tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-56231718124885251652024-03-13T19:47:45.451+00:00Pelagios<i>Linking together the places of our past through the documents that refer to them</i>leifusshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06952570470805157338noreply@blogger.comBlogger117125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5623171812488525165.post-49165777992374268182016-03-03T14:29:00.000+00:002016-05-31T10:46:10.337+01:00Pelagios is Moving House<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: #cccccc;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">You are now being redirected to the new home of Pelagios on the web </span><a href="http://commons.pelagios.org/"><span style="font-size: x-large;">http://commons.pelagios.org/</span></a></span></span><br />
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Despite a period of silence on our blog the
Pelagios team have, as ever, been hard at work. This has included participation in
workshops and seminars across Europe to promote and
inform about our linked data approach, from Umeå to Athens. But the big news is that we have been
awarded <a href="http://www.alphagalileo.org/ViewItem.aspx?ItemId=161362&CultureCode=en" target="_blank">further funding</a> from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation!</div>
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For this new stage of the project, Pelagios is becoming a
Commons. We will be nurturing Special Interest Groups (SIGs) dedicated either
to investigating particular historical periods—from antiquity to the modern
era—or creating new tools, services and resources for discovering and
representing historical geography. These SIGs will have access to funds in
order to hold international workshops and create resources of mutual benefit,
such as maps, datasets or software. They will also be responsible for the
overall governance of Pelagios Commons. <o:p></o:p></div>
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In order to meet the aims of this new and important phase, we will be moving
to a new platform. Yes, we are bidding a fond farewell
to Blogger, after five years of hosting our conversation. Instead, we invite you all to our new home, <a href="http://commons.pelagios.org/">http://commons.pelagios.org/</a>, where you will find more details about Pelagios Commons and our tools, resources and documentation all on one site.</div>
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We hope to see you there very shortly!<o:p></o:p></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-qAtPNYc4i_E/VtW6L8nnMbI/AAAAAAAAAiw/dGpc2lQAGjQ/s1600/IMG_1095.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="209" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-qAtPNYc4i_E/VtW6L8nnMbI/AAAAAAAAAiw/dGpc2lQAGjQ/s320/IMG_1095.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Pelagios team enjoying the 'Death on the Nile' exhibition at the Fitzwilliam museum<br />
in Cambridge, at the launch of Pelagios Commons on 23 February 2016 </td></tr>
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Elton Barkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16088251025729181601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5623171812488525165.post-50330289133176708632015-08-11T22:02:00.003+01:002015-08-11T22:02:55.886+01:00Linked PastsAs Pelagios 3 and 4 are getting close to wrap up, we hosted an event at <a href="http://www.kcl.ac.uk/index.aspx">KCL</a> in London called <a href="http://www.eventbrite.com/e/pelagios-linked-pasts-tickets-16278937741">Linked Pasts</a>. We've been meaning to write a post about it but our friend and fellow-LOD-traveller <a href="http://www.york.ac.uk/archaeology/staff/ads-staff/holly-wright/">Holly Wright</a> has just done a terrific job describing it over at the <a href="http://ariadne-infrastructure.eu/">ARIADNE</a> blog and so it seems to make sense to point you <a href="http://ariadne-infrastructure.eu/News/ARIADNE-at-Linked-Pasts">over there</a>. We're hoping to arrange similar events in future so if you're interested in how the Linked Open Data ecosystem for the humanities is evolving then let us know and perhaps even consider hosting it!<br />
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We'll post links to the presentations shortly, but in the meantime you may want to check out the reports of the <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HYu2WtinW0fqrc4zuG8cPC0K5UTPVaA78OLyDrc4ZOQ/edit">people</a>, <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zyQ-JbpLaAuDzcaFAq9d3z3_Wy9o4zH2hOAIVylHuRM/edit">places</a> and <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/15WmqExo_8uTxK7RHoILnIS5292kPl6xS2iFY59F2vcg/edit">periods</a> breakout groups. A huge thanks to everyone who took part for making it such a success (and especially to <a href="http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/ddh/people/research/bodard/index.aspx">Gabriel Bodard</a> who really helped us pull it all together).<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://ariadne-infrastructure.eu/var/storage/images/media/images/pelagios-ecosystems/35735-1-eng-GB/Pelagios-ecosystems_large.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://ariadne-infrastructure.eu/var/storage/images/media/images/pelagios-ecosystems/35735-1-eng-GB/Pelagios-ecosystems_large.jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Linked Open Data Ecosystems. With Cats.</td></tr>
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<br />leifusshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06952570470805157338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5623171812488525165.post-68529966992056405742015-07-07T08:33:00.001+01:002015-07-08T08:43:19.394+01:00Peripleo: a Sneak Preview<p>There's been quite a loooong silence on this blog about our tool development activities. Not that we've been idle. Far from it: we've been as busy as ever in our top-secret underground hideaway. Those of you <a href="https://twitter.com/Pelagiosproject">following us on twitter</a> may have noticed the occasional screenshot or info-bite leaking out. But today we're finally ready to give you a first comprehensive sneak preview of what we've been up to: the development of a spatio-temporal search engine for Pelagios. Everyone, meet <strong>Peripleo</strong>.</p>
<p>Peripleo is Greek for "to sail (or swim) around", and the notion of being able to freely navigate the "sea of open data", collectively brought together by our partners (and discovering the treasures hidden in remote places and ancient times!) is exactly what we had in mind when we started out.</p>
<h3>Example 1: Tetradrachm</h3>
<p>To see how Peripleo works, let's take a swim through two examples. First, let's search for <strong>'tetradrachm'</strong>, a particular coin type. This brings us to the following result, shown in Fig. 1: a total of 23,346 hits, and a map with a distribution of lots of small dots (and one slightly larger than the rest), indicating where those results are located. We also get some preview images for our results.</p>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-PGF2RLPU0xI/VZtsnDvUkyI/AAAAAAAAAPA/hQsSZp3-B5o/s1600/peripleo-fig1.png" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-PGF2RLPU0xI/VZtsnDvUkyI/AAAAAAAAAPA/hQsSZp3-B5o/s1600/peripleo-fig1.png" style="width: 600px;" /></a></p>
<p class="image-caption">Fig.1 Search results for 'tetradrachm'.</p>
<p>Let's flip open the 'filters' panel to find out a bit more about those results (Fig.2). The filters panel shows us how our result data are organised. In this case, it tells us that most results come from the <a href="http://numismatics.org/search/">American Numismatic Society Collection</a>, with a small fraction of hits (hovering the mouse over the bars tells us there are nine) coming from the <a href="http://coins.lib.virginia.edu/">Fralin | UVa Art Museum Numismatic Collection</a>. We can also see how our results are distributed over time, between the 6th century BC and 3rd century AD, with the peak at around 300 BC.</p>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-tTE91EsXPOM/VZttYTWzm5I/AAAAAAAAAPI/KUi8a_pWu3I/s1600/peripleo-fig2.png" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-tTE91EsXPOM/VZttYTWzm5I/AAAAAAAAAPI/KUi8a_pWu3I/s1600/peripleo-fig2.png" style="width: 600px;" /></a></p>
<p class="image-caption">Fig.2 Filter panel.</p>
<p>We can go exploring further too, by, for example, zooming in on Sicily (Fig. 3). Since the information on our side panels will update live as we go, we can see how our results change as we zoom in. We can see that our current map area contains a subset of 892 results (out of our total of 23,346). Interestingly, we can also see that the distribution over time has changed: results around Sicily date roughly to between 500 and 200 BC, i.e. to the earlier phase of our total result set.</p>
<p>The biggest dot in the region indicates the place with the most results. Clicking it reveals that it's <a href="http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/462503">Syracusae</a>, and that 520 of our 892 results in the area are linked to it. We can move the map around to explore how the temporal distribution differs in other areas; and all the time Peripleo will live-update the contents of the filter panel, as well as the image previews.</p>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-lHGbo_xOXo4/VZtuSZYrWtI/AAAAAAAAAPQ/HGNu_qMsb1s/s1600/peripleo-fig3.png" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-lHGbo_xOXo4/VZtuSZYrWtI/AAAAAAAAAPQ/HGNu_qMsb1s/s1600/peripleo-fig3.png" style="width: 600px;" /></a></p>
<p class="image-caption">Fig.3 Results around Sicily.</p>
<p>Let's take a break and zoom back out, so that we can view all our results again. You may notice handles around that blue time distribution graphic. These handles are draggable. Let's pull them to select a time range in the beginning of the graphic: somewhere between 500 and 400 BC, say. Peripleo now shows results only from that time span. If we drag the selected range across the graphic, we'll see how the geographical spread of our results changes over time. Fig. 4 shows the map at the start (Fig.4, left) and end (Fig.4, right) positions of this shift, with distinctively different 'footprints' at the beginning and end of the overall time period.</p>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-HDs9KLPAfgU/VZtvLU8VcWI/AAAAAAAAAPY/vQeySWfefh8/s1600/peripleo-fig4.png" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-HDs9KLPAfgU/VZtvLU8VcWI/AAAAAAAAAPY/vQeySWfefh8/s1600/peripleo-fig4.png" style="height: 225px;" /></a>
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-dZTRQMLzqB0/VZtvPkyhBBI/AAAAAAAAAPg/6hbyXUB8wLo/s1600/peripleo-fig5.png" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-dZTRQMLzqB0/VZtvPkyhBBI/AAAAAAAAAPg/6hbyXUB8wLo/s1600/peripleo-fig5.png" style="height: 225px;" /></a>
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<p class="image-caption">Fig.4 Results filtered by time.</p>
<p>Needless to say, once you have narrowed down your search to specific items you are particularly interested in, you can go directly to the source of the data. In our case, it could be one of <a href="http://numismatics.org/collection/1966.54.2">these item pages at the American Numismatic Society MANTIS system</a>, for example.</p>
<h3>Example 2: Theatres</h3>
<p>Let's try another example and search for the term <strong>'theatre'</strong>. This time, Peripleo comes up with a handy set of 483 results (plus some corresponding preview images). The filters panel tells us that results come primarily from <a href="http://vici.org/">Vici.org</a> and the Flickr photostream of the <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/APAAME">Aerial Photographic Archive for Archaeology in the Middle East</a>. Before exploring any further, though, let's first switch the backdrop to an aerial imagery baselayer (Fig. 5).</p>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-S6ZC9-UzxLM/VZtwomA3gvI/AAAAAAAAAPs/fZEriA7kpog/s1600/peripleo-fig6.png" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-S6ZC9-UzxLM/VZtwomA3gvI/AAAAAAAAAPs/fZEriA7kpog/s1600/peripleo-fig6.png" style="width: 600px;" /></a></p>
<p class="image-caption">Fig.5 Map layer settings dialog.</p>
<p>Now let's move the map to a region we're interested in, say North Africa. Again, thumbnail images will update as we go along; and hovering over a thumbnail will place a marker at the location the thumbnail is from. Let's take a closer look at one of the results by clicking on its thumbnail (Fig. 6).</p>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-KIBVDpDz6V4/VZtxeNNafcI/AAAAAAAAAP0/W4CzTo072TM/s1600/peripleo-fig7.png" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-KIBVDpDz6V4/VZtxeNNafcI/AAAAAAAAAP0/W4CzTo072TM/s1600/peripleo-fig7.png" style="width: 600px;" /></a></p>
<p class="image-caption">Fig.6 Aerial imagery baselayer.</p>
<p>The map will zoom in on the place we selected: <a href="http://vici.org/vici/7898/">a Roman theatre at Djemila, Algeria, that's recorded in Vici.org</a>. Peripleo indicates that no additional data is linked directly to the theatre. But let's see whether we can find something interesting in the area around it. We can do this by clicking the blue 'explore this area' button, next to the search box. Peripleo brings up markers for other places nearby, sized according to how much data there is available for them. In this case, we can, for example, quickly spot the marker for <a href="http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/305068">Cuicul</a>, the main settlement, which is linked to 133 inscriptions recorded in the <a href="http://edh-www.adw.uni-heidelberg.de/">Epigraphic Database Heidelberg</a>.</p>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-bNEsXU67twk/VZtx1YRYJfI/AAAAAAAAAP8/FPl6WALRCCo/s1600/peripleo-fig8.png" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-bNEsXU67twk/VZtx1YRYJfI/AAAAAAAAAP8/FPl6WALRCCo/s1600/peripleo-fig8.png" style="width: 600px;" /></a></p>
<p class="image-caption">Fig.7 Exploring an area.</p>
<h3>But Wait - There's More!</h3>
<p>This illustrates some of the things that you'll be able to do with Peripleo. But there are more things coming! For example: the scenarios above might give the impression that Peripleo is limited to treating places as points; and each item needs to be located at one specific place. That's not the case. Places in Peripleo can cover regions - see e.g. a search for 'galliae' in Fig. 8 (left) below. (Peripleo makes use of the <a href="https://github.com/pelagios/gazetteer-data/tree/master/magis-pleiades-regions">Creative Commons 'Polygon Shapes for Pleiades Regions' dataset by Pedar Foss, AWMC</a>.) Items can be connected to anything from a single place, to thousands - see e.g. a search for 'vicarello' in Fig. 8 (right), which returns, among other things, the <a href="http://pelagios-project.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/iwp2-pelagios-and-beakers-of-vicarello_17.html">Vicarello Beakers and the entire Itinerarium Gaditanum inscribed on them</a> (along with the <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/ryanfb/10171650146/in/photostream/">beautiful CC-BY photographs by Ryan Baumann</a>).</p>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-xpSJSN88bT0/VZt7aWO24cI/AAAAAAAAAQM/GCnlfVaoFXY/s1600/peripleo-fig9.png" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-xpSJSN88bT0/VZt7aWO24cI/AAAAAAAAAQM/GCnlfVaoFXY/s1600/peripleo-fig9.png" style="height: 225px;" /></a>
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-8fi3UmoprB4/VZt7dxVnolI/AAAAAAAAAQU/ZR1qCuIjsJM/s1600/peripleo-fig10.png" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-8fi3UmoprB4/VZt7dxVnolI/AAAAAAAAAQU/ZR1qCuIjsJM/s1600/peripleo-fig10.png" style="height: 225px;" /></a>
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<p class="image-caption">Fig.8 Regions (left) and complex items (right).</p>
<p>We feel that Peripleo offers a tantalising glimpse into a new way of doing research, of discovering what's in the data, and revealing connections that would otherwise have been much harder to trace. Yet this work marks only the first steps towards tapping into the vast potential of the digital resources brought together by our partners, collectively and openly. That is to say, Peripleo is still a work in progress. Or, as I like to say, playing with Peripleo isn't "beta testing" just yet, but rather like taking a stroll across a busy construction site. Nonetheless: we're really eager to get first test users into the system, and find out what YOU think. What works? What doesn't?</p>
<p>So, if you're not afraid to put on your hard hat, and don't mind stumbling across the occasional unfinished area - we'd love to invite you to have a play with Peripleo yourself. Do drop us a line if you're interested to take a look & we'll give you access right away. We'd love to hear your feedback!</p>
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</style>Rainer Simonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13818422993558387655noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5623171812488525165.post-49629542115365552682015-06-11T10:13:00.002+01:002015-06-11T10:13:52.114+01:00Return to Gaul<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i>This post has been written by first-year students of the master "<a href="http://classnum.hypotheses.org/">Humanités classiques et humanités numériques</a>".</i><br />
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We are French students in the master “Classical Humanities and Digital Humanities” at Paris-Ouest Nanterre La Défense University. One of our courses is a short collaborative project and we decided to contribute to Pelagios. The interdisciplinary and contributive nature of this project on ancient places makes it very relevant for students like us.<br />
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Due to our background, we were immediately interested in the way literary texts are dealt with in Pelagios. The idea was to choose a text and mark up all place names we would find with the Recogito tool. Our aim was to have a direct experience of the issues raised by digital editing, one of the core activities of digital humanists. Through the actual marking up of Rutilius Namatianus' <i>De reditu suo</i> (a text describing his return from Rome to Gaul – see the <a href="http://pelagios.org/recogito/documents/45/map">map</a>) and the collaborative revision process, we realised that it was not that easy, in some cases, to determine whether a word was indeed a place name and, if so, whether it had to be marked up and indicated on the map. For instance, one special feature of ancient texts is that they frequently refer to mythological places. But is a mythological place really a place in this context? Should we mark up Mount Olympus when it appears as the home of the Greek gods?<br />
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When a place is designated by the name of the people who live there, it is not always clear whether the narrator means the country or the people. Marking up texts thus turned out to be a captivating, even philosophical, activity and those who claim it tiresome have, no doubt, malicious tongues.</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06803156516699675095noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5623171812488525165.post-25389640221157426092015-03-24T08:22:00.001+00:002015-03-29T14:59:11.594+01:00Linked Pasts<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">The Pelagios project is pleased to announce a two-day colloquium on the subject of “Linked Pasts”, <b>20-21 July 2015</b>, at KCL (The Great Hall, The Strand Campus). Bringing together leading exponents of Linked Data from across the Humanities and Cultural Heritage sector, we address some of the challenges to developing a digital ecosystem of online open materials, through two days of position papers, discussion and breakout group activity. Day 1 will tackle the themes of Time, Geo and People, and issues of Open Data, Classification Schemes and Infrastructure. Day 2 will be devoted to two parallel structured activities, one exploring Niches (space, time, people), and the other Nutrition Cycles (open data, classification, infrastructure). For details of the line up of talks and contributors, see below.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">Refreshments (tea/coffee, lunch) will be provided, along with a reception on Monday evening.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">The event is free of charge but places are limited. Please reserve your place through <a href="https://www.eventbrite.com/e/pelagios-linked-pasts-tickets-16278937741" target="_blank">Eventbrite</a>.</span></span><br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-dYbUqjXagsw/VRBcWRYBiMI/AAAAAAAAAbU/l3_vcVYjdd0/s1600/Itinerary_by_Matthew_Paris_-_Historia_Anglorum_(1250-1259)%2C_f.2_-_BL_Royal_MS_14_C_VII.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-dYbUqjXagsw/VRBcWRYBiMI/AAAAAAAAAbU/l3_vcVYjdd0/s1600/Itinerary_by_Matthew_Paris_-_Historia_Anglorum_(1250-1259)%2C_f.2_-_BL_Royal_MS_14_C_VII.jpg" height="320" width="236" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">Matthew Paris: Itinerary from London to Jerusalem. CC0</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">(</span><span style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 20.7999992370605px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Maps_by_Matthew_Paris)</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">Day 1</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"> Welcome – Pelagios: A Linked Pasts Ecosystem?</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"> Keynote – Sebastian Heath (NYU), Does a Linked Future Mean Past Understanding? </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">Session 1 </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"> Time – Ryan Shaw (UNC), An Ecosystem of Time Periods: PeriodO</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"> Geo – Ruth Mostern (UC Merced), An Ecosystem of Places: Gazetteers</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"> People – Gabriel Bodard (KCL), An Ecosystem of People: SNAP</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"> Open Data – Mia Ridge (OU), Trends and Practice within Cultural Heritage</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"> Classification schemes – Antoine Isaac (Amsterdam), Europeana</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">Day 2 </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">Session 3: Towards an Infrastructure</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"> Rainer Simon (AIT): The Recogito Annotation Platform</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"> Humphrey Southall (Portsmouth): PastPlace gazetteer</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"> Guenther Goerz (Erlangen): WissKI</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"> Holly Wright/Doug Tudhope: Ariadne</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">Session 4</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"> Structured Activity 1: Niches (Space, Time, People)</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"> Structured Activity 2: Nutrition Cycles (Open Data, Classification, Infrastructure) </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">Wrap up: feedback, next steps + community actions</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">**Linked data goodness brought to you by elton, leif, rainer + pau**</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">***The colloquium is made possible by the generosity of our funders, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the AHRC***</span></span><br />
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Elton Barkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16088251025729181601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5623171812488525165.post-26990065213490243142015-02-13T14:15:00.001+00:002015-02-18T18:36:10.519+00:00Medieval sea-charts - centuries before their time<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Figure 1: Annotating portolan charts in Recogito</span></div>
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It's hard to describe the appearance of a portolan chart -
the medieval answer to the modern Admiralty chart - if you haven't already been
able to see one. Very few early examples
are freely available online but you can find a chart of 1403 here: <a href="http://brbl-dl.library.yale.edu/vufind/Record/3521236">http://brbl-dl.library.yale.edu/vufind/Record/3521236</a>.
