shows that
there’s a huge appetite for drawing on, and contributing to, content that is
free, open and linkable to across the web.
Pelagios: not “one
ring to rule them all”
Futures
Pelagios continues to go
from strength to strength. We’re currently in negotiation with another
potential partner, which would increase our geographic scope considerably—all
the way to ancient China! There has also been discussion about extending the
Pelagios “keep it simple”/ “bottom-up” approach to other kinds of common
references, such as time periods or people’s names. But to fulfil any of these
possibilities will require as much input from our partners and others as
Pelagios has been blessed to receive—and we are extremely grateful for
everybody’s support!
Leif has much more to say
about these aspects in a forthcoming post. Personally speaking, now that we have a
working bottom-up infrastructure in place, I would like to see web-users,
ordinary non-technical browsers like me, working with the data between which
Pelagios enables you to draw connections. For the study of the ancient
world—what we in the trade call “Classics” or “Classical Civilization”— is an
interdisciplinary subject that encompasses literary texts, material culture, visual
artefacts and conceptual ways of thinking. The digital environment affords
possibilities for mashing-up and exploring all these different kinds of data in
ways that before were simply not imaginable but which are the essence of our
subject. With its partners, Pelagios is helping to lay the foundations for the
study of the ancient world in the twenty first century.
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