The *Child of 10* standard

While Pelagios has been largely about building an alliance of leading ancient world research groups with the aim of linking their data in an open and transparent way, the 'front end' of our product has never been far from our minds. After all, many of the partners are also users of the data that they gather, or, if not the actual users, they have their own user groups to think about and appeal to. As a classicist myself - that is, as someone who spends most of the time reading and analysing ancient Greek texts - I want to be able to access sources easily and trust the data that I get: in other words, I want to be able to turn on the tap and find that the water runs (either hot or cold, depending on what I'm doing); I'm not interested in the plumbing that brings the water to me.

So it is with timely fashion that JISC brought to our attention a fellow jiscGEO project, called G3. In an earlier post, they had talked about a useful benchmark in user interface design being the Child of 10 standard, meaning that a child of 10 should be able to learn to do something useful with the system within 10 minutes. This indicates whether a system is “easy to use” or not.

Will our tool, the Pelagios Graph Explorer, fit the bill, I wonder? While our natural target audience are university researchers (lecturers and undergrads), given the seemingly never-ending appeal of Classics in popular culture, we would be mad not to take seriously the point that a 10 year old should be able to use our tool to find out interesting stuff about the ancient world. Indeed, the technical skills of the average Classicist researcher - not least this one - makes it imperative that we address this question. At the time of writing, then, we are currently engaging in user testing of the Graph Explorer with a sample representative audience, the results from which we will help inform our delivery of the product at the end of October (though it's already clear that this will be a work-in-progress...). All next week Mia Ridge, who has been conducting the user testing, will blog about it, setting out the methods (why we chose them, what prep is done), what actually happens in a session, and then some initial results.

But I can give a sneak preview here of the answer to that question, does the Pelagios Graph Explorer pass the *child of 10* test. On current performance, that would be a 'no'. Which is not to say that things haven't gone well! On the contrary, the very fact that issues are being raised with what you can do now that stuff is linked shows how successful we've been in linking our data: when we started out, it simply wasn't possible to imagine an ancient world of linked data, let alone think seriously about traversing it. But now that we have linked stuff together, the bar has been raised and people - rightly - want to do more with it. This presents a challenge to all the Pelagios partners to provide as much detail as possible in their metadata, in order to allow the kind of free play that a 10 year old - or a classicist - might want.

Perhaps we could start with the name: the Pelagios Graph Explorer isn't very sexy. Suggestions on the back of a postcard, or, ideally, on this blog, welcome.

A new comer to Pelagios: the Ptolemy Machine

In our extant literature from the Greco-Roman world, Claudius Ptolemy's Geography is a unique treatise on mathematical cartography. Its relevance for Pelagios is in part that it includes the largest scientific data set to survive from antiquity: more than 6000 named points are located with longitude-latitude coordinates in books 2-7, and more than 350 key cities are again located in an alternate astronomical coordinate system in book 8. The text of book 1 provides a systematic introduction, including two methods for drawing world maps. Books 7 and 8 include instructions for other kinds of visualizations.

With its combination of methods and data, Ptolemy's text is a kind of software for GIS. Ptolemy includes specific suggestions about how to realize his plan in hardware: he goes beyond the mathematical theory to discuss machinery and physical procedures for constructing maps. Scribes manually copying the text of the Geography applied these procedures directly to create maps in their manuscripts, but print editions have obscured the nature of Ptolemy's project as a dynamic (if not rapid) GIS.

To understand Ptolemy's work today, his software should be implemented in software. I have recently completed an initial digital edition of the Geography that is currently accessible via the Canonical Text Services protocol from http://ptolemymachine.appspot.com. From this edition, I can automatically extract all the named points with their lon-lat coordinates and several other attributes that Ptolemy assigns them in his text (e.g., type of feature, political unit, larger physical aggregate it belongs to...), and can serialize this information in a variety of formats for use in a GIS, including KML for direct use in Google Earth or Google Maps. (Above, Ptolemy's points in Google Earth colored by Roman province or foreign "satrapy.")

I am currently applying a variety of automated tests to the source text. In addition to traditional Greek "spell checking," I am analyzing Ptolemy's data for the spatial consistency of his attributes. (When all but one of the points assigned to a given Roman province fall uniquely within the convex hull of that group, but one point falls within the cluster of a different province, the most probable cause is a textual error. I'll blog a couple of telling examples in a later post.)

During the period of the Pelagios project, I'm planning to complement the text-view of the Geography at ptolemymachine.appspot.com with a GIS view of Ptolemy's text exposed through one or more network services. (I am still experimenting with a variety of options; I'm a newcomer to Google's Fusion Tables, but am impressed with their easy access to people who want to mash up geographic features, in the spirit of Pelagios.) I'm looking foward to seeing what others might do with this material.

Neel Smith

College of the Holy Cross

Worcester, MA