Probably originating in the 13th century, though not everybody agrees about
that, the portolan charts present the <st1:place>Old World</st1:place> with
immediate recognisability. Covering the
coastlines of the <st1:place>Mediterranean</st1:place> and <st1:place><st1:placename>Black</st1:placename>
<st1:placetype>Seas</st1:placetype></st1:place>, along with the Atlantic
shoreline up to <st1:country-region>Denmark</st1:country-region>
(and the <st1:place>British Isles</st1:place>), they contradict every normal preconception
about medieval cartography. You don't need to have <st1:country-region>Italy</st1:country-region>,
the <st1:place>Nile</st1:place> delta, <st1:place>Crimea</st1:place> and so on
pointed out. They are where you would
expect and pretty much how they ought to be.</div>
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Why Pelagios 3 devotes an entire segment to the 'portolan'
world though is because of their dense toponymy. Taking into account all the
islands, an average chart lists perhaps 2000 ports and harbours, as well as natural
features, especially the headlands which served as reference points for
sailors.</div>
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Besides the portolan charts we also have access to portolan
texts or, to help distinguish the two formats, the Italian term, <i>portolano /
portolani</i>. Two of those survive from
the 13th century, also the likely date (at its very end) of the Carte Pisane
that is generally considered the oldest extant chart. Whereas the delineation of the coastlines had,
by about 1340, broadly reached the form that would be repeated for several
centuries, the place-names were being steadily updated. Given the Pelagios terminal date of 1492,
that gives us a changing toponymy from three centuries of written navigational
guides and two in the case of the charts. </div>
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The portolan component will both enrich Pelagios and, we
hope, benefit from it. Less than half the coastal toponyms on the oldest <i>portolani</i>,
the 'Liber de existencia riveriarum' (early 13th century) and 'Lo compasso de
navegare' (dated 1296), are found on the other, and a sizeable number do not
appear on the charts at all. Likewise
the toponymy of the Carte Pisane, and two other anonymous charts associated
with it (now preserved in Cortona and
Lucca) partly overlap with one another but also have hundreds of names not seen
elsewhere. Considered together, these
are rich sources for historians of medieval navigation and trade, since their
inclusion in these works must point to them having a perceived significance at
the time - even more so for the roughly one in five names that were picked out
in red on the charts.</div>
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Overall, and leaving aside the islands, there are about 2000
mainland names that can be tied to a dated chart or atlas before 1492 and
something like a further 600 noted only in one or other of the <i>portolani</i>
texts or undated charts. Conveniently, both
the <i>portolani</i> narratives and the nautical charts provide a
geographically linear toponymic catalogue for the <st1:place>Mediterranean</st1:place>
and <st1:place>Black Sea</st1:place>. When the current name can be recognised
in its medieval equivalent, or where the successive re-naming has been
documented, those fixed points can then be used to locate the approximate present-day
position of unidentified names. The most helpful source for this matching
exercise will be 19th and 20th-century maps and Admiralty charts produced
before expanding ports, or the general touristification of the sandy bits in
between, gobbled up the old names, and often what they represented as well. Early gazetteers can help to corroborate the
guesswork.</div>
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That describes the potential contribution that the rich maritime
data can make to Pelagios. In exchange,
portolan historians anticipate the help that other medieval maps and texts can
give with the modern identification of some of the more elusive toponyms they have
been wrestling with. Regional historians
and archaeologists may also appreciate being introduced to what will be a new
source to many of them.</div>
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The toponymy for some of the portolan regions have already
been documented in detail (N.E. Spain, the <st1:place>Adriatic</st1:place> and
the <st1:place>Black Sea</st1:place>). Besides what is being extracted from the
original documents by the Pelagios team, the remainder will be sourced from a
comprehensive listing that was compiled originally in preparation for a chapter
in Volume 1 of <i>The History of Cartography</i>
(University of Chicago Press, 1987) and then fleshed out and expanded over
recent years. The resulting Excel
spreadsheet is publicly accessible at <a href="http://www.maphistory.info/">http://www.maphistory.info/</a><span style="background-color: white;"><a href="http://portolancharttoponymyfulltablerevised.xls/"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial;">PortolanChartToponymyFullTable</span><st1:stockticker><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial;">REV</span></st1:stockticker><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial;">ISED.xls</span></a>,</span> where it forms part
of a detailed ongoing investigation into the portolan charts (<span style="font-size: 11.0pt;"><a href="http://www.maphistory.info/portolan.html">http://www.maphistory.info/portolan.html</a></span>).<br />
<br />
**Former map librarian of the British Library (1987-2001), since 1993 Tony Campbell has been chairman of Imago Mundi Ltd, in which capacity he acts as co-ordinator for the biennial International Conference on the History of Cartography. He is working on Pelagios 4 as the expert adviser on portolan charts.</div>
</div>
Tony Campbellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10961306051530130300noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5623171812488525165.post-63366042554335838082015-01-15T11:34:00.003+00:002015-02-18T15:34:35.443+00:00What Do You Do with a Million Links?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-CXpiRWUdDy8/VOSwVj8H6KI/AAAAAAAAAaE/qI6WlU2H0nQ/s1600/Untitled.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-CXpiRWUdDy8/VOSwVj8H6KI/AAAAAAAAAaE/qI6WlU2H0nQ/s1600/Untitled.png" height="262" width="320" /></a></div>
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Figure 1: The Pelagios 3 graph of data</div>
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The Pelagios team had a paper entitled '<a href="https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/18447022/Pelagios_WDYDWAML_SCS.pptx" target="_blank">What Do You Do with a Million Links</a>?' accepted at the <a href="http://dca.drupalgardens.com/content/making-meaning-data-panel-aia-scs-new-orleans-jan-11-2015" target="_blank">Digital Classics Association organised session at the Society of Classical Studies</a> in New Orleans this month. Sadly, none of us were able to attend in person so to make our contribution we recorded an audio ppt which you can download from the link above (it's 212MB so you'll want a reasonable internet connection). Let us know what you would do with a million links!<br />
<br />
A huge thanks to <a href="http://classics.buffalo.edu/people/faculty/neil-coffee/" target="_blank">Neil Coffee</a> and all involved for bringing the session together.<br />
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leifusshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06952570470805157338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5623171812488525165.post-70298612904133071902014-11-13T08:13:00.001+00:002014-11-13T08:14:06.473+00:00Bringing About the SEA CHANGE<p>About two weeks ago, on Friday October 31, we held the first of two annotation workshops funded through the <a href="http://dm2e.eu/open-humanities-awards-round-2-winners-announced/">Open Humanities Awards</a>, designed to gather data through our Recogito "crowdsourcing" interface. The <a href="http://www.geog.uni-heidelberg.de/">Heidelberg University Institute of Geography</a> kindly agreed to be our host for this inaugural event. A big thank you goes to <a href="http://www.geog.uni-heidelberg.de/personen/gis_loos.html">Lukas Loos</a> for setting up our visit and taking care of local organization, and to <a href="http://www.asia-europe.uni-heidelberg.de/de/personen/academic-staff/wissenschaftler-personendetails/persdetail/volkmann.html">Armin Volkmann</a> for his spontaneous decision to merge his geo-archaeology seminar with our workshop on that day.</p>
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<img border="0" src="//4.bp.blogspot.com/-YfilB2KZ0lY/VGN3oM8DujI/AAAAAAAAANQ/tb9rG2xYwlM/s1600/participants-at-work-1024x477.jpg" width="720" />
</a>
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<p>And with what an effect. We were blown away by the results! In just two hours, our 27 participants made 6.620 contributions to 51 different documents (19 text and 32 maps). We've written a comprehensive report over at the <a href="http://dm2e.eu/open-humanities-awards-sea-change-update-2/">DM2E blog</a>. Be sure not to miss it!</p>Rainer Simonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13818422993558387655noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5623171812488525165.post-86816371400100048382014-10-14T15:01:00.002+01:002014-10-21T16:06:46.374+01:00Greece (is the Time, is the Place, is the Motion)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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It turns out The Bee Gees <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x18pVYUHJwA" target="_blank">were right</a>. We've wrapped up work (for now) on Greek early geographic documents and the experience has made it clear that time, place and motion do indeed feature heavily.</div>
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First a few statistics. Our objective - as always - has been to identify sources for as many documents as we could, both in the original Greek and in modern translation. Wherever possible we have used open access, online materials so that people can access the texts and read them for themselves. This time we have identified some 66 works, of which we were able to obtain digital texts for 42 of them (and 8 in both languages). You can see our list of available texts on the <a href="http://pelagios.org/recogito/?collection=greek+tradition" target="_blank">Recogito public site</a> and we’d be very happy to hear any suggestions for working with those texts which are still missing. Pau has been working like <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wK63eUyk-iM" target="_blank">Greased Lightning</a> over these long <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZW0DfsCzfq4" target="_blank">Summer Nights</a> to produce a remarkable 48,000 edits (and counting)!</div>
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Pau has not been alone in this work either. We’ll talk more about the new <a href="https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/recogito-editors" target="_blank">Recogito Editors</a> group in a future blog post, but for now we’d like to say an especially big thank you to <a href="https://independent.academia.edu/JohnBradyKiesling" target="_blank">Brady Kiesling</a> who donated a large number of pre-annotated texts from his wonderful ToposText project, and even did some <a href="https://www.academia.edu/8243687/Stadiasmus_of_the_Great_Sea_Anonymous_a_free_English_translation" target="_blank">translation</a> to boot. Shout-outs also go to <a href="https://mta-ca.academia.edu/BruceRobertson" target="_blank">Bruce Robertson</a>, <a href="https://ucl.academia.edu/GretaFranzini" target="_blank">Greta Franzini</a> and <a href="https://uni-leipzig.academia.edu/MonicaBerti" target="_blank">Monica Berti</a> for their help in OCR’ing Greek geographic texts.</div>
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Thanks to Rainer’s hard work, the Recogito interface is really starting to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPRHEqfm1JY" target="_blank">shape up</a>. Not only are new features such as detailed <a href="http://pelagios.org/recogito/stats" target="_blank">user- and document-stats</a> being added regularly, but there’s now a <a href="http://pelagios.org/recogito/static/documentation/index.html" target="_blank">tutorial</a> for users, and various small enhancements were made to the front page (e.g. temporal ordering of documents, so that you can start to see the development of ancient geography at a glance). There are other major changes afoot for our third Content Workpackage on the <a href="http://pelagios.org/recogito/?collection=christian+tradition" target="_blank">early Christian tradition</a>… but you’ll have to wait for another blog post to hear more about that.</div>
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<span style="text-align: left;">Just like last time, we’ve generated a preliminary heatmap of our work on the Greek sources so far. Even incomplete as it is, it’s fascinating to see our authors focus not only on the Aegean Sea, Magna Graecia and the Black Sea, but also their explorations along the Red Sea, the Atlantic and even the Silk Road. </span></div>
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So what about those sources? The list of documents we’ve been working with includes some of the biggest and most important in the history of geography, including <a href="http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0239%3Abook%3D1%3Achapter%3D1%3Asection%3D1" target="_blank">Strabo</a>, <a href="http://www2.open.ac.uk/openlearn/hestia/index.html#book/1/read/1" target="_blank">Herodotus</a> and the immense <a href="http://www.stoa.org/sol/about.shtml" target="_blank">Suda</a>. We said that Greece was the place, but in fact what we are really talking about, and what emerges from these early investigations, is just how many places the "Greek world" comprises of and how many places "Greek knowledge" extends to. Time also plays an essential role. From <a href="http://ptolemymachine.appspot.com/CTS?withXSLT=chs-gp&request=GetPassagePlus&urn=urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0363.tlg009.chs01:1.22" target="_blank">Ptolemy’s "Hour Intervals"</a>, which divide up the world like the face of a huge celestial clock, to the Spartan Cleomenes's <a href="http://www2.open.ac.uk/openlearn/hestia/index.html#book/1/read/813" target="_blank">alarming realisation</a> that it was not a matter of days to travel to the Persian capital but months, time is used to try to make sense of, or express bewilderment at, the vast distances being talked about. And Greek geography is not just static, but frequently in motion, with <a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=W9dEaFMqSUQC" target="_blank">stadiasmoi</a>, <a href="http://pelagios.org/recogito/map?doc=30" target="_blank">periploi</a>, <a href="http://parthia.com/doc/parthian_stations.htm#PARTHIAN_STATIONS" target="_blank">itineraries</a> and even the occasional <a href="http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/ancient/periplus.asp" target="_blank">International Business Traveller</a>. <span style="text-align: left;">We hope you enjoy exploring these documents as much as we do. If you’d like to get involved and help us annotate the rest, please do get in touch. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pyA6jAM3_I" target="_blank">We'll go together like....</a></span></div>
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leifusshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06952570470805157338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5623171812488525165.post-27502582638856348082014-10-02T12:21:00.001+01:002014-10-03T10:42:32.972+01:00“How many miles to Babylon?”<p>The answer to this famous nursery
rhyme – “three score and ten”, i.e. 70 km – seems outrageously high for a day's journey, no matter “if
your heels are [exceptionally] nimble and light”. (Even swift-footed Achilles would struggle to cover 70 km in day!) So, what are we to make of it? How can we evaluate
such a distance number?</p>
<p>This is where the "database ancient measurements" comes in. The project was initially sponsored by Berlin's excellence cluster
<a href="https://www.topoi.org/">TOPOI</a> and is managed now by my IT whiz Rainer Streng who set it up in MS Access and programmed data exports into "Google Earth" and
applications in "ArcGIS 10". <a href="https://tu-dresden.academia.edu/IrinaTupikova">Irina Tupikova</a>, who by day is an astronomer and mathematician, is also
working on Ptolemy's data, recalculating the spherical coordinates to the original measurements.</p>
<p>As far as we know, there is no comparable collection of this kind. Right now, our database includes nearly 100 ancient authors and their works, especially ancient geographers and historians (Strabo,
Pliny, Herodotus, Thucydides etc.), but also minor authors like the pseudo-Aristotelian work <em>de mundo</em> or Horace's <em>Satires</em>. All in all we have in our database 2466 "distances", i.e., attested routes with two points and a number. (Among them eleven routes for Babylon, and even bigger figures for a "day´s journey" than the 70 km in the nursery rhyme, if you are interested!)</p>
<p>What can one do with these data? We think: a lot! To start with:</p>
<ul>
<li>How accurate and reliable were ancient measurements data?</li>
<li>What units are attested and how do they relate to each other? This is a basic and notorious question in the field of ancient metrology.</li>
<li>Who measured or rather estimated distances in antiquity? Soldiers, explorers, merchants? Were there any attempts to map a whole country or empire and standardize the many
distances in antiquity? If so, was this a "bottom-up" process done by practitioners like seamen or merchants or a "top-down" one, organized by a central
administration?</li>
</ul>
<p>But there are potentially much more searching questions, such as:</p>
<ul>
<li>How does an ancient author employ numbers, especially distances as a means to engage with his readership, in order to bring home his own ideas or
concepts? Authors like Herodotus or Thucydides were very careful (and sometimes even deceptive!) in using numbers in their narratives.</li>
<li>How can we use measurement data to explore one of the most basic, important and comparable properties of space is its extension, its spatiality? If researchers concern themselves with spaces, they should not ignore this aspect (as they mostly do). Distances are a means to evaluate the different concepts of space the ancients had in mind. But they allow us also to
reconstruct not only the real maps of ancient geographers but also the "mental maps" of merchants, soldiers, intellectuals etc.</li>
<li>How can a corpus of ancient measurement data allow us to reconstruct ancient routes and waterways and, in addition, social phenomena like migration or mobility? The ambitious application Rainer works on now, is an ancient network of ancient routes and waterways (something like <em>Orbis</em> or <em>Omnes Viae</em>, but based on our measurement data).</li>
</ul>
<p>To give just a small example:</p>
<div style="text-align:center">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-UFbNXWE2Rck/VC5sswYq30I/AAAAAAAAANA/wPUG7RbuDzk/s1600/map.png" imageanchor="1">
<img style="border: 1px solid #ccc;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-UFbNXWE2Rck/VC5sswYq30I/AAAAAAAAANA/wPUG7RbuDzk/s1600/map.png" />
</a>
<p style="text-align:center; font-weight:bold; padding-top:0; margin-top:10px;">The green line depicts the route between Tridentum and Rome, a route, which according<br/>
to the "codex Theodosianus" (6.28.1) can be covered in 34 days. 34 days of travel <br/>
are "normally" equivalent to c. 850 km (a day´s journey calculated as 25 km). The<br/>
linear distance according to Google Earth is 477.58 km. But our ArcGIS model shows that<br/>
the route on known Roman roads is in fact 90 km longer, i.e. 567.40 km.</p>
</div>
<p>The meetings with the nimble-footed Pelagios team (zigzagging between several locations all over Berlin in one and a
half days) helped us sharpen our own profile and scientific approach tremendously. Fine-tuning our data and making it compatible and interoperable with the other
Pelagios partners will be undertaken over the upcoming months. Watch this space!</p>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04437244001377710957noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5623171812488525165.post-50974284673921481712014-09-29T13:31:00.003+01:002014-10-03T10:38:31.087+01:00Taking to the high seas: introducing Pelagios phase 4<p>This month sees the start of another new and exciting phase of Pelagios. With
funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council's <a href="http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/Funding-Opportunities/Research-funding/Themes/Digital-Transformations/Pages/Digital-Transformations.aspx">Digital Transformations</a> programme, we will be exploring the transformative potential of our
linked open data network for doing research. In short our brief is to address the question, "ok, now we can link stuff online—so what?"</p>
<p>In response to the challenge posed by "<a href="http://searchcloudapplications.techtarget.com/definition/data-silo">data silos</a>" (the mass of independently produced material uploaded onto the Web), since 2011 we have been developing the means of linking online resources via their common references to place. This has involved "annotating" the place names found in documents and aligning those references to a global gazetteer service (for the ancient world,
this is <a href="http://pleiades.stoa.org/">Pleiades</a>). Using Pleiades's <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_resource_identifier">Uniform Resource Identifiers</a> (or "social security numbers") for each ancient place as our glue, it is now possible to agree that places mentioned in different materials are one and the same (e.g. Classical Athens and not "Athens, Georgia"). Users are now able to move seamlessly between and search the records of a growing list of <a href="http://pelagios-project.blogspot.co.uk/p/partners.html">international partners</a>.</p>
<p>Thus each place annotation made in the document doesn’t just attach useful spatial information to a
resource; it also provides a way of linking to other resources. But, as Andrew Prescott, leader of the AHRC’s Digital Transformations strand, has <a href="http://digitalriffs.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/the-deceptions-of-data.html">recently written</a>: <em>'Scholarship is much harder than [the ability to link]: we need to be clear about why we are linking data, what sort of data we are linking, and our aim in doing so'</em>. Our one-year grant from the AHRC looks to unlock the potential of our place network to reveal previously unknown connections between different places and different documents (texts, databases, maps, etc.).</p>
<p>In particular what we want to do is to use these new links between different documents to rethink key periods in the
history of cartography. Until now digital resources have largely concerned issues of accuracy and visualization; i.e. to
pinpoint the locations of ancient places with respect to our contemporary topography. What we want to do, rather, is to try to reconstruct and interpret the markedly different ways in which pre-modern authors and mapmakers conceptualized the
world. Turning the spotlight on to five moments in time, Pelagios 4 will explore how ancient or pre-modern authors used various means to grasp, represent and communicate spatial knowledge of the world around them.</p>
<p>To conduct this research Pelagios is happy to announce the following scholarly collaborators:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://univ-lyon2.academia.edu/PascalARNAUD">Pascal Arnaud</a>, Professor of History at Université Lyon 2 and senior member of the Institut universitaire de France (IUF), is the leading specialist in ancient geography and navigation.</li>
<li><a href="http://www.maphistorydirectory.org/index.php/User:Campbell.Tony">Tony Campbell</a> is former head of the British Library’s ‘Map Room’ and the pre-eminent expert on Portolan Charts.</li>
<li><a href="http://www.southampton.ac.uk/english/about/staff/mod1w07.page">Marianne O'Doherty</a>, Lecturer in English at the University of Southampton, has published on medieval European travel narratives, geography and cartography.</li>
<li><a href="https://www.topoi.org/person/geus-klaus/">Klaus Geus</a>, Chair of Ancient Geography at FU Berlin, co-ordinates the TOPOI Excellence Cluster in ‘Common Sense Geography’. He is joined by <a href="https://tu-dresden.academia.edu/IrinaTupikova">Irina Tupikova</a>, a leading mathematical astronomer with an interest in the history of science.</li>
</ul>
<p>We look forward to working with these scholars and rethinking the ways in which geographic space was imagined and represented before the advent of modern Cartesian cartography.</p>
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<img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-K7wH_-919Z4/VCkbAtyqSBI/AAAAAAAAAVI/KXEDpgdmy_A/s1600/1024px-Jorge_Aguiar_1492_MR.jpg" width="580"/>
<p style="text-align:center; font-weight:bold; padding-top:0; margin-top:0;">
Portolan chart by Jorge de Aguiar (1492), the oldest known<br/> signed and dated chart of Portuguese origin.
</p>
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<p><em><a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jorge_Aguiar_1492_MR.jpg#mediaviewer/File:Jorge_Aguiar_1492_MR.jpg">Citation: "Jorge Aguiar 1492 MR" by Jorge de Aguiar - Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Yale, New Haven, USA. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons</a></em></p>Elton Barkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16088251025729181601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5623171812488525165.post-3346479811431972872014-06-24T10:09:00.002+01:002014-06-24T15:42:32.259+01:00What Have the Romans Ever Mapped for Us? Results from the Latin Geographic Tradition<style>.downloads li { padding-bottom:20px !important; }</style>
<p>Having recently completed our first content workpackage (CWP1), dedicated to Early Geospatial Documents from the Latin Tradition, we'd like to take this opportunity to share the annotation data that we've compiled so far. Overall we have completed annotating place references in 33 documents (41 if we include additional language versions of the same document). Within these documents, we've identified 19,880 toponyms, and were able to establish mappings to Pleiades in 15,721 cases (79%).</p>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-pRgTnj6M2NM/U6k-t_hhTbI/AAAAAAAAAMg/GzSDOG-5Etg/s1600/what-have-the-romans-ever-mapped-for-us.jpg">
<img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-pRgTnj6M2NM/U6k-t_hhTbI/AAAAAAAAAMg/GzSDOG-5Etg/s1600/what-have-the-romans-ever-mapped-for-us.jpg" style="width:710px; border:1px solid #ccc;"/>
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<p style="text-align:center; font-weight:bold; padding-top:0; margin-top:0;">Spatial distribution of toponyms annotated in CWP1 - Latin Tradition</p>
</div>
<p>You can find the complete list of our documents, along with a download link for the data, below. The annotations are stored in CSV format - i.e. they can be opened in a spreadsheet application, or imported into a database or GIS.</p>
<p>An additional part of our work in CWP1 (which will be important too for all our content work packages) has been to identify additional relevant documents as we go along. Our list of "geospatial documents" has therefore grown quite substantially. We have included these documents in our annotation tool <a href="http://pelagios-project.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/theres-pliny-of-room-at-bottom-1.html">Recogito</a>. You can follow their status directly on <a href="http://pelagios.org/recogito/?collection=latin+tradition">Recogito's Latin Tradition landing page</a>.</p>
<p>Now that we have finished work on the first of our six traditions, we are keen to get your feedback. In particular:</p>
<ol>
<li>We look forward to seeing what and how you make use of these data. We're sure that you'll use them in ways that we can't anticipate, and we'd love you to share that with us!</li>
<li>The large number of documents, the ambiguity of the evidence and the comparatively short space of time mean that some of our identifications will inevitably be wrong or open to debate. We are planning a mechanism to allow people to suggest alternative suggestions or to indicate agreement and disagreement. In the meantime, feel free to contact us if you have proposals for corrections. We're also happy to hear suggestions for other early latin geographic documents which we may have missed.</li>
<li>Since, as we expected, we could not fully annotate or geo-resolve all of our documents, we're interested in hearing from people who might be willing to join us in the challenge. If you would like to join in and help find places in the incomplete documents, feel free to get in touch and we may be able to provide you with a Recogito account. We'll have to roll this out slowly since Recogito is not a 'community tool' as such (with features such as full moderation, user profiles, etc) so please be aware that there may be a wait if we get a lot of volunteers!</li>
</ol>
<span style="border-top: 1px solid #ccc; display: block; margin: 0 auto 20px auto; width: 60%;"></span>
<ul class="downloads">
<li>
<strong><a href="http://pelagios.org/recogito/map?doc=73" target="_blank">Agrippa Fragments</a>.</strong><br />
113 toponyms. 80 Pleiades matches.<br />
<a href="http://pelagios.org/downloads/p3/toponyms/latin-tradition/Agrippa_Fragments_la.csv">[CSV]</a>
</li>
<li>
<strong><a href="http://pelagios.org/recogito/map?doc=67" target="_blank">Milestone of Allichamps</a></strong><br />
3 toponyms. 3 Pleiades matches.<br />
<a href="http://pelagios.org/downloads/p3/toponyms/latin-tradition/Milestone_de_Allichamps_la.csv">[CSV]</a>
<a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=B_3xBWiruPcC&lpg=PA23&ots=y8DEo_TkBc&dq=roman+itinerary+inscription+valencia&pg=PA22&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=roman%20itinerary%20inscription%20valencia&f=false">[Source Weblink]</a>
</li>
<li>
<strong><a href="http://pelagios.org/recogito/map?doc=18" target="_blank">Pomponius Mela: De Chorographia (around 43 CE)</a></strong><br />
2186 toponyms. 1778 Pleiades matches.<br />
<a href="http://pelagios.org/downloads/p3/toponyms/latin-tradition/De_Chorographia_la.csv">[CSV]</a>
<a href="http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/pomponius1.html">[Source Weblink]</a>
</li>
<li>
<strong><a href="http://pelagios.org/recogito/map?doc=64" target="_blank">Laterculus of Valencia (post 100 CE)</a></strong><br />
11 toponyms. 11 Pleiades matches.<br />
<a href="http://pelagios.org/downloads/p3/toponyms/latin-tradition/Laterculus_of_Valencia_la.csv">[CSV]</a>
<a href="http://eda-bea.es/pub/record_card_2.php?refpage=%252Fpub%252Fsearch_select.php&quicksearch=CIL+II+48&order=4&page=37&rec=11826">[Source Weblink]</a>
</li>
<li>
<strong><a href="http://pelagios.org/recogito/map?doc=58" target="_blank">Lavs Alexandriae (post 180 CE)</a></strong><br />
5 toponyms. 5 Pleiades matches.<br />
<a href="http://pelagios.org/downloads/p3/toponyms/latin-tradition/Lavs_Alexandriae_la.csv">[CSV]</a>
<a href="https://archive.org/stream/geographilatinim00ries#page/140/mode/1up">[Source Weblink]</a>
</li>
<li>
<strong><a href="http://pelagios.org/recogito/map?doc=32" target="_blank">Piazzale delle Corporazioni, Ostia (175 - 200 CE)</a></strong><br />
14 toponyms. 14 Pleiades matches.<br />
<a href="http://pelagios.org/downloads/p3/toponyms/latin-tradition/Piazzale_delle_Corporazioni__Ostia_la.csv">[CSV]</a>
<a href="http://www.ostia-antica.org/piazzale/corp.htm">[Source Weblink]</a>
</li>
<li>
<strong><a href="http://pelagios.org/recogito/map?doc=48" target="_blank">Hadrian's Wall Fort Vessels (100 - 300 CE)</a></strong><br />
16 toponyms. 16 Pleiades matches.<br />
<a href="http://pelagios.org/downloads/p3/toponyms/latin-tradition/Hadrian's_Wall_Fort_Vessels_la.csv">[CSV]</a>
<a href="http://www.romanmap.com/htm/rudge/rudge.htm">[Source Weblink]</a>
</li>
<li>
<strong><a href="http://pelagios.org/recogito/map?doc=17" target="_blank">Solinus: C. IVLII SOLINI (225 - 275 CE)</a></strong><br />
598 toponyms. 478 Pleiades matches.<br />
<a href="http://pelagios.org/downloads/p3/toponyms/latin-tradition/C._IVLII_SOLINI_la.csv">[CSV]</a>
<a href="http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/solinus5.html">[Source Weblink]</a>
</li>
<li>
<strong><a href="http://pelagios.org/recogito/map?doc=68" target="_blank">Itinerarium de Astorga (267 - 276 CE)</a></strong><br />
47 toponyms. 45 Pleiades matches.<br />
<a href="http://pelagios.org/downloads/p3/toponyms/latin-tradition/Itinerarium_de_Astorga_la.csv">[CSV]</a>
<a href="http://descargas.cervantesvirtual.com/servlet/SirveObras/35772718989144619754491/013781.pdf?incr=1">[Source Weblink]</a>
</li>
<li>
<strong><a href="http://pelagios.org/recogito/map?doc=50" target="_blank">Divisio Orbis Terrarum (300 - 400 CE)</a></strong><br />
167 toponyms. 153 Pleiades matches.<br />
<a href="http://pelagios.org/downloads/p3/toponyms/latin-tradition/Divisio_Orbis_Terrarum_la.csv">[CSV]</a>
<a href="https://archive.org/details/geographilatinim00ries">[Source Weblink]</a>
</li>
<li>
<strong><a href="http://pelagios.org/recogito/map?doc=3" target="_blank">Vicarello Beakers (around 200 - 400 CE)</a></strong><br />
438 toponyms. 438 Pleiades matches.<br />
<a href="http://pelagios.org/downloads/p3/toponyms/latin-tradition/Vicarello_Beakers_la.csv">[CSV]</a>
</li>
<li>
<strong><a href="http://pelagios.org/recogito/map?doc=33" target="_blank">Ammaedara Mosaic (275 - 325 CE)</a></strong><br />
12 toponyms. 12 Pleiades matches.<br />
<a href="http://pelagios.org/downloads/p3/toponyms/latin-tradition/Ammaedara_Mosaic_la.csv">[CSV]</a>
<a href="http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/crai_0065-0536_1997_num_141_3_15786">[Source Weblink]</a>
</li>
<li>
<strong><a href="http://pelagios.org/recogito/map?doc=9" target="_blank">Laterculus Veronensis (304 - 324? CE)</a></strong><br />
101 toponyms. 93 Pleiades matches.<br />
<a href="http://pelagios.org/downloads/p3/toponyms/latin-tradition/Laterculus_Veronensis_la.csv">[CSV]</a>
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laterculus_Veronensis">[Source Weblink]</a>.
</li>
<li>
<strong><a href="http://pelagios.org/recogito/map?doc=56" target="_blank">Nomina Provinciarvm Omnium (312 CE)</a></strong><br />
154 toponyms. 136 Pleiades matches.<br />
<a href="http://pelagios.org/downloads/p3/toponyms/latin-tradition/Nomina_Provinciarvm_Omnium_la.csv">[CSV]</a>
<a href="https://archive.org/details/geographilatinim00ries">[Source Weblink]</a>
</li>
<li>
<strong><a href="http://pelagios.org/recogito/map?doc=19" target="_blank">Bordeaux Itinerary (333 CE)</a>.</strong><br />
612 toponyms. 589 Pleiades matches.<br />
<a href="http://pelagios.org/downloads/p3/toponyms/latin-tradition/Bordeaux_Itinerary_la.csv">[CSV]</a>
<a href="http://www.christusrex.org/www1/ofm/pilgr/bord/10Bord01Lat.html">[Source Weblink]</a>
</li>
<li>
<strong><a href="http://pelagios.org/recogito/map?doc=1" target="_blank">Bordeaux Itinerary - English translation (333 CE)</a></strong><br />
643 toponyms. 617 Pleiades matches.<br />
<a href="http://pelagios.org/downloads/p3/toponyms/latin-tradition/Bordeaux_Itinerary_en.csv">[CSV]</a>
<a href="http://www.christusrex.org/www1/ofm/pilgr/bord/10Bord01Bordeaux.html">[Source Weblink]</a>
</li>
<li>
<strong><a href="http://pelagios.org/recogito/map?doc=20" target="_blank">Avenius: Ora Maritima (300 - 400 CE)</a>.</strong><br />
269 toponyms. 168 Pleiades matches.<br />
<a href="http://pelagios.org/downloads/p3/toponyms/latin-tradition/Ora_Mar%C3%ADtima_la.csv">[CSV]</a>
<a href="http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/avienus.ora.html">[Source Weblink]</a>
</li>
<li>
<strong><a href="http://pelagios.org/recogito/map?doc=10" target="_blank">Avenius: Ora Maritima (300 - 400 CE) - Spanish translation</a></strong><br />
277 toponyms. 197 Pleiades matches.<br />
<a href="http://pelagios.org/downloads/p3/toponyms/latin-tradition/Ora_Mar%C3%ADtima_es.csv">[CSV]</a>
<a href="http://www.culturandalucia.com/Rufo%20Festo%20Avieno_Ora_Mar%EDtima_castellano.htm">[Source Weblink]</a>
</li>
<li>
<strong><a href="http://pelagios.org/recogito/map?doc=62" target="_blank">Ex Cronographo Anni P. Chr. 354 (354 CE)</a></strong><br />
47 toponyms. 30 Pleiades matches.<br />
<a href="http://pelagios.org/downloads/p3/toponyms/latin-tradition/Ex_Cronographo_Anni_P._Chr._354_la.csv">[CSV]</a>
<a href="https://archive.org/stream/geographilatinim00ries#page/171/mode/1up">[Source Weblink]</a>
</li>
<li>
<strong><a href="http://pelagios.org/recogito/map?doc=21" target="_blank">
Sextus Festus: Breviarium of the Accomplishments of the Roman People (379 CE)</a></strong><br />
420 toponyms. 329 Pleiades matches.<br />
<a href="http://pelagios.org/downloads/p3/toponyms/latin-tradition/Brevarium_of_the_Accomplishments_of_the_Roman_People_la.csv">[CSV]</a>
<a href="http://www.attalus.org/latin/festus.html">[Source Weblink]</a>
</li>
<li>
<strong><a href="http://pelagios.org/recogito/map?doc=16" target="_blank">
Sextus Festus: Breviarium of the Accomplishments of the Roman People (379 CE) - English translation</a></strong><br />
400 toponyms. 320 Pleiades matches.<br />
<a href="http://pelagios.org/downloads/p3/toponyms/latin-tradition/Brevarium_of_the_Accomplishments_of_the_Roman_People_en.csv">[CSV]</a>
<a href="http://www.luc.edu/roman-emperors/festus.htm">[Source Weblink]</a>
</li>
<li>
<strong><a href="http://pelagios.org/recogito/map?doc=35" target="_blank">Peregrinatio Aetheriae (381 - 384 CE)</a></strong><br />
269 toponyms. 173 Pleiades matches.<br />
<a href="http://pelagios.org/downloads/p3/toponyms/latin-tradition/Peregrinatio_Aetheriae_la.csv">[CSV]</a>
<a href="https://archive.org/stream/silviaevelpotiu00heragoog/silviaevelpotiu00heragoog_djvu.txt">[Source Weblink]</a>
</li>
<li>
<strong><a href="http://pelagios.org/recogito/map?doc=8" target="_blank">Peregrinatio Aetheriae (381 - 384 CE) - English translation</a></strong><br />
383 toponyms. 260 Pleiades matches.<br />
<a href="http://pelagios.org/downloads/p3/toponyms/latin-tradition/The_Pilgrimage_of_Etheria_en.csv">[CSV]</a>
<a href="http://www.ccel.org/m/mcclure/etheria/etheria.htm">[Source Weblink]</a>
</li>
<li>
<strong><a href="http://pelagios.org/recogito/map?doc=27" target="_blank">Notitia Dignitatum (390 - 420? CE)</a></strong><br />
1505 toponyms. 1164 Pleiades matches.<br />
<a href="http://pelagios.org/downloads/p3/toponyms/latin-tradition/Notitia_Dignitatum_la.csv">[CSV]</a>
<a href="http://www.pvv.ntnu.no/~halsteis/occ001.htm&%E2%80%9Dhttp://www.pvv.ntnu.no/~halsteis/ori001.htm">[Source Weblink]</a>
</li>
<li>
<strong><a href="http://pelagios.org/recogito/map?doc=11" target="_blank">Notitia Dignitatum (390 - 420? CE) - English translation</a></strong><br />
719 toponyms. 570 Pleiades matches.<br />
<a href="http://pelagios.org/downloads/p3/toponyms/latin-tradition/Notitia_Dignitatum_en.csv">[CSV]</a>
<a href="http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/notitiadignitatum.asp">[Source Weblink]</a>
</li>
<li>
<strong><a href="http://pelagios.org/recogito/map?doc=24" target="_blank">Ammianus Marcellinus: Roman History (before 391 CE)</a></strong><br />
945 toponyms. 693 Pleiades matches.<br />
<a href="http://pelagios.org/downloads/p3/toponyms/latin-tradition/Res_Gestae_a_Fine_Corneli_Taciti_la.csv">[CSV]</a>
<a href="http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/ammianus/14.shtml">[Source Weblink]</a>
</li>
<li>
<strong><a href="http://pelagios.org/recogito/map?doc=12" target="_blank">Ammianus Marcellinus: Roman History (before 391 CE) - English translation</a></strong><br />
956 toponyms. 784 Pleiades matches.<br />
<a href="http://pelagios.org/downloads/p3/toponyms/latin-tradition/Roman_History_en.csv">[CSV]</a>
<a href="http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/ammianus_15_book15.htm#C10">[Source Weblink]</a>
</li>
<li>
<strong><a href="http://pelagios.org/recogito/map?doc=49" target="_blank">Dimensuratio Provinciarum (300 - 500 CE)</a></strong><br />
192 toponyms. 179 Pleiades matches.<br />
<a href="http://pelagios.org/downloads/p3/toponyms/latin-tradition/Dimensuratio_Provinciarum_la.csv">[CSV]</a>
<a href="https://archive.org/details/geographilatinim00ries">[Source Weblink]</a>
</li>
<li>
<strong><a href="http://pelagios.org/recogito/map?doc=59" target="_blank">Notitia Galliarum (375 - 425 CE)</a></strong><br />
142 toponyms. 93 Pleiades matches.<br />
<a href="http://pelagios.org/downloads/p3/toponyms/latin-tradition/Notitia_Galliarum_la.csv">[CSV]</a>
<a href="https://archive.org/stream/geographilatinim00ries#page/141/mode/1up">[Source Weblink]</a>
</li>
<li>
<strong><a href="http://pelagios.org/recogito/map?doc=44" target="_blank">
Pseudo-Plutarch: About Rivers And Mountains And Things Found In Them (200 - 400 CE) - English translation</a></strong><br />
288 toponyms. 242 Pleiades matches.<br />
<a href="http://pelagios.org/downloads/p3/toponyms/latin-tradition/About_Rivers_And_Mountains_And_Things_Found_In_Them_en.csv">[CSV]</a>
<a href="http://www.luc.edu/roman-emperors/Pseudo-P%20Revised.pdf">[Source Weblink (PDF)]</a>
</li>
<li>
<strong><a href="http://pelagios.org/recogito/map?doc=7" target="_blank">Rutilius Namatianus: A Voyage Home to Gaul (416 CE) - English translation</a></strong><br />
88 toponyms. 83 Pleiades matches.<br />
<a href="http://pelagios.org/downloads/p3/toponyms/latin-tradition/A_Voyage_Home_to_Gaul_en.csv">[CSV]</a>
<a href="http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Rutilius_Namatianus/text*.html">[Source Weblink]</a>
</li>
<li>
<strong><a href="http://pelagios.org/recogito/map?doc=31" target="_blank">Orosius: A History, against the Pagans (416 - 417 CE) - English translation</a></strong><br />
573 toponyms. 429 Pleiades matches.<br />
<a href="http://pelagios.org/downloads/p3/toponyms/latin-tradition/A_History__against_the_Pagans_en.csv">[CSV]</a>
<a href="https://sites.google.com/site/demontortoise2000/orosius_book1">[Source Weblink]</a>
</li>
<li>
<strong><a href="http://pelagios.org/recogito/map?doc=52" target="_blank">
Iulii Honorii: Excerpta Eius Sphaerae vel Continenta (320 - 440 CE)</a></strong><br />
1167 toponyms. 868 Pleiades matches.<br />
<a href="http://pelagios.org/downloads/p3/toponyms/latin-tradition/Excerpta_Eius_Sphaerae_vel_Continenta_la.csv">[CSV]</a>
<a href="https://archive.org/details/geographilatini00riesgoog">[Source Weblink]</a>
</li>
<li>
<strong><a href="http://pelagios.org/recogito/map?doc=57" target="_blank">Polemius Silvius: Ex Laterculo (448 - 449 CE)</a></strong><br />
160 toponyms. 137 Pleiades matches.<br />
<a href="http://pelagios.org/downloads/p3/toponyms/latin-tradition/Ex_Laterculo_la.csv">[CSV]</a>
<a href="https://archive.org/details/geographilatini00riesgoog">[Source Weblink]</a>
</li>
<li>
<strong><a href="http://pelagios.org/recogito/map?doc=51" target="_blank">Peutinger Table (400 - 500 CE)</a></strong><br />
3456 toponyms. 2679 Pleiades matches.<br />
<a href="http://pelagios.org/downloads/p3/toponyms/latin-tradition/Peutinger_Table_la.csv">[CSV]</a>
<a href="http://www.cambridge.org/us/talbert/">[Source Weblink: Rome's World]</a>
<a href="http://omnesviae.org/">[Source Weblink: OmnesViae]</a>
</li>
<li>
<strong><a href="http://pelagios.org/recogito/map?doc=26" target="_blank">Jordanes: De Origine Actibusque Getarum (500 - 600 CE)</a></strong><br />
260 toponyms. 155 Pleiades matches.<br />
<a href="http://pelagios.org/downloads/p3/toponyms/latin-tradition/De_Origine_Actibusque_Getarum_la.csv">[CSV]</a>
<a href="http://remacle.org/bloodwolf/historiens/jornandes/gothsla.htm">[Source Weblink]</a>
</li>
<li>
<strong><a href="http://pelagios.org/recogito/map?doc=15" target="_blank">Jordanes: De Origine Actibusque Getarum (500 - 600 CE) - English translation</a></strong><br />
209 toponyms. 137 Pleiades matches.<br />
<a href="http://pelagios.org/downloads/p3/toponyms/latin-tradition/Getica_en.csv">[CSV]</a>
</li>
<li>
<strong><a href="http://pelagios.org/recogito/map?doc=23" target="_blank">Isidore of Seville: Etymologiae (600 - 700 CE)</a></strong><br />
1888 toponyms. 1487 Pleiades matches.<br />
<a href="http://pelagios.org/downloads/p3/toponyms/latin-tradition/Etymologiarum_sive_Originum_la.csv">[CSV]</a>
<a href="http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/L/Roman/Texts/Isidore/9*.html">[Source Weblink]</a>
</li>
<li>
<strong><a href="http://pelagios.org/recogito/map?doc=63" target="_blank">Exordivm (around AD 700)</a></strong><br />
21 toponyms. 12 Pleiades matches.<br />
<a href="http://pelagios.org/downloads/p3/toponyms/latin-tradition/Exordivm_la.csv">[CSV]</a>
<a href="https://archive.org/stream/geographilatinim00ries#page/173/mode/1up">[Source Weblink]</a>
</li>
<li>
<strong><a href="http://pelagios.org/recogito/map?doc=25" target="_blank">
Bede: Historiam ecclesiasticam nostrae insulae ac gentis (703 CE)</a></strong><br />
63 toponyms. 32 Pleiades matches.<br />
<a href="http://pelagios.org/downloads/p3/toponyms/latin-tradition/Historiam_ecclesiasticam_nostrae_insulae_ac_gentis_la.csv">[CSV]</a>
<a href="http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=1913&chapter=112562&layout=html&Itemid=27">[Source Weblink]</a>
</li>
<li>
<strong><a href="http://pelagios.org/recogito/map?doc=5" target="_blank">
Bede: Historiam ecclesiasticam nostrae insulae ac gentis (703 CE) - English translation</a></strong><br />
63 toponyms. 32 Pleiades matches.<br />
<a href="http://pelagios.org/downloads/p3/toponyms/latin-tradition/The_ecclesiastical_history_of_our_island_and_nation_en.csv">[CSV]</a>
</li>
</ul>Rainer Simonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13818422993558387655noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5623171812488525165.post-68043361086918194632014-05-22T21:59:00.000+01:002014-05-22T21:59:14.662+01:00Future Footnotes, Reverse References and Bottomless Maps<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-stQcu7ppPEc/U35ga06d0NI/AAAAAAAAARA/3agNn1Exu88/s1600/asterisk.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-stQcu7ppPEc/U35ga06d0NI/AAAAAAAAARA/3agNn1Exu88/s1600/asterisk.gif" /></a></div>
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Pelagios and the Graph of Historical Data </div>
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are continually evolving in a number of directions that can sometimes make it hard to answer the simple question: ‘What are the benefits?’ Regular readers will know that these are many and various (and by no means all accounted for) but in this blogpost we’d like to outline two important ones that we've been thinking about for a while. We call these ‘Future Footnotes’ and ‘Reverse References’ (more on Bottomless Maps at the...well...bottom). </div>
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Footnotes and references are pretty much the defining feature of textual academic discourse. It isn’t enough to have a <a href="http://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/specrel/www/" target="_blank">bright idea</a> or <a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=YY4EAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false" target="_blank">discover something remarkable</a><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 13.5pt;"> – </span><!--EndFragment-->we have to relate our ideas and discovery to a wider body of research in order to locate them in the scholarly debate. But both suffer from severe limitations: footnotes can only point backwards and references can only point outwards.</div>
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Footnotes allow us to provide additional information that provides context or authority for an idea in a text (or even an image in the form of captions). Sometimes they are descriptive, but more often than not they are cross-references to previously written material
<span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 13.5pt;">– </span><!--EndFragment-->as an author we obviously can’t know about future material at the time of writing. Because the graph of historic data is continually growing, Pelagios links act as a Future Footnotes. Annotation allows us (and anyone else in fact) to create hooks that connect our texts to both old <i>and</i> new material as it becomes available, without having to manually update those links ourselves. So, for example, when we annotate a reference to <a href="http://pelagios.dme.ait.ac.at/api/places/http%3A%2F%2Fpleiades.stoa.org%2Fplaces%2F79574" target="_blank">Londinium</a>, for example, we don’t just say ‘here are the other references to Londinium that I am aware of at the time I wrote this’, but ‘here are other references to Londinium that the community is aware of, at the time you are reading it’.</div>
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References, on the other hand, allow us to provide evidence that backs up a point that we are making. They unilaterally point outwards because we only have the opportunity to refer to other work. In contrast, by annotating content we are simultaneously contributing our information to a wider cloud and so we create a Reverse Reference
<span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 13.5pt;">– </span><!--EndFragment-->i.e. it becomes directly available to other people through their own annotations. And to flip the logic of Future Footnotes, we don’t merely make it available to works that will be annotated in the future, but we make it available to works that have already been annotated as well. Thus we immediately make our work more accessible to precisely the people who might find it interesting.</div>
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So the benefits of Pelagios, and the Graph of Historical Data in general, are that they both future-proof and mutualise the cross-referencing that underpins academia in a way that has never been possible before. The analogies to footnotes and references aren’t quite perfect because they don’t account for the authorial stance
<span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 13.5pt;">– </span><!--EndFragment-->i.e. the desire for an author to <i>selectively</i> identify content, but they do indicate how radical this development in one of the most fundamental practices of academia can be. </div>
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There is one additional benefit that we also think is essential: because the graph is open and distributed, it’s possible to create services that allow for seamless interlinking between online resources. In other words, you don’t have to go to a centralised portal or search service to discover relevant material. You simply discover it naturally, through hyperlinked references and footnotes in online books or articles (or webpages, or pictures, or maps, or songs or videos...and so forth). </div>
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Of course curated portals and search services are valuable too, which leads us to our Bottomless Maps. There has been much discussion of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_map" target="_blank">Deep Map</a> in recent years – interactive digital maps that contain content that extends beyond the visual surface. Bottomless Maps, like the <a href="http://pelagios.github.io/pelagios-heatmap/" target="_blank">Pelagios heatmap</a> for example, link an ever-growing (and thus to all intents and purposes infinite) quantity of content to the places they depict. While the scope of the Pelagios project is restricted to historic geographic concepts, the model which we have been collaboratively developing is applicable to any other kind of reference (<a href="http://snapdrgn.net/about" target="_blank">people</a>, <a href="https://securegrants.neh.gov/publicquery/main.aspx?f=1&gn=HD-51864-14" target="_blank">periods</a>, <a href="http://www.heritagedata.org/blog/about-heritage-data/seneschal/" target="_blank">classifications</a>, <a href="http://www.homermultitext.org/hmt-doc/cite/texts/ctsoverview.html" target="_blank">canonical text citations</a>, and so forth). An <a href="http://sfsheath.github.io/lawdi-publication/isaw-papers-7.xhtml" target="_blank">ecology of other projects</a> is now springing up to support this, so the combined (and evolving) graph of humanities data will ultimately become much more significant than Pelagios itself. We look forward to a future in which such cross-referencing is just as commonplace as footnotes and references are today.</div>
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*We here expand the notion of the <a href="http://bsa.biblio.univ-lille3.fr/doc/gawd/gawd.html" target="_blank">Graph of Ancient World Data</a> to include any content of a historical, classical or archaeological nature.</div>
leifusshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06952570470805157338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5623171812488525165.post-3355810471430610122014-03-07T11:23:00.000+00:002014-03-09T14:34:51.528+00:00Greeking Out<p>This week marks a new and exciting milestone in the Pelagios 3 project - the start of work on the ancient Greek geographic tradition. There's more Latin to do of course: our work packages run on a staggered, overlapping 6-month basis, and, while we already have 19 documents in the system (some in both Latin and their modern language translation), future additions will include some major itinerary lists—including the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonine_Itinerary" target="_blank">Antonine Itineraries</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ravenna_Cosmography" target="_blank">Ravenna Cosmography</a>—as well as a number of smaller but fascinating geographic sources such as the Haidra mosaic, some more <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudge_Cup" target="_blank">inscribed vessels</a>, and the <a href="http://www.ostia-antica.org/piazzale/corp.htm" target="_blank">Piazzale delle Corporazione at Ostia</a>.</p>
<p>But from today we'll start introducing Greek documents into the system. Ancient Greek traditions of knowledge about geography extend far beyond Plato's "frogs around a pond" metaphor for Greek settlements around the Aegean Sea. From Homer's <i>Odyssey</i>, Greek texts push the boundaries of travel, exploration and knowledge, and Odysseus, the man who 'saw the cities of many men and knew their minds', stands as the archetypal explorer for Greeks who settled in places as far off as the Black Sea, Massalia (Marseille) and Libya. Later Greek authors like <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hecataeus_of_Miletus" target="_blank">Hecataeus</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herodotus" target="_blank">Herodotus</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotle" target="_blank">Aristotle</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pytheas" target="_blank">Pytheas</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes" target="_blank">Eratosthenes</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hipparchus" target="_blank">Hipparchus</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poseidonius" target="_blank">Posidonius</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemidorus_Ephesius" target="_blank">Artemidorus</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ptolemy" target="_blank">Ptolemy</a> are largely responsible for the way we conceptualise geography today (indeed, Eratosthenes invents the discipline), and we still use the terms that they came up with—terms such as equator, meridian, parallel, latitude and longitude. At the same time, much Greek geography is almost cosmological in nature—an attempt to understand the form of the earth and its place in the universe.</p>
<p>Remarkably, however, given the number and detail of these ancient witnesses, almost no Greek maps survive, and it is debate whether maps were even a feature of Greek traditions of geographical knowledge. (A map documented in Herodotus's <i>Histories</i>, carried by a certain Aristagoras of Mytilene, becomes the site of contestation and debate, while Herodotus himself 'laughs at' the schematic representations of his contemporaries.) Instead Greek conceptualizations of the world were almost exclusively in a narrative form, from numerous <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periplus" target="_blank">periploi</a> (sailing itineraries) to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strabo" target="_blank">Strabo</a>, whose <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographica" target="_blank">Geografica</a> </i>remains central to our understanding of global geography in the transition to Empire. </p>
<p>Working with Ancient Greek texts will introduce some new challenges for us to tackle. To begin with change in alphabet will take a little getting used to for some of the team! Fortunately recent work by Bruce Robertson, Greg Crane and others on <a href="http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/publications/dve/RobertsonGreekOCR/" target="_blank">OCRing ancient Greek</a> means that we should be able to include a range of previously inaccessible texts. We can also draw on experience form the <a href="http://hestia.open.ac.uk/" target="_blank">Hestia</a> project and a promising new approach developed by Thomas Efer at the University of Leipzig that can identify toponyms in a Greek text by comparing it to a previously marked up English text. We don't yet know what will be the most efficient combination of methodologies but at least we have plenty to choose from.</p>
<p>We have enormously enjoyed working with the Latin texts and will continue doing so, but the possibilities for analysis opened up by annotating documents from these two strongly related yet radically divergent traditions are incredibly exciting.</p>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c7/Madaba_map.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c7/Madaba_map.jpg" height="448" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jerusalem depicted in the Madaba Mosaic (6th C. AD). Image from Wikimedia Commons.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
leifusshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06952570470805157338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5623171812488525165.post-66610152892565753112014-02-25T11:36:00.000+00:002014-04-17T11:25:29.171+01:00Latin Groove<p>In our two previous posts we introduced <a href="http://pelagios.org/recogito">Recogito</a>, a tool we are developing in order to efficiently extract, annotate and verify geographic references in texts. The development of Recogito is still continuing at full steam, and the team (and Leif in particular ;-) is feeding our feature backlog with a steady flow of new ideas & requirements. But despite the fact that there’s still a slight ambience of a busy construction site around Recogito, we have not just been developing. We have also been using it heavily to annotate new documents.</p>
<p>Prior to the start of Pelagios 3, we assembled a list of potential ancient sources to work on in each content work package. The sources we selected are specifically geographical works, i.e. documents where the authors give accounts of their world in their time. For some of the more extensive sources (such as <a href="http://pelagios-project.blogspot.co.at/2014/01/theres-pliny-of-room-at-bottom-1.html">Pliny’s Natural History</a>), we restricted ourselves to only the specifically geographical chapters.</p>
<p>At the moment, we are about halfway through our first content work package, dealing with the Latin tradition (3 months out of 6). It’s therefore a good time to share with you the progress we made so far. The first three documents – the <a href="http://pelagios-project.blogspot.co.at/2013/10/iwp2-pelagios-and-beakers-of-vicarello_17.html">Vicarello Beakers</a>, the <a href="http://pelagios-project.blogspot.co.at/2014/01/from-bordeaux-to-jerusalem-and-back.html">Bordeaux Itinerary</a> and <a href="http://pelagios-project.blogspot.co.at/2014/01/theres-pliny-of-room-at-bottom-1.html">Pliny’s Natural History</a> – we already introduced previously. We've since found our groove and the list has grown much longer. Here are some documents we are currently working on:</p>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-3VDs640UmII/Uw2YkDHJBgI/AAAAAAAAAL4/FBZKKFQ_Pvs/s1600/screenshot-text.png"><img border="0" style="width:620px; margin-top:20px; border:1px solid #c2c2c2;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-3VDs640UmII/Uw2YkDHJBgI/AAAAAAAAAL4/FBZKKFQ_Pvs/s1600/screenshot-text.png" /></a>
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-lAsRg675frA/Uw2YnkdsS0I/AAAAAAAAAMA/ca9XGVTAqm8/s1600/screenshot-map.jpg"><img border="0" style="width:620px; margin-top:20px; border:1px solid #c2c2c2;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-lAsRg675frA/Uw2YnkdsS0I/AAAAAAAAAMA/ca9XGVTAqm8/s1600/screenshot-map.jpg" /></a>
<p style="padding-bottom:30px;"><strong>Fig.1. The Bordeaux Itinerary (Part 1) in Recogito</strong> (<a href="http://pelagios.org/recogito/map?doc=19" target="_blank">» View Map</a>)</p>
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<h3>Pomponius Mela: De Chorographia (around 43 AD)</h3>
<p>Pomponius Mela lived during the government of Claudius and presumably died around the year 45 AD. His most famous work, cited by other great geographers such as Pliny the Elder, was <em>De Chorographia</em>. This work was composed of three volumes and was developed during the decade of the 40s. Each of his books is dedicated to an area of the known Roman world. In the first volume, Mela generally describes the world and its regions, the Mediterranean coasts of Africa and the Near East, starting from the Strait of Gibraltar. The second volume describes the coasts from the Near East to Hispania, where he talks about Greece, Italy and Gaul. Finally, the third volume describes the Atlantic territories, Britannia, and all remote territories, such as the German Limes, Arabia and India. <a href="http://pelagios.org/recogito/map?doc=18" target="_blank">» Map in Recogito</a></p>
<h3>Laterculus Veronensis (AD 304-324?)</h3>
<p>The <em>Laterculus Veronensis</em> is a listing of the various Roman provinces that existed during the governments of Diocletian and Constantine. Its chronology is therefore located between the years 284 and 337. The work is named due to the origin of the single manuscript that has been preserved in the Library of Verona. This source describes twelve dioceses gathering a total of over 100 provinces. <a href="http://pelagios.org/recogito/map?doc=9" target="_blank">» Map in Recogito</a></p>
<h3>Avenius: Ora Maritima (AD IV)</h3>
<p>Rufius Avienus Festus was an Etrurian poet, astronomer and geographer who lived in the 4th Century AD. He wrote several books and poems, the most prominent was <em>Ora Maritima</em>. This work is based on the Greek journey of Eutimenes of Massalia from the sixth century. Avienus used other sources such as the work of the first century BC Greek historian Ephorus. The use of this kind of ancient sources has introduced much confusion, making some places difficult to locate, and resulting in a mix of parts originating from very different times. <a href="http://pelagios.org/recogito/map?doc=20" target="_blank">» Map in Recogito</a></p>
<h3>Rutilius Namatianus: A Voyage Home to Gaul (AD 416)</h3>
<p>Rutilius Namatianus was born in southern Gaul, probably at the beginning of V century AD. He was a poet, but his only preserved work is the poem <em>De reditu suo libri duo</em>. It must have been written between 416 and 420 AD, and is composed in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elegiac">elegiac meter</a>. Originally written in two volumes, the poem describes a trip down the coast from Rome to Gaul. Unfortunately, however, many parts (especially from the second volume) are lost, and the extant text stops at the port of Moon. <a href="http://pelagios.org/recogito/map?doc=7" target="_blank">» Map in Recogito</a></p>
<h3>Jordanes: Getica (AD VI)</h3>
<p>Jordanes lived during the sixth century AD and was of partially Gothic origin. It is believed that during his public career he was a notary and that he might further have had a religious career, coming to be a Bishop. Jordanes' fame comes from two major works, <em>De regnorum ac Temporum successione</em>, a world history from the creation to the 6th century, and <em>De Origine et Rebu Getarum Gestis</em>, better known as <em>Getica</em>. The latter one we have included in Pelagios 3 (restricting to the chapters with geographic descriptions). It is the only preserved source that explains the origin and characteristics of the Goths. <a href="http://pelagios.org/recogito/map?doc=26" target="_blank">» Map in Recogito</a></p>
<h3>Bede: The ecclesiastical history of our island and nation (AD 703)</h3>
<p>Bede, also referred as a Saint Bede, was born in England in the seventh century AD. He was a monk in the kingdom of Northumbria. Bede is known for his work <em>Historia Ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum</em>, completed around the year 731 AD. This work consists of multiple volumes. It begins with the invasion of Caesar in 55 BC and ends with the fifth book, in the time of Bede himself.
In Pelagios 3, we only have included the first chapters of this source, which are devoted to a geographical description of the British Isles. <a href="http://pelagios.org/recogito/map?doc=25" target="_blank">» Map in Recogito</a></p>
<h3>Ammianus Marcellinus: Roman History (before 391)</h3>
<p>This is a document we are currently starting to work on. Ammianus Marcellinus was a historian in the fourth century AD, probably born in Antioch. After developing his military career, he wrote one of the most famous stories of antiquity. His <em>Res Gestae</em> described the history of Rome from the government of Nerva in 96 to the Valeno’s death in 378. Unfortunately, the first thirteen books were lost, and the remaining eighteen contain missing parts. Only the last books survive, and are dedicated to the events between the years 353 and 378. Like in other cases, we only included those chapters where the geographic aspect was most prominent. <a href="http://pelagios.org/recogito/map?doc=24" target="_blank">» Map in Recogito</a></p>
<p>In numbers, we have already progressed to a total of 20.164 annotations (as of today), with an overall verification rate of 37.3% (which means we've confirmed more than 7.500 place references so far). But there are more Latin sources on our list which we yet have to address over the next three months. And our Greek content work package is about to start as well. So lots of exciting work ahead of us.</p>
<p>You can follow our progress live at <a href="http://pelagios.org/recogito">http://pelagios.org/recogito</a>!</p>
<p>- Ada, Pau & Rainer</p>Rainer Simonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13818422993558387655noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5623171812488525165.post-28594809900971697192014-01-21T11:13:00.000+00:002014-01-21T11:23:38.699+00:00There's Pliny of Room at the Bottom1 - Introducing Recogito Pt. 2<p>In our <a href="http://pelagios-project.blogspot.co.at/2014/01/from-bordeaux-to-jerusalem-and-back.html">last post</a>, we introduced <em>Recogito</em>, a tool we built to verify and correct the results of our automatic text-to-map conversion process. Last time, we've focused primarily on <em>Recogito</em>'s map-based interface, in which we clean up the results of geo-resolution - the step that automatically assigns gazetteer IDs to toponyms.</p>
<p>In this post, we want to talk about <em>Recogito</em>'s second view: the text annotation interface. And as usual, we'd like to seize the opportunity to introduce our next Early Geospatial Document along with it: the Natural History by Pliny the Elder.</p>
<h3>Naturalis Historia</h3>
<p>The Natural History (<em>Naturalis Historia</em>) by Pliny the Elder is an encyclopedia published ca. AD 77–79. This amazing work covers the Roman civilization's knowledge about astronomy, geography, zoology, botany, medicine and mineralogy. In total, it consists of 37 books, and builds on more than 400 sources from the Latin and Greek worlds. Books 3, 4, 5 and 6 focus on geography. In these books, Pliny describes the known world from the Atlantic to the Near East, and from the North of Europe to Africa. He records all the peoples and cities known, with all the geographic features prominent in each territory, such as rivers, mountains, gulfs, or islands.</p>
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<img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/--PJdpcTxop4/Ut4m5zDp4jI/AAAAAAAAALo/R6P3SdZ3Eio/s600/pliny-in-progress.jpg" />
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<p>Fig. 1. Pliny Books 3 and 4 - work in progress in Recogito.</p>
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<h3>Recogito Text Annotation UI</h3>
<p>The Natural history is the largest text we have addressed so far. Fig.1 shows our current progress with it. (In numbers, we're through the toponyms of Book 3 by 98%, and have just started Book 4 - now at 5.5%). It also differs from our previous itinerary texts, in the sense that it's prose, and not structured into an almost 'tabular' format. Time to enter our 'reading view' in Recogito: the text annotation interface.</p>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-oank59C-2JU/Utz9z_i5r_I/AAAAAAAAALQ/4cQmYNCNt_8/s1600/text-annotation-pliny.png">
<img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-oank59C-2JU/Utz9z_i5r_I/AAAAAAAAALQ/4cQmYNCNt_8/s640/text-annotation-pliny.png" />
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<p>Fig. 2. Recogito text annotation interface.</p>
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<p>The text annotation interface (see Fig. 2) is the place where we inspect and correct the results of <em>geo-parsing</em> - the automatic processing step that identifies toponyms in our source texts. Initially, when we start off with a new document, this view shows us our source text, marked up with grey 'highlights' wherever the geoparser thinks it has identified a toponym. We can then remove false matches, annotate toponyms the geoparser has missed, or modify things the geoparser got wrong (e.g. merge multiple identifications into one, turning separate consecutive identifications such as 'Mount' and 'Atlas' into a single toponym 'Mount Atlas').</p>
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<iframe style="margin:0 auto;" frameborder="0" height="396" src="http://www.screenr.com/embed/l5VH" width="650"></iframe>
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<p>Going through the source texts is a time-consuming task, and we have made every attempt to make the process as quick and painless as possible. The video above shows how the interface works in practice. Select text in the user interface as you would normally (using click and drag with your mouse, or double click), and confirm the action in the dialog window that pops up. Depending on what you select, the tool will automatically perform the appropriate action: either create a new annotation, delete one, or modify the annotation(s) in the selection. To speed up work even further, there is also an 'advanced' mode that skips the confirmation step.</p>
<p>There is one more thing you can see in Fig. 2: annotations are coloured to indicate their 'sign-off status'. We have already talked about this briefly in our <a href="http://pelagios-project.blogspot.co.at/2014/01/from-bordeaux-to-jerusalem-and-back.html">previous post</a>. It's a consequence of our practice to manually check every annotation before releasing it to the wild. Green annotations are those we have verified, and where we have confirmed a valid gazetteer ID). Yellow are the ones we've verified as valid toponyms - but for whatever reason we were yet unable to identify a suitable gazetteer ID for them. Grey are the ones we've either not looked at yet; or they are still 'work in progress' and we just haven't verified their gazetteer mapping.</p>
<p>Combined with the map-based interface you can think of this as creating the two parts of an annotation. The text annotation interface presents us with a reference to a place in a document (the 'target' of the annotation in <a href="http://www.openannotation.org/spec/core/">Open Annotation</a> terminology), while the map interface identifies a place in a gazetteer (the 'body' of the annotation). Although there are two steps to the process, they are fairly quick and easy. Maybe even fun!</p>
<p/>
<p><sup>1</sup><em> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There's_Plenty_of_Room_at_the_Bottom">"There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom"</a> was a lecture given by physicist Richard Feynman in 1959. The talk is considered to be a seminal event in the history of nanotechnology, as it inspired the conceptual beginnings of the field decades later.</em></p>Rainer Simonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13818422993558387655noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5623171812488525165.post-54065258464819531552014-01-13T15:56:00.004+00:002014-04-17T11:21:05.403+01:00From Bordeaux to Jerusalem and Back Again: Introducing Recogito (Pt. 1)<p>Welcome back to another update from our <em>Infrastructure Workpackage 2 - "Annotation Toolkit"</em>, affectionately known as <em>IWP2</em>. In our <a href="http://pelagios-project.blogspot.co.at/2013/10/iwp2-pelagios-and-beakers-of-vicarello_17.html">previous IWP2 post</a>, we talked a little bit about the basics of annotating place references in early geospatial documents. We also presented a <a href="http://pelagios.github.io/demos/vicarello-alpha/complete-sequence/">first sample dataset based on the Vicarello Beakers</a>. What we did not talk about yet, however, is how we actually annotate our documents in the first place.</p>
<p>The general plan behind the Pelagios annotation workflow is this:</p>
<ol>
<li>We use <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Named-entity_recognition">Named Entity Recognition (NER)</a> to identify a first batch of place names automatically in our
source texts. This step is also called "geo-parsing", and tells us which toponyms there are in our text, and where in the text they occur. We implemented NER using
the open source <a href="http://nlp.stanford.edu/software/corenlp.shtml">Stanford NLP Toolkit</a>, and presently restrict this step to English translations of our documents. In a
later project phase, we intend to cross-match the data gathered from the English translations to the original language versions, which is likely more feasible within the lifetime of
the project, than trying to attempt latin-language NER.</li>
<li>NER gives us the toponyms. What it does <strong>not</strong> tell us anything about, however, is which places they represent, or where these places are located. Next, we therefore
look up the toponyms in our gazetteer, and determine the most plausible match. This step is called "geo-resolution", and - like NER - is also fully automated.
<li>Naturally, neither geo-parsing nor geo-resolution work perfectly. Therefore, we need to manually verify the results of our automatic processes, correct erroneous NER or geo-resolution
matches, and fill gaps where NER or geo-resolution have failed to produce a result at all. And this is where our new Tool <strong><em>Recogito</em></strong> comes in.</li>
</ol>
<div style="text-align:center;padding:10px 0px 20px 0px;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-XyYzn4KzKAk/UtP6Fa5QxmI/AAAAAAAAALA/0fdWIGyR0oQ/s1600/recogito-map-bordeaux-parts.png">
<img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-XyYzn4KzKAk/UtP6Fa5QxmI/AAAAAAAAALA/0fdWIGyR0oQ/s640/recogito-map-bordeaux-parts.png" />
</a>
<p>Fig. 1: data from the Bordeaux Itinerary in <em>Recogito</em> (interactive version in <a href="http://pelagios.org/recogito/map?doc=19">Latin</a> and <a href="http://pelagios.org/recogito/map?doc=1">English</a>).</p>
</div>
<h3>The Itinerarium Burdigalense</h3>
<p>The first document we've tackled entirely in <em>Recogito</em> is the <em>Itinerarium Burdigalense</em>: the Itinerarium Burdigalense (or Bordeaux Itinerary) is a travel document that records a Pilgrim route between the cities of Bordeaux and Jerusalem. It is considered the oldest Christian pilgrimage document, dated in 333 AD - which is just 20 years after the Edict of Milan from 313, when the Emperor Constantine granted the religious liberty to Christians (and other religions). Formally, this document is very similar in some aspects to the <em>Itinerarium Provinciarum Antonini Augusti</em>: both of them are compiled as a list of places with the distances between them. Additionally, the Itinerarium Burdigalense also marked all the places as <em>mutatio</em>, <em>mansio</em> or <em>civitas</em> (change, halt or city) in a similar way as the Peutinger Table. The format of the document changes when the travel arrives to Judea, where it offers detailed descriptions of important places to Christian Pilgrims. So we can consider it an itinerarium in the tradition of Greek and Roman writing, except for its Christian emphasis. (We've compiled a detailed bibliography for the Itinerarium Burdigalense <a href="https://www.zotero.org/groups/pelagios/items/collectionKey/C4C8ATH3">here</a>. The text of an English translation can be found, for example, on <a href="http://www.christusrex.org/www1/ofm/pilgr/bord/10Bord01MapEur.html">this Website</a>.)</p>
<h3>Annotating the Bordeaux Itinerary with <em>Recogito</em></h3>
<p><em>Recogito</em> presents the results of our automatic processing steps in two flavours: in a text-based user interface, which is primarily designed to inspect and correct what the geoparser has done; and in a map-based interface which is used to work with the results from the geo-resolution step. A screenshot of the latter is shown in Fig.2, and we will explore it in more detail below. The former interface (which benefits from a little pre-knowledge of the map-based interface) we will disucss in a separate blog post.</p>
<h4>Geo-Resolution Verification & Correction</h4>
<p>The map-based interface separates the screen into a table listing the toponyms, and a map that shows how they are mapped to places. The primary work area for us in this interface is the table: here, we can scroll through all the toponyms and quickly check the gazetteer IDs they were mapped to. As a matter of policy, we want to explicity keep track of which toponyms have been looked at by someone, and which haven't. To that end, each entry in the table can be 'signed off' as either a verified gazetteer match, an unknown place, or a false NER detection. (In addition, there is also a generic 'ignore' flag, for toponyms that may be correctly identified in a technical sense, but which we don't want to appear in the map for whatever reason.)
<div style="text-align:center;padding:10px 0px 20px 0px;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-0ZmlNIIik0Y/UtP5PSkf3qI/AAAAAAAAAK0/dP1g7LjbFCY/s1600/recogito-map-bordeaux-closeup.png">
<img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-0ZmlNIIik0Y/UtP5PSkf3qI/AAAAAAAAAK0/dP1g7LjbFCY/s720/recogito-map-bordeaux-closeup.png" />
</a>
<p>Fig. 2: Recogito map-based geo-resolution correction interface.</p>
</div>
<p>Double-clicking an entry in the table opens a window with details for the toponym (Fig.3): the window shows the previous automatic gazetteer match (if any), the latest manual correction, and a text snippet showing the toponym in context. A lists of suggestions for other potential gazetteer matches, along with a small search widget allows us to quickly re-assign the gazetteer match in case it is incorrect. The change history for each toponym is recorded so we know who has change what (and when), or whether there are places <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Edit_warring">that may see substantially more edits than others in the long run</a>. Furthermore, manual changes are recorded separately from the initial automatic results. This way we will be able to benchmark the performance of NER and automatic geo-resolution later on. Detailed figures for the Bordeaux Itinerary are not yet out - but our initial figures suggest that NER has caught about 2/3 of all toponyms; and that approx. 80% of NER results were correct detections. The automatic geo-resolution correctly resolved between 30%-40% of the toponyms.</p>
<div style="text-align:center;padding:10px 0px 20px 0px;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-mijCKmEH49k/UtP5ogVv8PI/AAAAAAAAAK4/EG6qS6532Bs/s1600/recogito-map-details-popup.png">
<img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-mijCKmEH49k/UtP5ogVv8PI/AAAAAAAAAK4/EG6qS6532Bs/s720/recogito-map-details-popup.png" />
</a>
<p>Fig. 3: toponym details.</p>
</div>
<p>While Recogito is still under heavy construction, Pau is already deeply buried in the next document - which we will present in one of our next blogposts, together with an overview of the text-based interface.</p>Rainer Simonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13818422993558387655noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5623171812488525165.post-48000083603300703362014-01-07T12:57:00.001+00:002014-01-08T16:46:43.996+00:00The day of Pelagios: Berlin 11.12.13<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Before the seasonal break of mince pies and Glühwein, the Pelagios team held a meeting in Berlin to address a range of issues relating to geospatial data aggregation and analysis. The fact that we were holding this in Berlin reflected the fortunate co-presence there of a number of different digital humanities initiatives. Our hosts were the German Archaeological Institute (or DAI), the ICT Director, <a href="http://www.dainst.org/en/profile/reinhard-foertsch?ft=all">Reinhard Förtsch</a>, along with his researchers <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ziOtxa6Jyw">Philipp Gerth</a> and <a href="http://www.dainst.org/en/profile/wolfgang-schmidle?ft=all">Wolfgang Schmidle</a>. Others joining us were:<br />
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/en/staff/members/dwinter">Dirk Wintergrün</a> and <a href="http://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/en/staff/members/ggoerz">Günther Görz</a> from the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG);</li>
<li><a href="http://www.geisteswissenschaften.fu-berlin.de/we04/germanistik/faecher/editionswissenschaft/mitarbeiter/schnoepf.html">Markus
Schnöpf</a> of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities;</li>
<li><a href="http://www.topoi.org/person/geus-klaus/">Klaus Geus</a> and <a href="http://www.geschkult.fu-berlin.de/e/fmi/arbeitsbereiche/ab_geus/personal/wissenschaftliche_Mitarbeiter/Ekaterina_Ilyushechkina.html">Katerina
Ilyushechkina</a> of TOPOI’s <a href="http://www.topoi.org/group/c-5/">Common
Sense Geography</a> group;</li>
<li><a href="http://www.ics.forth.gr/isl/index_main.php?l=e&c=230">Martin Doerr</a>
and <a href="http://at.linkedin.com/pub/gerald-hiebel/5a/517/658">Gerald Hiebel</a>
of the <a href="http://www.forth.gr/index_main.php">Foundation for Research and
Technology-Hellas</a> (FORTH);</li>
<li><a href="http://mariandoerk.de/">Marian Dörk</a> from the University of Applied
Sciences Potsdam;</li>
<li><a href="http://www.dh.uni-leipzig.de/wo/team/">Simona Stoyanova</a> of the <a href="http://www.dh.uni-leipzig.de/wo/">Leipzig Digital Humanities</a> group;</li>
<li><a href="http://www.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/cgi-bin/site/ourteam.php?type=Former+Research+Assistant">Maya Krishnan</a>, a student working at Stanford’s Spatial Humanities group;</li>
<li><a href="http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:Johannes_Kroll_%28WMDE%29">Johannes
Kroll</a> of Wikimedia.</li>
</ul>
The meeting presented us with the opportunity to talk first
about Pelagios and its evolution. The Pelagios model of phases 1 and 2 uses
annotations to facilitate linking (in our case through common references to
places) rather than trying to unify different models. By enabling linking, each
partner’s site also serves as a gateway to another, thereby maximizing the
potential discoverability of these resources and avoiding fruitless attempts at
creating individual portals that are supposed to do everything. Yet, even if we
are decentralized, for linking to be facilitated we need a lightweight
structure.
<br />
<br />
In Pelagios phase 3 work is concentrating on three
areas. Since we are extending our model into new regions and time periods,
gazetteers - essentially databases of place names - are crucial. Again our
approach is to enable the linking between resources rather than trying to build
a super gazetteer that contains all place names over time. With the aim of
aligning gazetteers, we are currently investigating interoperability: What might
a <a href="http://pelagios-project.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/a-web-of-gazetteers.html">gazetteer 'ecosystem'</a> look like? Options include using popular gazetteers as
a backbone, though each come with drawbacks (the <a href="https://www.getty.edu/research/tools/vocabularies/tgn/">Getty Thesaurus
of Geographic Names</a> is heavily curated, minimizing community involvement,
while <a href="http://www.geonames.org/">Geonames</a> includes extraneous
information like every hotel in Berlin), and the <a href="http://www.w3.org/2009/08/skos-reference/skos.html">SKOS vocabulary</a> 'close
match' label to enable links between gazetteers.
For the meeting we've brought along a first preview of our 'cross gazetteer search', which runs on top of the linkages between the datasets from <a href="http://pleiades.stoa.org/">Pleiades</a> and <a href="http://imperium.ahlfeldt.se/">DARE</a>. A screenshot of the user interface to the system is shown below.
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-PxBj1SIpYj0/UsmulCkPCII/AAAAAAAAAPE/S02Emltzvjs/s1600/Pelagios_gazetteer_ecosystem.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-PxBj1SIpYj0/UsmulCkPCII/AAAAAAAAAPE/S02Emltzvjs/s1600/Pelagios_gazetteer_ecosystem.jpg" width="320" /></a>
<br />
Figure 1. Cross-Gazetteer Search Preview UI</div>
<br />
Our second task is to enable annotations to be made on
primary data (both textual and visual), so that place names can be identified.
Initial attempts at building a toolkit for annotating texts will be discussed
in forthcoming posts on this blog. As for the challenge of annotating
maps, two questions are particularly relevant: where can we get computers to do
the heavy lifting? And where do humans have to come into the loop? Finally, we
are also investigating ways of visualizing the resources in our network. Our <a href="http://pelagios.github.io/pelagios-heatmap/">heat map</a> provides an
early indication not only of the spatial spread but also the intensity of the
resources.<br />
<br />
These three areas—relating to gazetteer interoperability, annotation methods and visualization—were the subjects of discussion.<br />
<br />
<b>Gazetteers</b><br />
The DAI started work in May to build a <a href="http://gazetteer.dainst.org/">gazetteer</a> of the Institute’s
<a href="http://arachne.uni-koeln.de/drupal/">archaeological</a> and <a href="http://www.dainst.org/en/zenon?ft=all">bibliographical</a> records. They
have also been working with Wikidata and Wikimedia to explore how knowledge
about the Roman frontier (the ‘<a href="http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters/Reports/Wikimedia_Deutschland/March_2013">Limes</a>’)
can be aggregated and used. One such example is an interactive timeline (seen
below), showing how the border changed over time. Markus Schnöpf is currently
working on a gazetteer for the Islamic world, which could help provide the
basis for future Pelagios activity with Islamic texts. Meanwhile, at Stanford,
Josh Ober’s team are developing a digital version of <a href="http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2005/2005-02-29.html">Mogen Hansen’s Polis
inventory</a>, which will not only provide a comprehensive dataset of settlements
in ancient Greece, but also allow them to be searched in various ways using a
simple browser plug in map. (Watch this space for developments.) These projects
join a list that includes <a href="http://pleiades.stoa.org/">Pleiades</a>, the
<a href="http://imperium.ahlfeldt.se/">Digital Atlas of the Roman Empire</a>, <a href="http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~chgis/">Chinese Historical GIS</a>, and <a href="http://www.pastplace.org/">Past Place</a>, as the key protagonists taking
the first steps towards creating a gazetteer ecosystem.<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-nYEGyeCpo9U/Usmu-yoUctI/AAAAAAAAAPM/h2YTS_Ovo6U/s1600/Pelagios_limes.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-nYEGyeCpo9U/Usmu-yoUctI/AAAAAAAAAPM/h2YTS_Ovo6U/s320/Pelagios_limes.jpg" height="204" width="320" /></a>
<br />
Figure 2. An interactive timeline of the Roman ‘Limes’ (frontier)</div>
<br />
<b>Annotation methods</b><br />
With Greg Crane’s Humboldt Professorship at the
University of Leipzig, various new initiatives are being launched with the aim of utilizing
digital resources for the study of the ancient world. One of these, the <a href="http://www.dh.uni-leipzig.de/wo/projects/historical-languages-elearning-project/">Historical
Languages eLearning Project</a>, is experimenting with e-learning strategies
for teaching ancient Greek and Latin based around annotation. Pelagios could
work with this team to help in cases of disambiguating names that prove too
challenging for our automated workbench, or to experiment with using games to
scale up annotation over larger number of documents. The <a href="http://www.ariadne-infrastructure.eu/">ARIADNE project</a>, here
represented by Martin Doerr and Gerald Hiebel, is laying the foundations for
inferencing over data rather than just data retrieval (which is what Pelagios
focuses on). In particular, the <a href="http://www.cidoc-crm.org/">CIDOC-CRM</a>
model adopted by ARIADNE uses a formal structure for describing concepts and
relationships that, while more complex semantically, is compatible with the Pelagios
annotation model; moreover, the results of Pelagios can be used as the basis
for CRM-compliant data.<br />
<br />
<b>Visualization</b><br />
Throughout the discussion, we were also concerned about
visualization developments that can help in the understanding and analysis of
potentially massive datasets. Dirk Wintergrün presented on <a href="http://www.informatik.uni-leipzig.de:8080/geotemco/">GeoTemCo</a>, a platform
for visualising spatio-temporal data. This potentially looks very powerful, and
will be especially interesting once temporal content (derived from e.g.
publication dates, person references and other sources) are combined with place
annotations. We give one example below, since it provides a new way of looking
at data that members of the Pelagios team have produced in a previous project, <a href="http://www.informatik.uni-leipzig.de:8080/geotemco/">GAP</a>. Figure 3
shows GAP data from Herodotus and Pausanias in GeoTemCo, enabling the analysis
and comparison of geographical referencing of these different books. In
particular, Marian Dörk demonstrated a wide range of exciting visualization
possibilities that could answer specific research questions and more generally
appeal to the general public.<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-RyhSLx7QaFc/UsmvUYI_HyI/AAAAAAAAAPU/owSXGDxLGCI/s1600/Screen+Shot+2014-01-05+at+19.06.20.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-RyhSLx7QaFc/UsmvUYI_HyI/AAAAAAAAAPU/owSXGDxLGCI/s320/Screen+Shot+2014-01-05+at+19.06.20.png" height="190" width="320" /></a>
<br />
Figure 3. A comparison of places in Herodotus and
Pausanias, using GAP data in <a href="http://www.informatik.uni-leipzig.de:8080/geotemco/gapvis.html">GeoTemCo</a></div>
</div>
Elton Barkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16088251025729181601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5623171812488525165.post-1722118528947275912013-11-15T19:03:00.000+00:002013-11-15T19:03:23.609+00:00The nesting of EAGLE within PelagiosIn our previous post we
introduced what <a href="http://www.eagle-network.eu/">EAGLE</a> is and what it hopes to achieve. In this post
we outline briefly some particularities with our data structure that
demonstrate what we are bringing to Pelagios.<br />
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Most fundamentally we
use the term ‘place’ as it is defined by <a href="http://www.trismegistos.org/geo/index.php">Trismegistos Geo</a>: this
means taking ‘place’ in its broadest sense, to refer not only to
towns and villages, but also to regions, districts and all kinds of
micro-toponyms. All toponyms referring to a single place are listed
on their individual cards, each of which has a unique <a href="http://www.trismegistos.org/place/2058">TM Geo_ID number</a>. The number itself contains no information, but creates a
numerical order. If two places are identified and their cards
joined, the Geo_ID number of the old card is preserved but
henceforward contains only a reference to the new card.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-CZjzF_jVbJI/UoTaLJY454I/AAAAAAAADLE/rzYwpwcKY_U/s1600/hd_015202_Geza-Alfo%CC%88ldy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="444" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-CZjzF_jVbJI/UoTaLJY454I/AAAAAAAADLE/rzYwpwcKY_U/s640/hd_015202_Geza-Alfo%CC%88ldy.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
For example,
Trismegistos Geo lists two kinds of places: ancient places attested
in both literary and documentary sources, and modern places insofar
an ancient document has been found there. Sometimes in fact no
information about the ancient toponym is available and the findspot
of an ancient text has to be recorded with its modern findspot. With
regard to ancient places, it is not always clear what is a real
toponym and what is a common noun that refers to a geographical item
(also called appellatives in linguistic studies). In this matter,
Trismegistos follows the practical rule that any toponym listed in
the geographical index of a publication is also listed in the
geographical database. Trismegistos Geo is also adding to <a href="http://www.trismegistos.org/place/1163">PLEIADES id</a> for some location, in order to facilitate the recognition
of geographical entries in other databases. In addition, the cards
store all names and variants; among them a standard name is chosen
both for the ancient and the modern name. Moreover, every place is
ascribed to a modern country, an ancient region and a Roman
provincia, each item in a separate field. The standard name for the
modern country is the one used in English, and the correspondences
between each modern country or region and the ancient provinces are
those in use at the <a href="http://edh-www.adw.uni-heidelberg.de/edh/inschrift/HD067000">Epigraphic Database Heidelberg</a>.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Aligning the
inscriptions in Trismegistos will mean that the “annotated thing”
not only will represent the most up-to-date unique entry for that
text but also will in turn link to multiple independent editions of
the same text where they exist and indeed to all quality curated editions from the EAGLE BPN. In this way we will help minimize the possibility of
duplicating records for the same place.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
In the long term, we
look forward to aligning both Trismegistos and Pleiades to Wikidata, in
order to bring together the richness of both of these gazetteers. As
we see it, establishing a network of gazetteers—one of the aims of
Pelagios 3—is a highly valuable step towards harmonizing practice
and making content reusable and extendable. We look forward to
working with the Pelagios team to take linked ancient world data one
step further in terms of data networking and interoperability, and
together help facilitate research in all disciplines of the field,
digital or otherwise. </div>
Pietro Liuzzohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16546148860698601350noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5623171812488525165.post-44525892793953023392013-11-14T14:39:00.000+00:002013-11-14T14:39:07.215+00:00The EAGLE flies with Pelagios<a href="http://www.eagle-network.eu/">EAGLE—the Europeananetwork of Ancient Greek and Latin Epigraphy</a>—is joining Pelagios. EAGLE is itself a <a href="http://www.eagle-network.eu/about/who-we-are/">Best-Practice Network (BPN)</a>, co-funded through the <a href="http://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/en/ict-policy-support-programme">ICT-Policy Support Programme</a> of the European Commission, and aims to create a new online archive for epigraphy in Europe. As part of Europeana’s multi-lingual online collection of millions of digitised items from European museums, libraries, archives and multi-media collections, EAGLE will link and connect, using Linked Open Data (LOD) best practice, thousands of inscriptions, photos of inscriptions and related contextual items in a single readily-searchable platform.<br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-IxGhyJYDlMk/UoTT2tUgtYI/AAAAAAAADK0/a_vu6Zi40oI/s1600/egl_logo_landscape_rgb.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="417" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-IxGhyJYDlMk/UoTT2tUgtYI/AAAAAAAADK0/a_vu6Zi40oI/s640/egl_logo_landscape_rgb.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The project will make available the vast majority of surviving inscriptions from the Greco-Roman world, complete with the essential information about them and, for all the most important, one or more translations. By joining Pelagios, EAGLE will be able to connect with other major online projects about the Ancient World and make its data accessible to other aggregator and LOD projects to increase the quality, usability and accessibility of data provided by the BPN. For example, our partner <a href="http://www.trismegistos.org/about.php">Trismegistos</a> (KULeuven) has gathered geographical information concerning the provenance of the inscriptions listed by the major <a href="http://www.eagle-network.eu/collections/">content providers</a>—a total of some 35,235 place records and 124,569 place attestation records.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The EAGLE BPN looks forward to the possibilities of connecting materials that have for a long time been viewed only in isolation as a result of separation and localism. There are four tasks towards achieving this vision data wise:</div>
<ul>
<li><div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
To make all content available in <a href="http://www.europeana.eu/">Europeana</a>, the largest culture and heritage aggregator in Europe (<a href="http://www.europeana-newspapers.eu/allez-culture-help-secure-funding-for-europeana/">#AllezCulture</a>)</div>
</li>
<li><div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
To use <a href="http://www.eagle-network.eu/wiki/index.php/Main_Page">Wikidata</a> for our translations of inscriptions. By gathering all existing translations of inscriptions and providing an easy-to-edit online database of translations, EAGLE aims to enrich both those data that are present in Wikimedia Commons with curated content from the databases, and the database contents themselves with contributions from the wider public</div>
</li>
<li><div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
To produce an open, interoperable format. In the Eagle portal, data will be available in XML files compliant with <a href="http://www.stoa.org/epidoc/gl/dev/">EPIDOC/TEI guidelines</a>.</div>
</li>
<li><div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
To produce open vocabularies that align existing models used by single content providers. These will provide many other URIs which, we hope, will become a way to further connect other data on the basis of <a href="http://www.eagle-network.eu/voc/objtyp/">Object Type</a>, <a href="http://www.eagle-network.eu/voc/material/">Material</a>, <a href="http://www.eagle-network.eu/voc/typeins/">Type of inscription</a>, to mention just some.</div>
</li>
</ul>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
We at EAGLE are excited about joining Pelagios and look forward to enabling online research about the ancient world take off.</div>
Pietro Liuzzohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16546148860698601350noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5623171812488525165.post-4775635353282922582013-10-17T15:34:00.002+01:002013-10-29T18:41:47.997+00:00IWP2: Pelagios and the Beakers of Vicarello<p>
The last few weeks have been a busy time for the Pelagios team. In parallel to kicking off
<a href="http://pelagios-project.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/a-web-of-gazetteers.html">our work
on linking gazetteers</a> as part of first Infrastructure Workpackage (IWP 1), we also started to
assemble some foundational bits and pieces of our second IWP - which is concerned with building
up the data and annotation infrastructure.</p>
<h3>Prelude: the Itinerarium Gaditanum</h3>
<p>Jump cut to Vicarello, Italy, mid-19th century: excavations at the Aquae Apollinares Baths
in 1852 reveal three cylindrical vessels made of silver, with heights varying between
95-153 mm. Excavations in 1863 later reveal a fourth vessel of similar kind. Although differing
in the details, on the surface of each vessel is engraved the <i>Itinerarium Gaditanum</i>, the
land route between Gades (Cadiz) and Rome, listing between 104 and 110 road stations along the way,
and the distances between them in units of <i>Millia Passum</i> (thousand Roman steps or 1481 meters
approx).</p>
<div style="margin: 0px auto; padding: 30px 0px 10px 0px; text-align: center;">
<img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-8aQsJh5Xui4/Ul6WP0MfJ5I/AAAAAAAAAHw/GKVcRKGEDRk/s1600/10171503914_ab235b32a7_z.jpg" />
<div style="font-weight: bold; margin-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-align: center;">
<small>Photo by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryanfb">Ryan Baumann</a> CC-BY 2.0</small>
</div>
</div>
<p>The <em>Vicarello Beakers</em>, as they are now frequently referred to, have traditionally been
identified as miniature replicas of a milestone probably erected in Gades, perhaps similar in
design to the Miliarium Aureum (the Golden Milestone) in Rome. Originally, through the study of
the different stations of the route, experts had dated them at different times between the governments
of Augustus and Tiberius. But recent palaeographic studies and comparisons with late documents such as
the <em>Antonine Itinerary</em> or <em>Burdigalensis Itinerarium</em>, as well as their resemblance
to the <em>missorium of Theodosius</em> suggest a dating to the late third or early fourth century AD.</p>
<p>Their handy number of toponyms, as well as the fact that there are images and
transcriptions available online already, makes the Vicarello Beakers an excellent test case
to teach our data infrastructure a few new tricks. Technical details about the upgrades it's about
to receive (complete with <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework">RDF</a>
samples and pointy brackets) will appear on our
<a href="https://github.com/pelagios/pelagios-cookbook/wiki">Wiki</a> and through
<a href="http://groups.google.com/d/forum/pelagios-project">our mailing list</a> in
due course. But, for the purpose of this blog post, let me just give you a sneak preview of some of the
things our upgraded data model can do.</p>
<h3>Linked Data, Open Annotation, RDF, What?</h3>
<p>You may recall that Pelagios is based on the principles of <a href="http://linkeddata.org/">Linked
Open Data</a>, and that we have chosen the <a href="http://www.openannotation.org/spec/core/">Open
Annotation Data Model</a> as the conceptual basis for our common vocabulary. These foundations
will not change. But with a growing network of partners, more diverse content, and increasing amounts
of data, it has become painfully clear that our initial data model from the days of Pelagios 1 and 2
has reached its limits. We have grown to so many partners and content now that data for major places
has become practically unmanageable - just try to find something useful in our
<a href="http://pelagios.dme.ait.ac.at/api/places/http%3A%2F%2Fpleiades.stoa.org%2Fplaces%2F423025">data
about Rome</a>!</p>
<div style="margin: 0px auto; padding: 30px 0px 10px 0px; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://pelagios.github.io/demos/vicarello-alpha/complete-sequence">
<img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-DSucUTifcBY/Ul6tgXbMTPI/AAAAAAAAAIA/VV8DocAnL0o/s1600/Clipboard01.jpg" />
</a>
<div style="font-weight: bold; margin-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-align: center;">
<small>Mapped Pelagios annotations for one of the Vicarello Beakers</small>
</div>
</div>
<p>So what are the things our new data model will improve?</p>
<ul>
<li>First and foremost, our new model allows for <strong>richer item metadata</strong>. There is now a much cleaner
separation between information about the <em>item</em>, and information about the <em>places that relate to it</em>
(and how). There is room to encode dates and temporal characterics, categories,
authorship, languages used in the source document - ordering dimensions which help us to get more structure
into the pile of "anonymous place references" we agglomerated through our first two project phases.</li>
<li>In line with a richer metadata model, we have also adopted the
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_Requirements_for_Bibliographic_Records">FRBR</a> distintion of
<strong>Work</strong> and <strong>Expression</strong>. In FRBR terminology, the Vicarello Beakers are a
<em>Work</em> - "a distinct intellectual or artistic creation". Each of the four beakers is termed an <em>Expression</em>
of this Work. This is another straightforward ordering principle, which helps us to get more structure and hierarchy into our data.</li>
<li>One of the changes that happend in the transition between the (now deprecated) <em>Open Annotation Collaboration</em> model
and the new <em>Open Annotation</em> model is <strong>support for multiple "annotation bodies"</strong>. I'll refer to the
<a href="http://www.openannotation.org/spec/core/">OA spec</a> for details. But as far as Pelagios is concerned, this
change allows us to represent the different "faces" of a place reference in a source document - logical
mappings to (a) gazetteer URI(s), its precise transcription, different images of it, etc. in a much simpler
way.</li>
<li>Toponyms in a document may follow a certain sequence or layout. The Vicarello Beakers are a prime example of this: laying
out their toponyms in a list with four columns, according to the sequence of the places along the route between Gades and
Rome. We're experimenting with ways to <strong>record the logical ordering of toponyms</strong> in a document, and bringing it to
use for visualization.</li>
</ul>
<p><a href="http://pelagios.github.io/demos/vicarello-alpha/complete-sequence">This simple mashup</a> shows the toponyms from the four
Vicarello Beakers on a map. There's an information box with the <em>Work</em> metadata at the bottom, and if you look
to the top-right, you will find a small layer menu which lets you switch places - and the path indicating the toponym
sequence - on and off individually for each beaker. Click on a place, and a popup will show you the transcription from the Beakers, along
with the gazetteer reference from <a href="http://pleiades.stoa.org/">Pleiades</a>, which corresponds to the place.</p>
<p>
What's noteworthy about this demo, however, is not so much the map itself - but rather that the map is generated completely
automatically from a Pelagios RDF file, containing item metadata and OA annotations. (You can grab the RDF source file
<a href="http://pelagios.github.io/demos/vicarello-alpha/annotations-vicarello.ttl">here</a>.) In essence, these are
also our first baby steps towards the <em>Visualization Workbench</em> - which is the objective of our third infrastructure
workpackage.</p>
<p>In the meantime, stay tuned for the exciting sequel to "Pelagios and the Beakers of Vicarello" - in which
the Pelagios team will tackle their next <em>Early Geospatial Document</em>, and where we will shed some light on the workflow
we use to compile our data, and how we transform it to <em>Open Annotations</em>.</p>
Rainer Simonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13818422993558387655noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5623171812488525165.post-46666809251238385782013-10-08T11:58:00.000+01:002013-10-17T13:46:34.852+01:00New Researcher Joins the Team<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span id="docs-internal-guid-4d497b5f-8f2f-6637-da31-0f7c0b494974"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span id="docs-internal-guid-4d497b5f-8f2f-6637-da31-0f7c0b494974"><span lang="EN-GB">The launch of Pelagios 3 also saw a new
researcher join the team. And the identity of the fourth musketeer?
Over to you, Pau:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span id="docs-internal-guid-4d497b5f-8f2f-6637-da31-0f7c0b494974">
</span>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span id="docs-internal-guid-4d497b5f-8f2f-6637-da31-0f7c0b494974"><span lang="EN-GB"><br /></span></span></div>
<span id="docs-internal-guid-4d497b5f-8f2f-6637-da31-0f7c0b494974">
</span>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 10.0pt; margin-left: 21.3pt; margin-right: 14.1pt; margin-top: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span id="docs-internal-guid-4d497b5f-8f2f-6637-da31-0f7c0b494974"><span lang="EN-GB">Hi all, I'm Pau de Soto from Barcelona
(Catalonia, Spain). I have a PhD (2010) from the Autonomous University of
Barcelona (UAB) on the use of GIS and Network Analysis in understanding how the
Roman Transportation System works in the Iberian Peninsula. Using this
methodology I discovered that it is possible to calculate the costs and the
times needed to travel along the Roman networks by sea, river and land, from
one point to another or from one point to the entire network.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span id="docs-internal-guid-4d497b5f-8f2f-6637-da31-0f7c0b494974">
</span>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 10.0pt; margin-left: 21.3pt; margin-right: 14.1pt; margin-top: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span id="docs-internal-guid-4d497b5f-8f2f-6637-da31-0f7c0b494974"><span lang="EN-GB">After completing my PhD, I completed a MsC in
Geographic Information Systems (2012), before taking a job at the
Archaeological Institute of Merida (Spanish National Research Council-CSIC). At
the AIM, I’ve been responsible for conducting geophysical surveys in Spanish
archaeological sites. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span id="docs-internal-guid-4d497b5f-8f2f-6637-da31-0f7c0b494974">
</span>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 10.0pt; margin-left: 21.3pt; margin-right: 14.1pt; margin-top: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span id="docs-internal-guid-4d497b5f-8f2f-6637-da31-0f7c0b494974"><span lang="EN-GB">Ok, that’s enough information about me! What am
I doing as part of Pelagios?<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span id="docs-internal-guid-4d497b5f-8f2f-6637-da31-0f7c0b494974">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 10.0pt; margin-left: 21.3pt; margin-right: 14.1pt; margin-top: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB">As a Postdoctoral fellow I will be responsible
for the production of Pelagios annotations, including the survey, collation and
documentation of primary and secondary literature. I will also work with Rainer
to develop new annotation methods and tools. Of course, in true Pelagios style
I will be documenting all activity in order to help disseminate that work and
continue to build up the community knowledge. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.1500000000000001; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 10.0pt; margin-left: 21.3pt; margin-right: 14.1pt; margin-top: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB">Last but not least I want to thank my new
colleagues for the opportunity of contributing to this exciting project. I
can’t wait to get started!<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB"><br /></span>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-UCfRkXceUpE/Ul_cHQmPA7I/AAAAAAAAAMk/JKSXKsEeFEw/s1600/DogtanianLogo.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="244" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-UCfRkXceUpE/Ul_cHQmPA7I/AAAAAAAAAMk/JKSXKsEeFEw/s320/DogtanianLogo.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
<span lang="EN-GB"><br /></span></div>
</span></div>
P.S.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09502042061222635105noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5623171812488525165.post-38596979954440081392013-10-01T09:57:00.000+01:002013-10-01T14:04:53.299+01:00A Web of Gazetteers<p>
Pelagios is all about creating connections between places and data about them.
Since we are now in the process of extending our scope beyond the ancient Greco-Roman
world, we have been joined by two new infrastructural partners -
<a href="http://www.pastplace.org/">PastPlace</a> and the <a href="http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~chgis/">China
Historical GIS</a>. They will provide us with records for those places that are beyond the spatial
or temporal coverage of our long-term partner in crime, the <a href="http://pleiades.stoa.org/">Pleiades
Gazetteer of the Ancient World</a>.</p>
<p>Moving from a single gazetteer to a system of three has significant consequences. Gazetteers vary
widely in how they represent places conceptually and syntactically: with different abstractions, relations
and hierarchy models; with different approaches to express changes over time, or to record the source or
bibliographic references that lead to the inclusion of the place in the gazetteer. In fact, even the definition
of what a place <i>is</i> can radically differ from one gazetteer to the next. This is especially true for the
specialist gazetteers that we are dealing with in the humanities.</p>
<p>The goal of our first infrastructure work package is to bridge these gaps and create a framework to
link up our gazetteers to form a coherent whole. Obviously, we can (and will) never find <i>the one</i> generic
datamodel that fits the needs of everyone, and that every gazetteer should adhere to from now on. Apart from
practical issues of implementation and migration effort, such a model would inevitably end up being either hugely
complex (because it would need to subsume all the complexities and subtleties of each gazetteer known at the
time of design); or it would be overly simplistic (because it would force everyone into a rigid, trimmed-down
schema, sacrificing the richness and specialization of the original custom models).</p>
<div style="margin: 0px auto; padding: 30px 0px 10px 0px; text-align: center; width: 520px;">
<img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Q7qOlU6hVMQ/Ujlc4ddi65I/AAAAAAAAAHg/35IHMT2GAKI/s1600/3430164569_9b64d6018b_z.jpg" width="520" />
<div style="font-weight: bold; margin-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-align: right;">
<small>Photo by
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/scissorhands33/3430164569/">will ockenden</a> CC-BY 2.0</small></div>
</div>
<p>For this reason, we are not aiming to create a common data model in the first place. Instead, we're following
our general strategy of <i>"connectivity through common references"</i>, which standardizes how to create
<b>links</b> between stuff, rather than standardizing how stuff should be <b>represented</b>. That being said: things don't work
entirely without any data (or, rather, metadata) specification at all, unfortunately. What we do standardize in our case
is a syntax for "descriptive records". Each gazetteer exposes such records about each of its primary entities, and
they contain the absolute minimum information we need in order to:</p>
<ol>
<li>identify and disambiguate places, and</li>
<li>build a searchable index external to the gazetteer, so that we can relate search queries in a third-party application
(such as the Pelagios API) to the original entry in the source gazetteer.</li>
</ol>
<p>The other essential aspect that we need in order to move from a single gazetteer to a system of many is (surprise surprise!)
links. Each descriptive record may (and should) include links to entries in other gazetteers in order to indicate similarity.
(We are going to use the semantics of <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/skos-reference/#L4138"><code>skos:closeMatch</code></a>, which
is defined as a relation <i>"[...] used to link two concepts that are sufficiently similar that they can
be used interchangeably in some information retrieval applications"</i>.) Specifically, we encourage gazetteers to include links
to one or more <i>reference gazetteers</i> in their descriptive records - open data gazetteers with global coverage,
high community adoption, and a Linked Data representation - such as <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/">Wikidata</a> or
<a href="http://www.geonames.org/">GeoNames</a>.</p>
<p>And what's the result of this? Answer: a dense network of links that makes our specialist gazetteers globally
navigable, as well as re-usable and combinable in other contexts and applications. We are still in the process of
polishing the spec for our descriptive records. You can find the current status on the
<a href="https://github.com/pelagios/pelagios-cookbook/wiki/Pelagios-Gazetteer-Interconnection-Format">Pelagios Cookbook
Wiki</a>. Our partners are about to start working on the implementation; and I'm about to extend
<a href="http://github.com/pelagios/scalagios">our core data handling software libary</a> to support it as well.</p>
<p><b>Are you working with a gazetteer dataset you want to see linked up with Pelagios?</b> Let us know - we'd be excited to see a global Web of gazetteers grow and flourish!</p>Rainer Simonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13818422993558387655noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5623171812488525165.post-90411210990211312972013-09-24T13:05:00.000+01:002013-09-24T13:05:36.604+01:00Pelagios 3 OverviewAfter our initial announcement we thought it would be good to go into a little more information about our work plans for Pelagios 3. This post provides a summary of the stages ahead, and as we begin new phases of the project we will provide additional detail about each workpackage. You can also read a PDF of the <a href="https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/18447022/Pelagios3ProjectDescription.pdf" target="_blank">full project description</a>.<br />
<br />
<h3>
Mission</h3>
The mission of Pelagios 3 is to annotate, link and index place references in digitized Early Geospatial Documents (EGDs). EGDs are documents that use written or visual representation to describe geographic space prior to 1492.<br />
<br />
<h3>
Primary objectives:</h3>
(i) provide an <b>index</b> of toponyms attested, and the places they refer to (where known), in all available EGDs, accessible both as Linked Open Data and via the Pelagios Web Service;<br />
(ii) create an open and semi-automated <b>toolset</b> that allows the scholarly community to enhance and refine the index incrementally, by annotating place references in further historical sources;<br />
(iii) develop a freely available analysis <b>workbench</b> and contextualization widgets that enable researchers to bring together spatial documents in new and innovative ways and provide key contextual information as embedded content in third-party websites.<br />
<br />
We will carry this out through a series of nine workpackages. Three Infrastructure Workpackages (IWPs) will deal with the mechanics. Six Content Workpackages (CWPs) will deal with content related to specific historical regions and periods.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Osir5dQYzJk/Ujw09n5_l_I/AAAAAAAAALg/FOikQDVaAM8/s1600/wpTimetable.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="161" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Osir5dQYzJk/Ujw09n5_l_I/AAAAAAAAALg/FOikQDVaAM8/s640/wpTimetable.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
<h3>
Workpackages</h3>
<div>
<br /></div>
<h4>
IWP1: Gazetteer Infrastructure</h4>
IWP1 will establish the common gazetteer infrastructure necessary to form the bodies of Pelagios annotations. Pelagios is grounded in the idea of a “Gazetteer ecosystem”: URI-based gazetteers that are specific to a spatial, temporal or cultural milieu and maintained and curated by their respective research communities, but aligned through the principles of Linked Data and a common, overarching referencing framework. (Hereafter we refer to all such URI-based gazetteers simply as ‘gazetteers’). In order to arrive at an initial, pragmatic version of such an infrastructure, two challenges need to be addressed: (i) a common, generic gazetteer data model needs to be identified which suits the needs of the different individual stakeholders involved; (ii) referencing frameworks need to be agreed, through which different gazetteers can cross-link to each other.<br />
<br />
<h4>
IWP2: Annotation Toolkit</h4>
IWP2 will facilitate pragmatic solutions to the issues of transcription and identification by assembling a toolkit of both automated and manual methods and technologies that can be tailored to a specific document. The following software tools will be the results of IWP2:<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>an assistive image processing tool that automatically pre-identifies toponym candidates on digitized old maps;</li>
<li> a tool (integrated with the previous browser interface) to visually enhance pre-identified toponym candidates to aid manual transcription;</li>
<li> manual annotation and transcription tools that focus specifically on simplifying navigation and selection within high-resolution digitized EGDs;</li>
<li>a recommender system that proposes plausible toponym options to the annotator (seamlessly integrated with the overall annotation browser interface);</li>
<li>a management dashboard to extract, compile, edit and export lists of annotations, and prepare them for linking and upload into the Gazetteer infrastructure;</li>
<li>a publishing tool to present annotated items online.</li>
</ul>
<br />
<br />
<h4>
IWP3: EGD Workbench</h4>
IWP3 will develop tools that allow end-users to navigate, visualise, interpret and compare the annotations generated in CWP1-6. These tools will operate on top of the Pelagios API, which will be extended to support the updated Pelagios 3 annotation data model. Concrete visualization software components to be developed will include:<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>a browser interface containing a synchronized map-, timeline-, and network-based visualization; </li>
<li>a tool to drill down to explore specific properties of an annotation set (equal to one or more collections or specific EGDs), such as its spatial coverage or the sequence of the toponyms contained within it, and compare it against other annotation sets. </li>
<li>a visual search interface which enables end users to discover collections that are particularly salient with regard to a specific area and time of interest.</li>
</ul>
<br />
<br />
<h4>
CWP1: Latin Tradition: </h4>
Example EGDs - Antonine Itineraries, Ravenna Cosmography, Bordeaux Itinerary, Vicarello goblets, Natural History (Pliny), Chorographia (Pomponius Mela), Peutinger Table, Divisio Orbis Terrarum, Dimensuratio provinciarum, Notitia Dignitatum, Ora Maritima (Avienus), Periegesis (Priscian), De Mirabilibus Mundi (Solinus)<br />
<br />
<h4>
CWP2: Greek Tradition: </h4>
Example EGDs - Geography (Strabo), Armenian Geography, Suda, A Sketch of Geography in Epitome (Agathemerus), Manual of Geography (Ptolemy), Description of Greece (Pausanias), Synecdemus (Hierocles), Christian Topography (Cosmas), Epitome of the Ethnica (Stephanus of Byzantium), Description of the Roman World (George of Cyprus), the Madaba Mosaic, The Dura Europos Shield, the Iliad, the Odyssey, texts in Minor Greek Geographers vols. 1 & 2.<br />
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CWP3: Early Christian Tradition</h4>
Example EGDs - Gough Map, Italie Provincie Modernus Situs, Description of the World (Marco Polo), On the Vicissitudes of Fortune (Niccolo de Conti), Fra Mauro Map, Erdapfel (Martin Behaim), World Map (Henricus Martellus Germanus), Genoese Map, De Virga world map, Vesconte World Map, Bianco World Map, approx. 320 sundry EGDs from the British Library<br />
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CWP4: Early Maritime Tradition</h4>
Example EGDs - Le Liber (portolano), Lo Compasso (portolano), approx. 180 Portolan charts (Pujades 2007), Catalan Atlas (Cresques Abraham).<br />
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CWP5: Early Islamic Tradition</h4>
Example EGDs - Image of the Earth (Al Khwarizmi), al-Kashgari World Map, Tabula Rogeriana (al-Idrisi) Book of Curiosities, Maps of the Balkhi School<br />
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CWP6: Early Chinese Tradition: </h4>
Example EGDs - Yujitu (‘Map of the Tracks of Yu’), Songhuiyao, Chinese Buddhist Temple Gazetteers, ‘Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms’leifusshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06952570470805157338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5623171812488525165.post-50499700898705966582013-09-16T11:56:00.000+01:002013-10-17T13:52:30.593+01:00Pelagios Chapter 3: Early Geospatial Documents<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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A few weeks ago we trailed that we had some exciting news and now we can finally announce it. Thanks to the generosity of <a href="http://www.mellon.org/">The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation</a>, Pelagios is entering a third, even more ambitious phase. We will be extending the Pelagios approach to all early geospatial documents up to 1492 (a game-changing year for the history of cartography). This means that we'll be dealing with texts and maps, not only from the ancient Greco-Roman worlds, but also the early Byzantine, Christian, Maritime, Islamic and Chinese traditions.<br />
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With a digital place index of maps and descriptions of the world in place, researchers and the general public will be able to explore online the historical significance of both famous and obscure places in the history of geography. As just one example, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_(Ptolemy)">Claudius Ptolemy</a> used London as one of his primary reference points for global time zones in the late second century, just as we do today. While such coincidences may be rare, and many places in early maps and texts are unidentified, or existed only in the popular or religious imaginations, our aim is to help their rich biographies to be told. With such an unprecedented variety of data linked together, it will be possible to trace in broad terms the continuities - and discontinuities - of people's responses to the world around them. Equally exciting, and thanks to the continuing annotation of data by Pelagios growing community of partners, you'll also be able to bring together disparate fragments of its life history, its connections with other places, its stories and imagery.</div>
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The project raises significant technological challenges as well. First of all we will need to make sure that URI-based gazetteers (standardised lists of places) are available for all of our periods and regions, and aligned with one another so that they can be cross-referenced. This means working not only with our old friends at <a href="http://pleiades.stoa.org/">Pleiades</a>, but also with new ones at the <a href="http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~chgis/">China Historical GIS</a> and <a href="http://www.pastplace.org/">PastPlace</a>. Then we will need to use a raft of methods, old and new, to identify toponyms in texts and images, and in a range of languages. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) – a computer-based method for the automatic recognition of text in digitized images – is inadequate for use with medieval handwritten script. Therefore we are developing <a href="http://rsimon.github.com/toponym_identification">new, semi-automatic methods</a>, which employ image processing and statistical approaches to eliminate as much of the tedious manual work of transcription as possible. Third, we will need to relate those place references to the gazetteers, building on the knowledge and expertise of a network of experts, along with a few tricks of our own. Places that we can't identify we intend to throw out to the public, along with any clues we have available, to invite the wider community to have a go. Finally, we continue to work on the <a href="http://pelagios.dme.ait.ac.at/api">Pelagios search API</a> and web interface so that the results will become ever easier to work with and incorporate in other digital resources online.</div>
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In addition to the continually growing community of projects providing content about all these places, we will be working in collaboration with specialists from all around the world, including from the British Library, Queen Mary, University of London, KCL, the University of Portsmouth, the University of Edinburgh, the Orient Institute of Beirut, the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, Drew University and Harvard University. If you would like to get involved in any way, please do contact us!<br />
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Elton Barkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16088251025729181601noreply@blogger.com9